Posts

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....

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.

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).

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....

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.)

Thirty-seven years ago, at about 11 a.m., at the Rocca Brancaleone Park, my then-girlfriend and I kissed for the first time under a tree. We decided immediately not to get together because we were classmates1, and we didn’t want to complicate our lives. Right. We have been together ever since and will celebrate our 27th wedding anniversary next week. Our three sons are the fruitful result of that teenage affair....

Open AI just released ChatGPT 4o. The launch demo is available on YouTube, and yes, it is impressive. They did not launch v5, though, and 4o is only incremental, not exponential, as v4 has been compared to its predecessor. It may mean we’re at the end of the “exponential growth” phase of LLM models. However, the most critical aspect of this release is not technical, as Ethan Mollick correctly pinpoints in his timely What Open AI Did post:...

I took a walk on the beach last weekend. I never frequent Lido Adriano. It is much better than I expected, especially out of season.

I read ADHD—A Lifelong Struggle today. It’s the best thing I’ve read on ADHD so far. Its advice is grounded in experience and applies to everyone: those who think ADHD is a crock or, worse, an excuse, those who suffer from it, and those who have family members or friends who suffer from it. And we all punish ourselves. That’s the real tragedy of this illness. We are our biggest detractors because we know what we’re capable of....

This is a follow-up post to C# 12 Primary Constructors. Like that article, this one originates from the preparation notes for my presentation at the ABP Dotnet Conference 2024. I love collection expressions. Like primary constructors, collection expressions will see a significant adoption in the long run. Collection expressions introduce a new way to initialize common collection values in a terse, unified syntax. This is how we initialize collections today:...