Hidden Tracks: Domodossola – Weissmies

Lately, I have become increasingly interested in sound. Of the short films I shoot while hiking, for example, I’ve noticed that I’m primarily interested in their sounds. Footsteps on the ground, birds singing, wind rustling through leaves, things like that. During my motorcycle ride across Europe, I caught myself recording a walk with the Memo app on my iPhone. Listening to it allows me to reconstruct a sharp and surprisingly clear memory of that early morning, just out of the tent at Shelsley Walsh....

June 11, 2024

Quoting Sean Voisen

just writing down notes is all that really matters. Any tool that allows you to compose and save text will do. It is the act of writing, not the act of linking or reading or revisiting, that clarifies thought and leads to insight. The rest is all superfluous. – Sean Voisen Just yesterday, I fixed a bug in our legacy application. Once I was done, I turned to my notes to log what I’d just done....

June 4, 2024

The Toschi Hermitage

I went on a motorcycle and hiking trip yesterday. It was a glorious day, albeit windy, which helped keep the temperature chill. Mixing hiking with motorcycling is something I love, as it combines two of my hobbies. However, it requires some careful planning. I still want to wear full safety gear on the bike but not take any of that with me as I walk in the wilderness, where I’ll be in hiking gear instead....

June 2, 2024

How to handle custom claims in an Open ID Connect-authenticated ASP.NET Core app

Today, I learned how to handle custom claims in an Open ID Connect authenticated ASP.NET Core app. The scenario goes like this. I have an ASP.NET Core app that authenticates with Open Id Connect. It receives a bearer token from the authentication server. Besides OIDC claims, this token has been forged with additional custom claims for use in the app. However, only ODIC claims exist when I parse HttpContext.User.Identity.Claims in my middleware....

May 31, 2024

Kagi is profitable

Two years after its launch, Kagi, the pay-per-use search engine is profitable. We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience....

May 31, 2024

LLMs don't remember everything you say

Simon Willison has a new article explaining an important and often ununderstood aspect of LLMs. There’s a remarkable difference between chatting with an LLM, as we users do, and training it. Short version: ChatGPT and other similar tools do not directly learn from and memorize everything that you say to them. Every time you start a new chat conversation, you clear the slate. Each conversation is an entirely new sequence, carried out entirely independently of previous conversations from both yourself and other users....

May 29, 2024

Quoting Elena Kostyuchenko

In 2021, in Russian courts, the fate of 783000 people was decided. There were 2190 acquittals. Two thousand one hundred and ninety. The probability of being acquitted is 0.28 per cent. – Elena Kostyuchenko in I Love Russia, which I’m currently reading.

May 29, 2024

Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.15

Today I released Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.15. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices that adhere to the standard defined by Italian Revenue Agency (Agenzia Entrate). See the changelog for details (Italian).

May 24, 2024

A motorcycle trip across Europe

Last night, I returned from Trifest 75, a motorcycle rally organized by the Triumph Owners Motorcycle Club1 at the Shelsley Walsh Hill Climb, Worcester, UK. Crossing Europe from South to North took us a whole week across Italy, Switzerland, and France before reaching the soil of England. This outing was conceived long ago (Trifest happen every year) and has always been postponed because of the high cost and time required. This year, we took the opportunity of the 75th anniversary to go, partly because I sensed the great interest while talking about the idea at various rallies we had last year in Italy....

May 23, 2024

The video of my OAuth2 session at WebDay 2024 is online

The video my OAuth2 and OpenID Connect session at WebDay 2024 Milan is available online. It is in Italian, and you need to login or register in order to see it (sorry, I don’t have control over it.)

May 23, 2024