Posts

Inspired by the historic Dahomey Amazons and founded by three of the biggest powerhouses in African music, Mamani Keïta, Mariam Doumbia, and Oumou Sangare, Les Amazones d’Afrique have been using their voices to advocate for women’s rights since their 2017 debut. The group has never shied away from mashing up tradition and technology. Still, on Musow Dance, with the endlessly inventive production of Jacknife Lee, they lean heavily into an almost entirely electronic sound, turning up the energy several notches with booming 808s, dramatic synth slides, and bursts of vintage disco. But none of these additions ever overshadow the true soul of the music, instead amplifying the already formidable voices of Les Amazones d’Afrique’s ever-evolving lineup (source). ...

I just finished reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy1. On this occasion, I discovered a new use for ChatGPT and LLMs. ChatGPT and I chatted about the themes, especially the correlations and connections between the three short novels that comprise the volume. It was an alienating and revealing experience. For the first time, I am reasoning about a book with a machine, not a person. Because it knows everything about the text and draws on the shared global knowledge, it can give more satisfaction than most people do (also, it’s not easy to find someone around with whom I can talk about all the books I read!) Yes, it is wordy and repetitive, but it can stimulate and enrich my analysis2. ...

I took a daily hike in my beloved Apennine Mountains a few weeks ago. One of my favourite motorcycling routes is the narrow, engaging, panoramic road that unites Corniolo in the Bidente Valley with Marradi and the Mugello area via the Braccina Pass. I always wanted to return and hike through it; the moment had come. It was an excellent circular tour that, to the merits of moderation-it is not too long, nor too strenuous, the ascent is always gradual, etc. - also combines the variety of the environment, shading from mixed mid-altitude broadleaf forests (hornbeams, oaks, ash, cherry, maple) to coniferous reforestations that in this case, with increasing age and size, have taken on a certain dignity. ...

A walk on the beach right after the storm. Lots of logs scattered all around, for miles. And sanderlings running all over the place.

Kara Swisher, a dean in digital and classical journalism, has an interesting article in the New York Magazine. As a witness and protagonist she recounts how in the last 30 years digital has eaten away at traditional media and how today, with the advent of AI, there is a risk of it happening all over again. Above all, she reasons why it is essential for journalists not to surrender their weapons and lawmakers to step in and finally harness an industry that always had free reign and no regulation, as it is considered inevitable. ...

Today I released Eve 2.2. It is a maintenance release that drops old Pythons and adds support for the latest versions of the language. Long overdue, it also gets rid of some annoying deprecation warnings. As always, see the changelog for details. Many thanks to Bret Curtis and Guillaume Le Pape for their contributions to this release.

Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print “gimme gimme gimme”, because of the Abba song called “Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight”. Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today. ...

I just released FatturaElettronica .NET v3.5.0. This version adds multi-language support, all thanks to the excellent work done by Michael Mairegger. We currently support Italian and German and are ready to accept contributions for other languages. The Fattura Elettronica open-source project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices that adhere to the standard defined by the Italian Revenue Agency.

I never knew about the connection between Ray Bradbury, John Huston, and Herman Melville. Today, few people are aware that Bradbury, renowned science fiction writer, beloved fantasist, and mainstay on banned-book lists, wrote the screenplay for the 1956 John Huston adaptation of the Melville classic, which starred Gregory Peck as the iconic and obsessive Captain Ahab. Writing the screenplay was a dream come true for Bradbury, until it morphed into a waking nightmare. As the old adage goes: Never meet your heroes. ...

Dave Rupert, reasoning on why he likes books: Books are strange objects. Chapters and chapters of coherent research and lived experiences assembled by people who wanted to put it all down in one place. Edited by actual editors who like editing. Designed— down to the weight of the paper, the typography, and the illustration on the cover— to make the experience of reading it enjoyable. Books are uncanny and impractical objects. A terribly inefficient way to encode information from one brain to another, but an excellent way to tell a story. ...