A dad reunites with his three kids, ages 26, 23 and 15, and they decide to do a D&D campaign together. Now, this alone would be enough to catch my attention: I’ve been an avid D&D player as a boy, my older son has been playing too, and I always dreamed of playing one day with my three kids and maybe my wife. But there’s more to this story. Tenzin, the youngest son and long-time tabletop RPG gamer and DM, proposes to let OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 be their DM....
Steve Sanderson is experimenting again, and when Steve plays with his toys, I pay attention. In a new video on his YouTube channel, Steve introduces an experimental new .NET package that allows the creation of isolated instances of the .NET runtime that will safely run code in a sandbox.
I know this is coming in a bit late; apologies, but… We’re doing a Web Performance meetup at DevRomagna today. Andrea ‘Verlok’ Verlicchi, a Google Developer Expert specialing in web performance, will share his extensive experience in web performance and provide practical, high-impact, and easily applicable tips on improving performance in 2023. Info and signup here.
John Carmack, while advising on the advent of AI and its influence on the Software Engineering profession: Software is just a tool to help accomplish something for people – many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don’t over-focus on the specifics of the tools. I have often fallen into the over-focusing trap in my career. The whole thread is well worth reading: (via)
Quoting the last paragraph from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it....
Zerocalcare is an Italian cartoonist whose strips, especially in the form of illustrated books, have surged to an iconic level in the last decade. His drawing is excellent, but it is with his writing that, I think, he conquered fame. His stories are fun to read and yet profound and vibrant, all at the same time. Also, he often touches on themes nobody else covers, at least not in the comics world....
Today I released Eve v2.1, which comes with official Flask 2.2+ support and the ability to modify the pagination limit on a per-resource basis thanks to the new pagination_limit setting. You can find the release on PyPI, while the changelog is available here—special thanks to Pieter De Clercq and smeng9 for the help with this release.
On Thursday, I will be speaking in Milan at WebDay 2023. Mine is a hands-on session on building a reliable and continuous end-to-end testing environment for web apps using Microsoft Playwright. If you attended my introductory Playwright session at WPC last year, Thursday’s session would be the ideal follow-up to that one, as I only briefly touched on CI deployments there. Drawing from my experience doing the whole thing in production, I’ll essentially be live testing a Blazor app, then take the entire thing to remote CI via GitHub Actions....
I’ve recently moved away from my custom Neovim configuration to embrace LazyVim. LazyVim is a Neovim setup with sane default settings for options, autocmds, and keymaps. It boldly aims to transform Neovim into a full-fledged IDE that is easy to extend and customize. It comes with a wealth of plugins pre-configured and ready to use, and it is also blazing fast. Elijah Manor has a fantastic introductory video on YouTube; I suggest you take the time to look at it....
Regarding space-related topics and scientific research, Casey Handmer’s blog is one of my references. So when Casey started his Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary and I learned about Kim Stanley Robinson’s masterpiece, I was instantly intrigued. In Casey’s opinion, KSR’s Mars Trilogy is “one of the finest works of literature ever composed.” It took a couple of weeks of futile resistance before I gave in and ordered the first book in the series, Red Mars, a 420 pages tome that attempts to depict a scientifically credible human colonization of Mars1....