I think the future probably belongs to the small companies // individuals more than sprawling conglomerates. There is a huge opportunity for people who use AI to remove everything that isn’t judgment from their workload, and apply that judgement to good products and good services. My theory is that one person, with an AI-augmented operational layer plus taste is the company of the future - and I’d bet on that again and again.

A bold statement for sure. Like many others, I’ve been experiencing this AI acceleration firsthand — more tasks, faster pace, less time to think. It can feel overwhelming. But Westenberg’s framing resonates with me: the goal isn’t to do everything faster, it’s to consciously offload the repetitive and the mundane, and reclaim that space for the work that actually matters. I run a tiny company myself, so I can only hope Joan is right.

Markdown doesn’t do most of what those formats do. You can’t set margins. You can’t do columns. You can’t embed a pivot table or track changes or add a watermark that says DRAFT across every page in 45-degree gray Calibri. Markdown doesn’t even have a native way to change the font color.

And none of that mattered, because it turns out most writing isn’t about any of those things. Most writing is about getting words down in a structure that makes sense, and then getting those words in front of other people. Markdown does that with less friction than anything else ever created. You can learn it in ten minutes, write it in any text editor on any device, read the source file without rendering it, diff it in version control, and convert it to virtually any output format.

Markdown Ate The World is a nice and well-informed article. I appreciated the early brief history of word-processing file formats. I didn’t know, for example, that .docx is just a zipped XML file. Oh, and I vividly remember the old times, when .doc files were as fragile as candles in the wind.

Senior engineering practitioners from major technology companies gathered for a multi-day retreat to confront the questions that matter most as AI transforms software development. The discussions covered more than twenty topics across breakout sessions, but the most significant insights didn’t emerge from one single session. Instead, they surfaced at various intersections; we found that the same concerns kept appearing in different conversations, framed by different people solving different problems.

This publication synthesizes those cross-cutting themes, organized around the patterns that senior leaders need to understand and act on now. The retreat did not produce a single, unified vision of the future, but instead produced something more useful: a map of the fault lines where current practices are breaking and new ones are forming.

– The Future of Software Engineering

Great read. It also taught me about the Chatham House Rule.

Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it.

We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.”

– Nolan Lawson, We mourn our craft

Beautiful resource. Some samples came as a true surprise to me, like the New York City Subway signage, though the Italian connection is a bit weak on that one. (via)

The actual phrase ‘Dark Ages’ itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, which Caesar Baronius – a cardinal and Church historian – came up with around 1602. He applied the term exclusively to the tenth and eleventh centuries. However, and very significantly in his use of the term, Baronius was not decrying a state of scientific malaise, or a particularly turbulent political period – he’s talking about a lack of sources surviving from that time. Indeed, Baronius sees the cut off point for the dark ages to be the Gregorian reforms of 1046, following which we see a massive increase in surviving documentation.

So:

Is there a time that historians use the term ‘Dark Ages’? Yeah, we do use it to talk about source survival rates. It’s not a term we use as a value judgment, however. We just mean that we don’t have a lot of evidence to go off of.

Holy cow Eleanor, color me indoctrinated (via).

Europe must increasingly prepare for a world in which the protection of America is replaced by protection from America. An essential component of this is moving away from dependence on US goods and services and, perhaps most essential of all, US tech and tech infrastructure.

And then, towards the conclusion:

A potential silver lining of Europe disentangling itself from US tech is the opportunity to embed social values and democratic oversight into the design of these systems. US tech firms are massive, centralised surveillance platforms that routinely abuse their users and reproduce existing social inequalities. We could do better via better regulation of the private sector, and more public sector options.

Let’s do it, Europe.

Writing forces clarity. When I explain a concept to others - in a doc, a talk, a code review comment, even just chatting with AI - I discover the gaps in my own understanding. The act of making something legible to someone else makes it more legible to me.

– Addy Osmani in 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google

The one quoted above is #12, and I’ve been religiously abiding by it for a long time, but all 21 are well worth reading. If you’ve been in software engineering long enough, they’ll resonate with you. Also, most lessons apply to all kinds of career paths, not just software.

As AI generated content becomes the norm, I believe that human-generated content and raw thoughts and emotion will become more valuable. In many ways, I’d rather read a raw, unproduced, and scrappy blog post with grammatical mistakes over perfectly generated content that serves little value.

– Armeet Singh Jatyani, Importance of Writing

Every machine serves a purpose. People need purpose. The temptation to become the machine is higher than ever. The promise of the machine is alluring. If I can just keep chugging forward, I will end up somewhere that is not here. If I can turn myself into a mechanism that takes input and consistently works towards some goal, I will make it.

[..] You’re not a machine. You’re a person. Play to your strengths. Be sharp and strategic like a scalpel, not blunt like a mallet. Stop fetishizing the grind. Dream bigger.

– Armeet Singh Jatyani, Becoming the Machine

When I’m writing, I write. When I’m cooking, I cook. When I’m talking to someone, I put my phone away. The constant mental juggling that felt necessary before now feels exhausting. There’s something meditative about giving your full attention to a single task.

– 47nil

AI can replace most of programming, but programming isn’t the job. Programming is a task. It’s one of many things you do as part of your work. But if you’re a software engineer, your actual job is more than typing code into an editor. The mistake people make is conflating the task with the role.

It’s like saying calculators replaced accountants. Calculators automated arithmetic, but arithmetic was never the job. The job was understanding financials, advising clients, making judgment calls, etc. The calculator just made accountants faster at the mechanical part. AI is doing something similar for us.

AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job

Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album, it was the first album to be explicitly labelled as ‘ambient music’. [..] In this article, I’ll discuss how Music for Airports was created, and I’ll deconstruct and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2. Hopefully, the article will demystify some of Brian Eno’s techniques, and give you some ideas about how to adopt some of his ambient music techniques yourself.

I’m a sucker for this nerdy stuff. I didn’t know Brian Eno designed the cover art for the whole Ambient series himself. Also, oh my God, take a look at the graphic score. It is mesmerizing. It looks like mysterious alien notation, gifted to us, humble hearthlings, to ponder¹.

How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports

I think of it [the usefulness of writing] like breathing but for ideas. We do so much reading all day—there should be a natural balance with producing words too. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale…

Joe Boudreau in On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads, an article I agree 100% with.

If you want to understand time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain. Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, and smooth even the sharpest edge.

wry writer

The theory that people no longer read as much as they used to is put forward by people who no longer read as much as they used to.

– Francesco Farabegoli

What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.

Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa

The ongoing discussion on HN is also worth reading (minus the AI slop complaints).

I’m trying to figure out how to use generative AI as a designer without feeling like shit. I am fascinated with what it can do, impressed and repulsed by what it makes, and distrustful of its owners. I am deeply ambivalent about it all. The believers demand devotion, the critics demand abstinence, and to see AI as just another technology is to be a heretic twice over. Today, I’d like to try to open things up a bit.

I’m surprised by how brilliantly Rick Rubin, Brian Eno, Hayao Miyazaki, and Miyazaki’s Spirited Away are packed into this talk.

This guide is intended to be a comprehensive look at the tech that Star Trek suggested to drive humanity forward ad astra per aspera. The emphasis is on innovations that don’t violate physics according to present consensus understanding. Go ahead and explore boldly.

Are We Trek Yet? – A guide for how close we are to Star Trek technology is a funny, revealing, and well-executed idea. It is somewhat comforting that at the time of this writing, eight of all the Star Trek technologies are readily available, and thirty-one are in progress. It only tracks Star Trek technology, though.

The most innovative and intriguing aspect of Star Trek is its society, depicted as a post-scarcity utopia where material needs are met without the use of money, allowing individuals to work for personal fulfillment and the betterment of humanity. The United Federation of Planets exemplifies this ideal, promoting equality, cooperation, and exploration among diverse species.

Many years ago, I read a writing on a wall that struck my young, fervent imagination so profoundly that I still remember it vividly: “To live in utopia, we must first dream it.”¹ We’re not a Star Trek society today, and we certainly aren’t heading in that direction, but I’ll keep dreaming.

“For decades, garbage collection in .NET was a background concern. It was mostly invisible to the everyday developer and was regarded as ‘automatic’ unless (or until) something slowed down the application. However, .NET 10 changes this perspective by making garbage collection (GC) a key component of application performance.”

What .NET 10 GC Changes Mean for Developers is a good in-depth article that explores the revolutionary garbage collection improvements in .NET 10, which deliver 2- 3x performance gains through seven key enhancements: escape analysis for stack allocation, DATAS enabled by default, flexible region sizing, delegate optimizations, intelligent write barrier elimination, enhanced devirtualization, and refined heap controls for containers.

What are the features of Fascism? We need to know, so we can recognize them and point them out as they emerge, as they always tend to do, time and time again, as our societies struggle to evolve.

Sounds like heavy reading material, but it isn’t. I mean, look at the incipit:

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists — that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.

Brilliant. I forgot what a masterpiece of synthesis, clarity, accessibility, and subtle irony this essay is. While Schwartz’s post offers an excellent, concise synthesis, the original is worth reading in its entirety, especially in today’s context.

Last year, Ashley and a large team of scientists conducted an elaborate experiment on the effects of exercise on the mammalian body. In one test, Ashley put rats on tiny treadmills, worked them out for weeks, and cut into them to investigate how their organs and vessels responded to the workout compared to a control group of more sedentary rodents.1 The results were spectacular. Exercise transformed just about every tissue and molecular system that Ashley and his co-authors studied—not just the muscles and heart, but also the liver, adrenal glands, fat, and immune system

Why Exercise is a Miracle Drug

Sometimes we feel confusion going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It’s not some fancy abstract concept, but rather a fundamental human constraint. It’s not imagined, it’s there and we can feel it. Since we spend far more time reading and understanding code than writing it, we should constantly ask ourselves whether we are embedding excessive cognitive load into our code.

Cognitive Load is what matters

I appreciate that the final output is the result of an open collaborative effort.

Why Aren’t People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

This is the story of the world’s most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world’s biggest companies. But Python’s future wasn’t certain; at one point it almost disappeared.

Python: The Documentary

The first-line treatment for ADHD is stimulants. Everything else in this post works best as a complement to, rather than as an alternative to, stimulant medication. In fact most of the strategies described here, I was only able to execute after starting stimulants. For me, chemistry is the critical node in the tech tree: the todo list, the pomodoro timers, etc., all of that was unlocked by the medication

Notes on Managing ADHD

Thank you, whoever you are, for the extraordinary work done on this website (via).

Let me tell you something that will happen after you become a manager: you’re going to mess up. A lot. You’ll give feedback that lands wrong and crushes someone’s confidence. You’ll make a decision that seems logical but turns out to be completely misguided. You’ll forget that important thing you promised to do for someone on your team. You’ll lose your temper in a meeting when you should have stayed calm. The real question isn’t whether you’ll make mistakes; it’s what you do after.

The Management Skill Nobody Talks About

I’m turning 55 in a few days, and sometimes I wonder if I should slow down or reduce the intensity of my training. I’ve made adjustments along those lines in recent years, but I suspect I am still pretty active for my age.

Today I read Herman’s post on the ROI of exercise, and it is spot on. It’s common sense; we’ve all read those things, but here they are nicely compiled. The concept that lifelong exercise “adds extra years to each stage of life rather than just frail years at the end” hit home for me.

I was hiking the Narrows trail along the Rockcastle river in Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest, slipped off the edge of the trail and broke me ankle. There was no cell phone service so I ended up butt-crawling a ways on the trail (crutches I hacked together made things worse with weak wood out there) until I finally raised a faint signal. Texted 911 (so thankful they have this service for the deaf), helped their volunteer rescue squad locate me by boat on the river below and their wonderful firemen hauled me down the mountain with good cheer.

Lucky man. Reaching an area with cell phone reception was not impossible, and the distance to cover was still feasible.

Reading stories like this doesn’t make me as nervous as it did before I took the plunge and got a Garmin InReach Mini and then joined CAI, so I would have insurance coverage for emergency rescues.

Arthur C. Brooks, in his July 2019 Atlantic article Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think, confronts an uncomfortable truth: professional decline begins much earlier than most people expect.

The core of Brooks’ argument is based on psychologist Raymond Cattell’s work from the 1940s, which distinguished between fluid and crystallized intelligence.

Fluid intelligence—analytical capacity, processing speed, and the ability to solve novel problems—peaks in one’s early thirties and then declines precipitously, which explains why many tech entrepreneurs achieve fame and fortune in their twenties but enter creative decline by age 30.

Crystallized intelligence, conversely, represents the ability to use knowledge accumulated over time—the essence of wisdom. This form of intelligence tends to increase through one’s forties and doesn’t diminish until very late in life. Careers that depend primarily on fluid intelligence tend to reach their peak early, while those utilizing more crystallized intelligence tend to reach their peak later.

Brooks suggests that as we age, we should embrace this change and prepare in advance for a transition, planning to move from innovator to mentoring and teaching roles.

Another study that struck me is the 2007 study by UCLA and Princeton researchers, also mentioned in the article, that showed that elderly people who rarely or never felt “useful” were nearly three times more likely to develop depression than those who frequently felt useful. It may seem like common sense, and it probably is, but we should keep this in mind when interacting with our elderly loved ones.

I’m turning 55 this year. I’m still grinding like there’s no tomorrow, though. I am in a peculiar position, as running my own company and being responsible for the people working with me makes transitioning to something else a less-than-easy option. Additionally, in my field, continuous learning is essential, as failure to do so can render one obsolete in short order; therefore, I am committed to and used to ongoing training. I’m not slowing down, at least not yet. Experience makes decision-making easier (and wiser?), and learning still comes naturally, perhaps because of the knowledge base I can draw upon.

That’s how I feel today as I ponder Brooks’ article, but I’ll admit that the thought of slowing down surfaces sometimes. Also, I’m often the only grey-bearded individual in the crowd (especially noticeable at conferences where I’m speaking), and that must mean something.

He has always been an entertaining speaker and teacher. As it turns out, the TED format suits him perfectly.

In the last year, a mindset shift and approach appeared as a very simple idea: just do one thing, that I want to do today.

The one thing can be small or big, easy or labored, fleeting or long. I carve out time to go play drums for two hours, go for a bouldering session, do a shorter 20 minute run, read a page of a book, eat something I’m really excited about, and more. Even on the most difficult day, I can adjust and find the smallest thing that I am excited about and do it.

Just One Good Thing

Neuromancer has become more than just an influential novel; it’s now the blueprint for the entire Cyberpunk genre. Even if you’ve never read it, you’ve felt its impact in nearly every major sci-fi film, TV show, anime, and video game of the past 40 years. Gibson didn’t invent cyberpunk, but he defined it. He created the lexicon—cyberspace, matrix, sprawl—that shaped how we imagine our digital future.

Reading Neuromancer for the very first time in 2025

Everyone’s either panicking that AI will replace them or assuming they don’t need to learn anything anymore. Both miss the point entirely. AI amplifies what you already know. If you understand distributed systems, you’ll use AI to build better ones. If you don’t, you’ll use AI to create distributed disasters.

The difference? When that AI-generated code breaks in production — and it will — you need to know why. When it doesn’t scale — and it won’t — you need to understand the bottlenecks. When it creates race conditions, memory leaks, or architectural nightmares, GitHub Copilot won’t save you. Your fundamentals will.

What Doesn’t Change

I believe what’s important isn’t the specific technology itself, but rather maintaining curiosity that always looks toward new alternatives and making technical decisions based on your own judgment rather than simply delegating your choices to popular opinion.

In Praise of the Contrarian Stack

I have many thoughts right now, and it will take some time for them to settle. A good analysis and explanation of why this move is needed and is a good first step can be found in yesterday’s article by Dries Buytaert’s, The Web’s Broken Deal with AI Companies, which I recommend everyone read.

For 25 years, we built the Open Web on an implicit agreement: search engines could index our content because they sent users back to our websites. That model helped sustain blogs, news sites, and even open source projects. AI companies broke that model. They train on our work and answer questions directly in their own interfaces, cutting creators out entirely. Anthropic’s crawler reportedly makes 70,000 website requests for every single visitor it sends back. That is extraction, not exchange.

The ongoing discussion on Hacker News is also worth reading

Side note, I am fascinated by the technical details surrounding the 402 Payment Required response (and Cloudflare’s implementation), which was designed explicitly for micro-payment handling but never gained traction, until now.

A calm day is always welcome, but there’s a perverse pleasure in struggling against violent gusts, or enjoying the steady rhythmic crackle of rain on a waterproof hood. Sometimes, bad weather can feel like a gift, exactly what’s needed to stir the senses and awaken the brain.

I also share with him my disillusionment about the sublime purity of nature.

When I was young I saw only what I wanted to see — mostly myself — in what appeared to be a beautiful landscape with the occasional thrill of the sublime. But now, I see every sign of intensive land management; little is natural or truly wild when almost every hectare is the product of either sheep farming, grouse production, or forestry. And I think about issues of ownership, class, exclusion, climate and tourism. This landscape is political, and it reflects all of us.

choosing software used to be straightforward. does the app do what you need, or not? but now, opening notion or obsidian feels less like launching software and more like putting on your favorite jacket. it says something about you. aligns you with a tribe, becomes part of your identity. software isn’t just functional anymore. it’s quietly turned into a lifestyle brand, a digital prosthetic we use to signal who we are, or who we wish we were.

I don’t necessarily agree with the premise. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we chose which BBS to operate as Sysops not only based on features but also culture, style, and aesthetics. Given the option, humans make a choice based on both function and form. Why behave differently with software?

The notion versus obsidian face-off is brilliant. As a Team Obsidian, I find Omer’s take amusing and spot on:

if notion is a sleek apartment in seoul, obsidian is a cluttered home lab. markdown files. local folders. keyboard shortcuts. graph views. it doesn’t care how it looks, it cares that it works. it’s functional first, aesthetic maybe never. there’s no onboarding flow, no emoji illustrations, no soft gradients telling you everything’s going to be okay. just an empty vault and the quiet suggestion: you figure it out.

Style is more relevant these days, that’s for sure, but that’s also a consequence of proliferation. There are so many viable alternatives today that products also need to differentiate on form.

these apps aren’t solving new problems. they’re solving old ones with better fonts. tighter animations, cleaner onboarding. they’re selling taste. they’re selling time. and people buy in, not just because the tools are better (some of them aren’t), but because they feel like tools made for people who care.

You are what you launch is a good read.

I’m very excited to announce that I have recently joined Turso as a software engineer. For many in the field, including myself, getting to work on databases and solve unique challenges with such a talented team would be a dream job, but it is that much more special to me because of my unusual and unlikely circumstances. As difficult as it might be to believe, I am currently incarcerated and I landed this job from my cell in state prison. If you don’t know me, let me tell you more about how I got here.

What a remarkable story of redemption and an example of how far hard work, determination, and discipline can take you.

Update (2026-06-24): Mandar Vaze reports the Preston Thorpe was recently interviewed on the Changelog podcast.

A few years ago, I quietly adopted a small principle that has changed how I think about publishing on my website. […] The principle is: If a note can be public, it should be.

Unconsciously, I am trying to do the same, as you might have noticed by the increased activity on this website. Maintaining consistency can be challenging, but it’s worth the effort.

On the topic of Agenting Coding he recently published:

• AI Changes Everything (you should read it)
• GenAI Criticism and Moral Quandaries

Both already reported.

Hey, why did you build a CLI tool instead of an IDE?

Yeah, it’s a good question. There are two reasons. We started this at Anthropic, where people use a broad range of IDEs. Some people use VS code. Other people use Zed, Xcode, Vim, or Emacs. And it was just hard to build something that works for everyone. And so the terminal is just the common denominator. The second thing is that at Anthropic, we see firsthand how quickly the model is improving. I think there’s a good chance that by the end of the year, people won’t use IDEs. And so, we want to prepare for this future and avoid over-investing in UI and other layers on top. Given the way the models are progressing, it may not be practical to work on them soon.

Well, that’s one fascinating bold statement right there. It aligns with a vision I’ve had for a while: in a not-too-distant future, people will use LLM UIs (think Claude.ai with plug-and-play MCP support and voice recognition¹ both built in) as their primary interface instead of many different, specialized applications, at least for most use cases.

We live in a metrics obsessed culture that is obsessed with narrowly defined productivity. There’s too much focus on accountability and too little focus on creativity. The reason why we don’t have Bell Labs is because we’re unwilling to do what it takes to create Bell Labs — giving smart people radical freedom and autonomy. The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.

This sentence, in particular, rings true in an aching way:

Judging people inside the fat trap just intensifies their misery and reduces the odds they can get out of it.

Knowing when to leave might be more important than knowing when to show up.

– kupajo in When to Leave

It wasn’t the purpose of his article, but I wish Armin had gone into the details of how, why, and when he delegates tasks to Claude Code.

Update: Armin later a follow-up.

It’s a move I’ve been contemplating for some time. Like Simone, I use Linux at work daily so that the task wouldn’t be too much of a stretch, but I’m probably too lazy (or too old) to execute it.

I’ve been using LLMs (ChatGPT and Claude) more and more lately, especially for work. The more I use them, the more I understand how to leverage their capabilities. I would have never thought about sharing my reading experiences with ChatGPT before. Ethan Mollick has it right; we should all put at least 10 hours into LLMs before judging them.

Your goal is simple: spend 10 hours using AI on tasks that actually matter to you. After that, you’ll have a natural sense of how AI fits into your work and life. You’ll develop an intuition for effective prompting, and you’ll better understand AI’s potential. Don’t aim for perfection - just start somewhere and learn as you go.

[…] more and more people across the globe get their news and cues from social media. It has a scary ability to generate anxiety and rage, and it is addictive. Expert after expert I’ve talked to over the years has made the same point — in the new paradigm, engagement equals enragement. This is made worse by the people who run these companies, for whom anticipation of consequences is lacking and whose first instinct is to let it all through the gate, regardless of potential damage or danger. What’s the opposite of the mommy state? Parent-free chaos.

Read her article here.

I appreciate how Swisher was an initial proponent of digital advent, so much so that she co-founded All Things Digital. Yet, that didn’t prevent her from foreseeing the troubled waters ahead.

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.

Long live the good old hacker spirit. Full story here.

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.

Fascinating stuff. Well written, too. Read the full story here.

The Loneliness of the Low-ranking Tennis Player, by Conor Niland, chronicles the life of players at the Challenger and Futures levels, one or two steps below the elite. Sinner, Alcaraz, and most other stars have only skimmed through these purgatorial circles thanks to their talent, and still, hundreds spend their entire career trapped in there, and it’s not as pretty as we, the laymen, may think.

In the end we won because the open source community started to converge on distributed version control and we were the only ones in the hosting space that truly cared about how developers worked at all. The only ones who questioned it, approached it from first principles, tried to make it better holistically rather than just throwing more features onto something existing in order to sell it.

Full story here. A great run-down by Scott Cahon himself on why Git and then GitHub won the version control system war.

But I follow the solar energy topic and stay up to speed, as I want to take action one day. Here are two articles I read just in the last couple of days. In many aspects, they are similar, and both draw very optimistic conclusions: solar will get unfathomably cheap.

• Solar will get too cheap to connect to the grid, by Ben James
• What Will We Do With Our Free Power?, By David Wallace-Wells

A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens.

Full story here.

What a great story. Teenagers who are enthusiastic about hacking and coding and have lots of fun in creative ways. It reminds me so much of my teenage years, like when assembling a fake backdoor on Lorien, my first BBS, as a honeypot to attract local hackers so I could later reach out and get to know them¹.

Long gone are those days, and I wish I still had that kind of drive.

Capability makes your life simpler. Tolerance, skills, knowledge, and health are always with you, wherever you go. They are assets but they take up no space. They are stored in your body. Some lack capability through no fault of their own, but anyone can increase their capability. It’s an investment that pays dividends every day.

Well, marketing friends, we gotta have a serious talk. Because the way we’ve done marketing for the last twenty years is ending. I’m serious. I believe that Rand in 2010 would have told you that digital marketing was all about being able to track every view and every click, so that when conversions happened, we could perfectly attribute them, is wrong today. Back then, we could say: “Oh, this piece of content, this advertisement, this PR investment, this word-of-mouth effort is worthwhile because it turned into this trackable, perfectly attributable series of events in our analytics.” It doesn’t work this way anymore. That’s because clicks are dying and attribution is dying. There’s only one way forward.

A 7 minutes video, with transcript, is available here.

Yes, he’s stating the obvious in some ways, but it’s his job to spread the word to the masses, and he’s been doing that for quite a long time. I remember seeing him on stage in San Marino many years ago when his gospel was about SEO, SERP attribution, and traceability. I am glad to find that he’s still on the go.

My colleague Stefano correctly points out that Rand’s final advice on moving where the public is today is sound and reasonable, but it is nothing new. It’s always been about that. In 2014, we went to Google AdWords and the likes because that’s where the public was back then. In the 2020s, the public has flocked to platforms’ walled gardens and digital marketers follow the herd, like a pack of wolves.

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world ,  but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

I’m too compromised and ahead in age to make it my own. Still, I hope this movement has traction among young people, especially those in my field—optimism and activism instead of denial and despair.

Read the whole document here.

I use the reverse lookup of bash-history (Ctrl+R) daily. Still, only today (thanks to an HN comment on Bash-Onliner) did I learn that it also preserves one’s comments, which can be exploited to invoke complex commands quickly:

$ mv -n ~/Desktop/*.pdf ~/Documents/PDF_Archive/  #pdfsync

Then, you simply Ctrl-R and type “pdfsync” to recall the above command when needed. Neat.

The main issue with social media is that we want them to be everything. We want them to be a place for casual interactions, for discovery, for news, for serious discourse. And that’s a mistake. Because the moment you put a stupid amount of people in one room and you let them do whatever they want the only reasonable outcome you can expect is chaos. Sure, you might get some positive results out of it but you’ll also likely get someone shitting in a corner and someone trying to fuck the power outlet. Because that’s the world we live in. Now sprinkle some nonsense AI on top of it all and Bob’s your uncle.

– Manuel Moreale

With so many weird little guys running around Miyazaki’s filmography, it seems time to honor and celebrate them. […] A key aspect of Miyazaki’s weird little guys is how numerous they are. They’re a swarm, frequently providing little moments of comic relief as they move coal or swim through the sea. Their designs are quite simple, but their meaning frequently is not.

More here.

Consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel. Solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant.

Even China’s dominance in panel production, which remains a concern, does not prevent technology development and cost-cutting, at least not in the medium term.

Another worry is that the vast majority of the world’s solar panels, and almost all the purified silicon from which they are made, come from China. Its solar industry is highly competitive, heavily subsidised and is outstripping current demand—quite an achievement given all the solar capacity China is installing within its own borders. This means that Chinese capacity is big enough to keep the expansion going for years to come, even if some of the companies involved go to the wall and some investment dries up.

They sustain that low-cost, clean solar energy is inevitable and will reshape society and the planet in ways we can’t yet fathom. I sure hope things go in this direction.

Hiring engineers is about composing teams. The smallest unit of software ownership is not the individual, it’s the team.

Have you ever been on a team packed exclusively with staff or principal engineers? It is not fun. That is not a high-functioning team. There is only so much high-level architecture and planning work to go around, there are only so many big decisions that need to be made. These engineers spend most of their time doing work that feels boring and repetitive, so they tend to over-engineer solutions and/or cut corners—sometimes at the same time. They compete for the “fun” stuff and find reasons to pick technical fights with each other. They chronically under-document and under-invest in the work that makes systems simple and tractable.

The best teams are ones where no one is bored, because every single person is working on something that challenges them and pushes their boundaries. The only way you can get this is by having a range of skill levels on the team.

Imitators can’t answer questions at a deeper level. Specific knowledge is earned, not learned, so imitators don’t fully understand the ideas they’re talking about. Their knowledge is shallow. As a result, when you ask about details, first principles, or nonstandard cases, they don’t have good answers.

For more advice, see the original post.

However, the most critical aspect of this release is not technical, as Ethan Mollick correctly pinpoints in his timely What Open AI Did post:

Likely the biggest impact of GPT-4o is not technical, but a business decision: soon everyone, whether they are paying or not, will get access to GPT-4o1. I think this is a big deal. When I talk with groups and ask people to raise their hands if they use ChatGPT, almost every hand goes up. When I ask if they used GPT-4, only 5% of hands remain up, at most. GPT-4 is so, so much better than free ChatGPT-3.5, it is like having a PhD student work with you instead of a high school sophomore. But that $20 a month barrier kept many people from understanding how impressive AI can be, and for gaining any benefit from AI. That is no longer true.

He then speculates how this change will impact significant areas such as education, work, and global entrepreneurship.

Tor, one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, is best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. But the real “dark web,” when it comes to Tor, is the hidden history brought to light in this book: where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways. In Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy,Ben Collier has written, in essence, a biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, politics, and empire in the deepest reaches of the internet.

I’ve always been cautiously curious about the Tor project. I remember listening to a Tor talk at a PyCon Italy (or EuroPython?) conference, where the speaker insisted that Tor wasn’t meant for dark usages but as a means of liberation. Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy might help frame the project from that perspective.

It’s packaged as a free PDF. It’s too bad it’s watermarked, so converting it to EPUB results in a mess.

I, like many developers who have worked on high-scale, low-latency web services over the last fifteen years, have an intimate relationship with Redis. At any new job, when you ask where the data is, and someone points you to a server address with port 6379, you know you will meet an good, reliable friend there.

Redis is indeed an awe-inspiring project. I have met Salvatore (antirez), its author, several times. He’s a down-to-earth and brilliant guy. I admit I feel nostalgic for Redis’ “heroic” period when Salvatore was at the helm and Redis was for developers, not enterprises.

I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.

Brilliant.

But the reality is that you can’t build a hundred-billion-dollar industry around a technology that’s kind of useful, mostly in mundane ways, and that boasts perhaps small increases in productivity if and only if the people who use it fully understand its limitations. And you certainly can’t justify the kind of exploitation, extraction, and environmental cost that the industry has been mostly getting away with, in part because people have believed their lofty promises of someday changing the world.

Full article here.

Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership. Using that access, they installed a very subtle, carefully hidden backdoor into liblzma, a part of xz that also happens to be a dependency of OpenSSH sshd on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and other systemd-based Linux systems. That backdoor watches for the attacker sending hidden commands at the start of an SSH session, giving the attacker the ability to run an arbitrary command on the target system without logging in: unauthenticated, targeted remote code execution.

As the excellent timeline of the xz open-source attack quoted above remarks, this will likely be remembered as the first known supply chain attack on widely used open-source software. This story screams a nation-state-level hacking attempt to me.

As an open-source maintainer with limited bandwidth, I know very well how tempting it can be to give up control and how difficult it is to judge someone’s intentions. I feel for the original author of XZ. A relevant discussion is currently going on on HN.

In any case, I thought the characters were more or less fictional until today, when I found that, no, the main ones are historical, and the story is, by and large, true.

In 1600 a Dutch galleon arrived on the shores of a small fief on Kyushu, the westernmost of Japan’s four main islands. It was the first Dutch ship to reach Japan. Among the crew was an English navigator, William Adams, who managed to gain the trust of Tokugawa Ieyasu, a powerful warlord who became a shogun (the military leader of the samurai caste) in 1603. Adams eventually rose to the rank of Hatamoto, the shogun’s direct retainer. How did an English navigator come to serve the shogun? To answer this, we must first look at the situation in Japan at the time and the policies of Ieyasu.

The History Today article, available here, confirms that the main plotline has solid historical roots. By the way, I just realized it’s Tuesday. A new episode is due today, at least in my part of the world.

Our ancestors have been eating each other for a million years or more. In fact, it seems that, down the ages, around a fifth of societies have practised cannibalism. While some of this people-eating may have been done simply to survive, in many cases, the reasons look more complex. In places like Gough’s cave, for example, consuming the bodies of the dead seems to have been part of a funerary ritual. Far from a monstrous affront to nature, cannibalism may be a way of showing respect and love for the dead, say some archaeologists.

More here.

Take care of yourself. Sleep. Eat. Exercise. Rest. Relax. Take care of other people, as best you can. People are important. Software is just fun.

– Lars Wirzenius, in his noteworthy 40 years of programming

While technology has evolved in the last fifteen hundred years, the human brain has not. And few people in the ancient world cared as much about the challenges of attention and distraction as monks. Our reasons might differ today, but we have much to learn nonetheless.

The focus problem predates the advent of the modern age with all its continuous, unstoppable, but always alluring background noise. I wonder if ADHD was also a thing back then and how many were possibly affected. We will never know.

Anyway, Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s recent Paying people to work on open source is good is a stellar post on the topic of open-source sustainability.

My fundamental position is that paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money. Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong.

Full article here.

I don’t think content creators are at risk with Sora, not anytime soon, but, as Marquees repeatedly notes in the video above, just one year ago we thought AI-generated video was a joke.

John van Wyhe, the academic who has led the “overwhelming” endeavour, said it showed the extraordinary extent of Darwin’s research into the work of others.

“It also shows how insanely eclectic Darwin was,” Van Wyhe said. “There is this vast sea of things which might be an American or German news clipping about a duck or invasive grasshoppers. That’s been the fun part, not the formal books but the other things … all of which pool together to make the theories and publications we all know.”

The Guardian article is here. I had to dig a little to surface the actual catalog on the Darwin Online website. Many titles even have links to their text contents and images.

A few steps into his public philosopher career, Spinoza found himself exiled from his Jewish community in Amsterdam. That made him cautious and adept at avoiding an even worse fate, which was entirely possible in the mid-1600s.

Although Spinoza was certainly a champion of political and intellectual freedom, he had no interest in being a martyr for them, and, if his life teaches anything about thinking in dangerous times, it is how prudence and boldness can go hand in hand. Not for nothing did he wear a ring inscribed with the Latin word “Caute”: “Be cautious.”

Full article here.

People living in remote Indigenous communities are as happy as those in wealthy developed countries despite having “very little money”, according to new scientific research that could challenge the widely held perception that “money buys happiness”.

Researchers who interviewed 2,966 people in 19 Indigenous and local communities across the world found that on average they were as happy – if not happier – as the average person in high-income western countries.

Who would have thought.

Full article here.

Let me start with the headline: Gemini Advanced is clearly a GPT-4 class model. The statistics show this, but so does a month of our informal testing. And this is a big deal because OpenAI’s GPT-4 (the paid version of ChatGPT/Microsoft Copilot) has been the dominant AI for well over a year, and no other model has come particularly close. Prior to Gemini, we only had one advanced AI model to look at, and it is hard drawing conclusions with a dataset of one. Now there are two, and we can learn a few things.

Things are getting hotter in the LLM space, and competition is always good.

Full article here.

He argues that the advent of the ads market tainted the original blogging scene in the mid-2000s, and something similar is now happening in the YouTube scene. Today’s independent blogger is not in it for the money (there’s none to be had) but for passion and an (unconscious?) belief in indie web ideals, and these are precisely the forces that drove the first wave of bloggers in the 2000s.

We modern bloggers, however, inhabit a tiny self-indulging bubble that is not comparable with the original scene. But you know what, I feel comfortable in it.

With roots in the world of fashion, there exists a cyclical principle suggesting that every two decades, previously popular trends “every 20 years or so the trends that were once popular will begin to be on the forefront again.” What’s old is new again. However, these recurring trends aren’t just rip-offs. They are remixed and reinterpreted through the lens of a new generation. We are, perhaps, in a 20 year resurgence for the indie web and blogging.

More here.

Have you ever wasted some time watching a youtube video, that got you kind of interested because of the click-baity topic, but in the end turned out to be nothing more BUT click-bait? Or have you ever wanted to just quickly recall what a video that you’ve watched some time ago was about? Just Tell Me has you covered!

You can run it from the website or locally on the command line, with your OpenAPI key and the LLM model of choice. I have not looked at the code, but I understand it leverages the video transcript to do its magic¹. I’ve been using it for a while, and it’s been good.

As far as I’ve been able to figure out so far, the things my mind is best at are details and systems. It‘s part of what makes me a good programmer: I can hold a lot of detail in my head about how a system fits together, I can mess around with it more easily than most people, and I can pick up on details other people might miss, such as potential bugs. A lot of the things I enjoy (and seem to be pretty good at) are those where there’s an underlying system to figure out and master – computer games, martial arts, even cooking.

Then there’s a few things my mind struggles to handle. Most of them revolve around people.

I’m not always great at figuring out what someone else is thinking, or feeling, or even dropping hints about. I can take educated guesses, for sure, but I don’t necessarily get it right. It also takes a lot of work to keep track of all the social cues going on whenever there’s a conversation happening, and all the social conventions most people seem to follow without even thinking. I can think of several times when someone has asked me how my weekend went, and it’s completely slipped my mind that the appropriate response is to ask them about theirs too. It’s not that I don’t care; it’s that I’m having to concentrate so much on the rest of the social cues that I take longer to catch up with how the conversation is supposed to go.

It took some balls to write his next one: My brain, and how you can help me. Respect.

The footage, captured directly by NASA’s Mars rovers - Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance - unveils the red planet’s intricate details. These rovers, acting as robotic geologists, have traversed varied terrains, from ancient lake beds to towering mountains, uncovering Mars’ complex geological history.

As viewers enjoy these images, they will notice informal place names assigned by NASA’s team, providing context to the Martian features observed. Each rover’s unique journey is highlighted, showcasing their contributions to Martian exploration.

Stunning, and mesmerizing.

In case you can’t see the embedded video (hi mailing list folks), here’s the link.

Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. From the leasing business model of mega a publishers to physical device evolution to format obsolescence, digital books are fragile and threatened. […] Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.

Full article here.

Dungeons & Dragons played an outsize role in popularizing fantasy literature, ideas, and themes, as well as inspiring many of its devotees to create their own. Roleplaying, as a formal activity, owes nearly its entire existence to the phenomenal success of D&D. Even more remarkable is the extent to which the computer and video game industry, which is bigger and more profitable than the music and movie industries combined, owes a huge debt to the example set by D&D. If you play any game with classes or levels or experience or hit points today, that’s because of Dungeons & Dragons.

More here.

I started playing D&D in high school in the mid-80s. Does that make me a Stranger Things kid? I’m still trying to figure that out, but D&D significantly impacted me growing up. It probably didn’t save my life like it did for others, but to an introvert like me, it offered an incredible opportunity to go out, meet and talk to people, challenging myself and my imagination.

Right before Christmas, I presented myself with an AD&D 5th edition complete set, partly out of curiosity but also nostalgia. I loved browsing the modern editions of the Player Handbook, Master Manual, and Monsters Book—so many good memories. I later bought the Starter Kit, hoping to play at least an evening session with my “kids,” as two of them were about to return home from University (the third is still with us.) We never played that session. In hindsight, it was a stupid idea.

I wondered for many years, how all of this could have happened. How people like my grandpa turned into monsters and people around him watched or turned into monsters with him. The last years made this very clear.

More here.

NTS Radio is a family of like-minded and passionate individuals, dedicated to supporting exciting music and culture through online radio and events. NTS uncovers the best of the musical past, celebrates the present and cultivates the future of the underground music scene, and prides itself on being open-minded and experimental. (source)

I’m certainly a latecomer, but NTS Radio is the bomb. I have not opened Spotify (whose algorithm I find dull and repetitive) in the last week, not even once. I go straight to NTS to find the best and most diverse music from all genres, played by DJs and independent radio stations worldwide. Absolute banger.

Upon his death in 1543 in Frombork, Poland, Copernicus was buried in the local cathedral. Over the subsequent centuries, the location of his grave was lost to history. There were several unsuccessful attempts to locate Copernicus’s remains, dating as far back as the 16th and 17th centuries. Another failed attempt was made by the French emperor Napoleon after the 1807 Battle of Eylau. Napoleon held Copernicus in high regard as a polymath, mathematician and astronomer. In 2005, a group of Polish archaeologists took up the search.

More here.

The goal of the pg_rman project is to provide a method for online backup and PITR that is as easy as pg_dump. Also, it maintains a backup catalog per database cluster. Users can maintain old backups including archive logs with one command.

We’ve always been doing our Postgres backups the rudimentary way via pg_dumpall, which works and is purely logical (one can restore across different Postgres versions), but pg_rman maintains a catalog and has point-in-time recovery.

I might want to look into it at some point.

To ground ourselves, we can start with two quotes that should inform any estimates about the future. The first is Amara’s Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Social change is slower than technological change. We should not expect to see immediate global effects of AI in a major way, no matter how fast its adoption (and it is remarkably fast), yet we certainly will see it sooner than many people think.

It’s an insightful read that pairs well with Simon Wilson’s 2023 round-up. Also, his 30-second fake video of himself telling things he never told is impressive.

2023 was the breakthrough year for Large Language Models (LLMs). I think it’s OK to call these AI—they’re the latest and (currently) most “interesting development in the academic field of Artificial Intelligence that dates back to the 1950s. Here’s my attempt to round up the highlights in one place!

The links contained within the post are also valuable. You may know Simon’s website if you are interested in LLMs and AI. If you don’t, I suggest you start following him, preferably via his RSS feed like real hackers do.

For those who don’t know me, I’m a demographer. I study population. And my first love in fantasy was, of course, Middle Earth. How many people live in Middle Earth? Being a demographer, I was mainly interested in the data side of things.

Tolkien is frustratingly vague about population. He almost never gives us estimates of settlement sizes, and many of the larger metropolises of Middle Earth (like Pelargir) never actually appear on the page. Sizable armies make frequent appearances, yet because his adventurers almost exclusively traverse the wilds of Middle Earth, we rarely see where those soldiers are coming from.

Almost every attempt to estimate population in Middle Earth extrapolates from army sizes. This is no surprise since those are some of the only numbers Tolkien does provide and, furthermore, historically, this is also how ancient populations in the real world are often estimated, so there are some credible rules-of-thumb out there.

I wanted to take a new approach.

As a long time Tolkien fan, I truly enjoyed How Many Hobbits? A Demographic Analysis of Middle Earth.

As a Kahneman reader, I appreciated the Thinking Fast and Slow analogy proposed at about half-length in the video: “System 1” (fast automatic thinking, rapid decisions) is where we’re now; “System 2” (rational, slow thinking, complex decisions) is LLMs next goal. Also, I suspect Karpathy’s intriguing idea of LLMs as the center of a new “operating system style” is not too far off from what will emerge soon. The final segment on AI security and known attack vectors (jailbreaking, prompt injection, data poisoning) is also super interesting.

On his website, Karpathy also has a promising zero-to-hero video series, “a course on building neural networks from scratch, in code.”

This weekend we learned that Bram Moolenaar had passed away at the age of 62. And this news affected me more than I expected. Like so many: I did not know Bram personally. But I’ve been using a tool made by Bram for more than half my life — at least weekly, sometimes daily. That tool is a text editor. The best one there is: Vim.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are walking along a dirt road in the seventh century Middle East. The sun is hot, the air is dry, your feet are tired. It’s been a long journey, by boat and foot, from your home in Constantinople to where you find yourself now: outside of the walls of the mountainous river city of Antioch. In the bright sunlight, you strain your eyes to catch a distant glimpse of the sight you’ve come all this way to see – and then suddenly, you do. A bright stone pillar, stretching as tall as a church dome with an unsteady-looking wooden platform; and atop it a tiny, bedraggled, flinty old man.

You’ve found him: the Pillar Saint.

To our modern eyes, this is a profoundly weird image – but it would have been a recognisable, even iconic, one if we were living in the early medieval Middle East. To explain how we got here – and how that guy got on that pillar - we need to step back and tell the origin story of one of the most recognisable characters in medieval life: the monk.

More here.

Some remarkable quotes:

Of course these are extremely impressive responses, sometimes astonishingly so; thus I totally understand why you and others have been paying attention to it.

The most immediate impression is the quality of the wordsmithing. It’s way better than 99% of copy that people actually write. It’s definitely not like a Markov model that uses the most predictable way to continue what’s already been said. On the other hand there are surprising lapses there too, as typical of any large system.

Answer #10 reads as though it’s the best answer yet. But it’s almost totally wrong!

It’s amazing how the confident tone lends credibility to all of that made-up nonsense. Almost impossible for anybody without knowledge of the book to believe that those “facts” aren’t authorititative and well researched.

I find it fascinating that novelists galore have written for decades about scenarios that might occur after a “singularity” in which superintelligent machines exist. But as far as I know, not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost.

I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same.

It pleasantly surprised me that they’re built as a purely artistic expression. All sculptures (as Mohit rightfully refers to them) are unique and not for sale. Check them all out on his website (via).

The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance.

Usage:

networkQuality -v

Example output:

==== SUMMARY ====
Uplink capacity: 44.448 Mbps (Accuracy: High)
Downlink capacity: 162.135 Mbps (Accuracy: High)
Responsiveness: Low (73 RPM) (Accuracy: High)
Idle Latency: 50.125 milliseconds (Accuracy: High)
Interface: en0
Uplink bytes transferred: 69.921 MB
Downlink bytes transferred: 278.340 MB
Uplink Flow count: 16
Downlink Flow count: 12
Start: 13/05/2023, 15:04:13
End: 13/05/2023, 15:04:27
OS Version: Version 13.3.1 (a) (Build 22E772610a)

It supports Apple’s Private Relay, offers some configuration options and allows setting up your own server. More info here.

On his website, he apologizes for being unable to respond to all the mail he receives. Well, my experience is the opposite. I remember one of our several mail exchanges. In 2013 I asked him for git help, and minutes later, he replied with a custom script he had put together for dealing with that exact problem. Later on, as I was working on a git presentation for Codemotion (I think), I fired a quick email asking permission to feature his script in my session. The green light landed seconds later. Salvatore is the epitome of kindness and helpfulness.

As if his pronounced computer skills were not enough, with his latest sci-fi novel Wohpe (on my reading list), he proves to be endowed with the most diverse capabilities.

Anyway, here’s the antirez & Redis story I mentioned. Worth reading it.

We only publish significant news. To find them we use AI (ChatGPT-4) to read and analyze 1000 top news every day. For each article it estimates magnitude, scale, potential and credibility. Then we combine these estimates to get the final Significance score from 0 to 10. And now the best part: We’ll only send you the news scored 6.5 or higher. Sometimes it’s 5 articles, sometimes 2, sometimes 8. And sometimes — none at all. But one thing is constant — you can be sure that you haven’t missed anything important.

The concept is brilliant and well executed, but I can’t help but feel uncomfortable at the notion of an AI curating news for me. Yet, this is the best use case for LLM/AI I’ve seen until now.

“I started realizing that religion shows up in the natural sciences and the contemporary world in a funny and alarming way,” Rubenstein said. “Because sciences tend to think of themselves as something as far away as possible from religion, as having freed themselves from God. To an extent that’s true. But in the process, they tend to generate these big stories, big mythologies, about the origins and the ends of the world. And conjure characters who are heroes, gods, and monsters. I started tracking the way that the natural sciences themselves generate new ways of understanding the world that, a couple centuries ago, we would have called religion.”

More here.

But what Sun Ra had done, and done best, was reminding earthlings everywhere that he wasn’t mortal. He was a signifier of a life beyond the reality of this one. He was a visual reassurance of the presence of another world. He brought the cosmos to the streets, and, most importantly, he was a reminder that one does not have to subscribe to the status quo—musically, stylistically, politically, ideologically.

More here.

This morning, these memories were brought back to me while reading The End of Computer Magazines in America by Harry McCracken. He was involved with the computer magazine industry in its golden age, so the article has exciting insights. I also appreciated the several former colleagues and competitors who commented, helping frame the period. Computer magazines are dead indeed, and it’s a bittersweet sensation. Quoting McCracken’s closing words:

I do remain grateful that computer magazines existed. Their time has passed—but what a time it was.

However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.

More here.

First, The Parable of the Two Watchmakers, introduced by Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, describes the complex relationship between sub-systems and their larger wholes. In the context of the article, it helps explain, even for non-programmers, the cost of an interruption. It also hints at a possible mitigation technique:

There once were two watchmakers, named Hora and Tempus, who made very fine watches. The phones in their workshops rang frequently and new customers were constantly calling them. However, Hora prospered while Tempus became poorer and poorer. In the end, Tempus lost his shop. What was the reason behind this?

The watches consisted of about 1000 parts each. The watches that Tempus made were designed such that, when he had to put down a partly assembled watch, it immediately fell into pieces and had to be reassembled from the basic elements. Hora had designed his watches so that he could put together sub-assemblies of about ten components each, and each sub-assembly could be put down without falling apart. Ten of these sub-assemblies could be put together to make a larger sub-assembly, and ten of the larger sub-assemblies constituted the whole watch.

Second, larger computer screens help a programmer keep his mental model (and context) together. I’m still deciding on this one. Focusing on a single window or not having a lot of cruft around the screen helps solve complex code for me. But toss anything John Carmack at me, and I will abide.

The 640 x 480 resolution was the standard from 1990 to around 1996, but it was possible to get more screen real estate back then. There is a famous photo of John Carmack working on Quake using a 28-inch 1080p monitor in 1995.

Why did he choose 45 kg monitor for about $10k in 1995? The higher screen real estate allowed for more code to be visible at once, resulting in a more dense context. Productivity greatly increases when you have the ability to store and access more detailed context. It’s like having a larger desk to hold documents when studying for an exam or doing any task that requires the use of multiple sources of information from a common domain, such as solving puzzles.

The brilliant comic that opens the article is the perfect TL;DR for the Watchmakers parable.

Last month one of our journalists received an interesting email. A researcher had come across mention of a Guardian article, written by the journalist on a specific subject from a few years before. But the piece was proving elusive on our website and in search. Had the headline perhaps been changed since it was launched? Had it been removed intentionally from the website because of a problem we’d identified? Or had we been forced to take it down by the subject of the piece through legal means?

The reporter couldn’t remember writing the specific piece, but the headline certainly sounded like something they would have written. It was a subject they were identified with and had a record of covering. Worried that there may have been some mistake at our end, they asked colleagues to go back through our systems to track it down. Despite the detailed records we keep of all our content, and especially around deletions or legal issues, they could find no trace of its existence.

Why? Because it had never been written.

More here.

I feel like the transcript speaks for itself, but before reproducing it I will state for the historical record that my mind is still exploding from from all the inevitable innovation and legal controversies this kind of usage of LLM (Large Language Model) technologies will provoke in the coming months and years. Software development for this kind of use case will never be the same again.

The whole gaming session’s transcript is available here.

independent, in-person developer conferences are hurting. Based on my own observation as well as talks with organizers and sponsors that I have come to know over the years, the average independent in-person event is still down 30-40% from pre-pandemic attendance levels. And often it seems to require massive discounts or even giveaways to get to this level.

And he offers an interesting theory on why that is:

My hypothesis is that we’ve bifurcated the audience somewhat. The folks that were there almost exclusively for the content have decided that they can do so more cheaply and efficiently online via virtual conferences or recordings. The folks that went for the networking as a primary driver, on the other hand, are largely eschewing online events as not fulfilling their needs. […] So ultimately what we are left with is a lower in-person audience and a lower virtual audience.

As a conference speaker and meetup organizer, I noticed that online events saw low attendance during the pandemic, and they still do today. When available, recordings partially compensate, but only in audience terms. The problem is online events are not conferences. ‘Conference’ originates from the late Latin “conferentia,” itself a derivative of “conferre,” a synonym for the collation of “bring together”¹. A conference is a meeting to discuss some topics. The get-together element is missing in online events, and networking is next to impossible (live chats and ‘virtual after-parties’ are just poor palliatives.) In my book, hybrid events are even worse, as live streaming and recordings discourage live attendance (at the DevRomagna meetups, we often get asked if live streaming or recordings will be available, and the answer is no - either we do live streaming - and we sometimes do - or we do an in-person event, but never a mix of the two.)

Going back to Brian’s musings, I think I subscribe to them. I am not sure attendance will ever get back to old numbers. I am afraid a good portion of those who were regulars became disaffected, and gaining their attention back is a hard gamble. YouTube and Twitch, I think, are phenomenal competitors, and the pandemic hiatus threw a ton of fresh new viewers at them.

PS: Coincidentally, we’re running an in-person meetup at DevRomagna today.

That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

More here.

As it turns out, this is the Flammarion engraving, a famous wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (“The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology”).

The print depicts a man, clothed in a long robe and carrying a staff, at the edge of the Earth, where it meets the sky. He kneels and passes his head, shoulders, and right arm through the star-studded sky, discovering a marvelous realm of circling clouds, fires and suns beyond the heavens. One of the elements of the cosmic machinery closely resembles traditional pictorial representations of the “wheel in the middle of a wheel” described in the visions of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. The caption that accompanies the engraving in Flammarion’s book reads:

A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch…

The Flammarion engraving has inspired and has been used by many writers, artists, researchers, and jack-of-all-trades. The whole story is available at the Wikipedia page linked above.

Source

Above all, I liked the affection and serenity that shines, through all stages, between father and son. A depiction of the circle of life I gladly subscribe to.

Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more impressive, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions. This is James Daunt’s superpower: He loves books.

The whole piece is worth reading. Of all the libraries in my hometown, there’s only one (not a franchise) doing the same, and I genuinely enjoy walking up to their window to spot new titles. I appreciate that the owners take their time to pick worthy books and that I get to contemplate their opinionated selection. They also organize group readings and other activities seldom found in franchise libraries. Their only downside, valid for all small libraries, is that almost every time I need a particular title, it’ll have to be back-ordered, which sadly makes Amazon unbeatable.

I suspect my being an adult father of three kids played a role, as I was nodding all the time, often feeling emotional about it. Anyway, here’s the YouTube recording I’m talking about, and here’s a transcription I dug out of the Internet Archive.

Spoiler warning, I’m now going to quote Wikipedia, where I found a good summarization of the themes covered:

The speech covers subjects including the difficulty of empathy, the unimportance of being well-adjusted, and the apparent lonesomeness of adult life. It suggests that higher education’s overall purpose is to consciously choose how to perceive others, think about meaning, and act appropriately in everyday life. Wallace argues that the true freedom acquired through education is the ability to be fully conscious and sympathetic. Authors Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb have said that Wallace used the speech to outline his spiritual philosophy and the methods he used to find peace when wrestling with anxiety and depression.

I also learned on Wikipedia that the speech’s themes were expanded in Wallace’s novel The Pale King, posthumously published in 2011. With all its intimidating size, the Pale King has been sitting on my nightstand (aka reading list) for ages. Maybe it’s time to deal with it.

On New Years Day of 2022, I stumbled out of bed and immediately lost my vision, fell to the floor, and had to get my then-partner to help me back into bed. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, and I knew what it was straight away - I was having a migraine. In the previous decade I’d had countless migraines, and they always followed the same pattern. I’d wake up after a night out, attempt to get to the bathroom, lose my vision, and most likely end up on the floor vomiting from the pain that I can only describe as feeling like someone trying to hammer a nail into my skull. The worst part about them? They were avoidable.

More here.

And we must remind ourselves that growth occurs in intervals: there are times of growth, and there are times of non-growth. The latter isn’t a failure so much as a necessary period of rest. Dormancy isn’t stagnant; it’s potentiating. It’s patient. If you’ve grown a lot in the past however many months or years and now feel that growth coming to a close, don’t fret right away. Wait. Reflect on what you’ve learned. Look for signs of spring. Move to where there’s water, if you need to. But don’t rush. There will be time again for running and jumping, when you’re ready.

More here.

Also, I’m not surprised that similar investigations revealed that Mikhail Bulgakov was under morphine when he wrote his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita (one of my all-time favorite books).

Full article is available here.

I find, more often than not, that I understand something much less well when I sit down to write about it than when I’m thinking about it in the shower. In fact, I find that I change my own mind on things a lot when I try write them down. It really is a powerful tool for finding clarity in your own mind. Once you have clarity in your own mind, you’re much more able to explain it to others.

More here.

While it has been a very challenging and difficult time for the company, it cannot even remotely be compared with the horrendous situation that the people of Ukraine are facing on a daily basis, caused by the war. Once again, we condemn this aggression, and have and will continue to stand by the people of Ukraine, including our colleagues and their families. 

More here.

I’m using JetBrains products when I’m not in (neo)vim. For C#, Rider is fantastic, and so is PyCharm for Python. The company is incredible, too, as today’s bold move demonstrates. They moved 800 employees, got visas, new locations and apartments, everything. Huge respect.

I’m lucky enough to have been awarded their Open Source License for many years, so I’m biased, but look, now I’m even proud of supporting their products (via).

Despite its name suggesting otherwise, Dune II was a first – a real-time strategy game that sprang out of the box with almost every gameplay attribute and control system seen in every RTS since. In direct lineage, it was the father of the globally successful Command & Conquer franchise, in that its code was used as a basis of the first game of the series. Yet in terms of wider influence, the battles first fought out on the vibrant sands of Arrakis continue to echo through modern videogaming.

More here, with beautiful illustrations to boost

Dune II is one of the few video game boxes I keep. It’s comfortably resting in the library behind me, along with other jewels from the distant past.

Reading the Making of Dune II took me down memory lane (via).

What I missed about Mastodon was its very different culture. Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users. They’ve discovered the same thing the Mainstream Media did: negative emotions grip people’s attention harder than positive ones. Hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions.

More here.

I have been on Mastodon for a few weeks now, and wow, what a breath of fresh air. I’m only syndicating to Twitter (and have been for a while, as you might have noticed) while I’m active and engaged on Masto. I know this is breaking my POSSE stance so much that I’ve set up my own Masto instance so I could own my content over there like I do with this website. I never switched from fosstodon (which is an instance I like a lot), though. I’ll wait a little bit and then decide on the move.

What impresses me is the atmosphere and overall level of engagement on Masto. I have 2.1k followers on Twitter and just a little over 100 on Masto, and yet, the Masto feed is so much richer and more interesting, and the interaction level is incomparable. The Masto vibe these days reminds me of Twitter when I joined back in 2009. Better yet, of the old BBS days, or Usenet. Hopefully, it will last, and, for the reasons outlined by Marcus’ post above (mandatory read, IMHO), I am confident it will.

Join me on Mastodon.

“On Sunday, June 21, 1970, in an office building on Great Portland Street in London, a teletype sprang to life. Under the heading “HAPPY FAMILIES,” the machine rattled out a sequence of English sentences, such as “THE DOG SITS ON THE BABY” and “UNCLE TED PLAYS WITH SISTER.” The “Happy Families” program that produced this output had been written that same weekend by someone with no prior programming experience, a participant in a workshop organized by the Computer Arts Society offering a course in “non-numerical programming.”

Almost fifty years later, on October 26, 2019, in Istanbul, the eyes of a young woman lit up as she managed to get her very first program to run. She was attending a workshop organized by Django Girls, an international non-profit organization aiming to empower women through free, one-day programming workshops.

The programming language used at the London workshop in 1970 was TELCOMP, a simple unstructured language similar to BASIC—not BASIC as it is now, but unstructured BASIC as it was then. The programming language taught at the Istanbul workshop in 2019 was Python, a programming language designed by Guido van Rossum that has become wildly popular, steadily gaining in popularity since an inconspicuous public release in 1991. As far apart as these events are, both in time and geography, an arc of history connects them.”

It is a magnificent article. If you’re passionate about Python, and programming languages in general, make sure to read it.¹

brr’s Antarticta blog is a recent addition to my RSS feed collection. It’s always interesting to follow people living and working in the most remote parts of the world.

On The Verge, Nilay Patel’s brutal piece on the recent Twitter acquisition is chock-full of brilliant insights on what it takes to run a modern commercial social service.

You fucked up real good, kiddo. Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.

More here.

In 1701, in Middletown, New Jersey, Moses Butterworth languished in a jail, accused of piracy. Like many young men based in England or her colonies, he had joined a crew that sailed the Indian Ocean intent on plundering ships of the Muslim Mughal Empire. Throughout the 1690s, these pirates marauded vessels laden with gold, jewels, silk, and calico on pilgrimage toward Mecca. After achieving great success, many of these men sailed back into the Atlantic via Madagascar to the North American seaboard, where they quietly disembarked in Charleston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York City, Newport, and Boston, and made themselves at home.

More here.

Studies have found that high levels of social media use are connected with an increased risk of symptoms of anxiety and depression. There appears to be substantial evidence connecting people’s mental health and their online habits. Furthermore, many psychologists believe people may be dealing with psychological effects that are pervasive but not always obvious.

More here.

I believe strongly in the indieweb principles of distributed ownership, control, and independence. For me, the important thing is that this is how we get to a diverse web. A web where everyone can define not just what they write but how they present is by definition far more expressive, diverse, and interesting than one where most online content and identities must be squished into templates created by a handful of companies based on their financial needs. In other words, the open web is far superior to a medium controlled by corporations in order to sell ads. The former encourages expression; the latter encourages consumerist conformity.

Read it all here (via).

The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss - an unequalled achievement.

The full story is available here (via).

The Italian podcaster Francesco Costa thinks that the foreign press’s fixation on creeping Fascism in the country is overblown and unhelpful. If the center-right coalition wins, “Will Italy be a police state? No,” he said. “Will it be very badly run? Yes.”

Full article is available here. I’ve been following Francesco Costa for a few years. He’s talented, conscientious, brilliant, and gifted with good humor. He deserves to be featured in The New Yorker.

Software quality is more the result of a system designed to produce quality, and not so much the result of individual performance. That is: a group of mediocre programmers working with a structure designed to produce quality will produce better software than a group of fantastic programmers working in a system designed with other goals.

This leads to the insightful conclusion:

Instead of spending tons of time and effort on hiring because you believe that you can “only hire the best”, direct some of that effort towards building a system that produces great results out of a wider spectrum of individual performance.

But what does he mean by a system designed for quality? Read it all here.

Bands like L7 and Heavens to Betsy were instrumental to the birth of the grunge scene, but for decades were treated like novelties and sex objects. Thirty years later, it’s time to reassess their legacy.

More here.

Fairy tales, as G.K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.

I read somewhere that he based the Gilbert character from The Sandman on Chesterton, so it’s no surprise to find Gaiman quoting Chesterton in Smoke and Mirrors.

Wanting to find the work in which the quote first appeared, I did a little research only to discover that G.K. Chesterton never actually wrote it. According to E.M. Goldsmith¹, Gaiman’s is a rework of the following original quote:

Fairy Tales then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him to a series of clear pictures of the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. –Tremendous Trifles (1909), XVII: “The Red Angel”²

An excellently simplified, actualized and de-Christianized rework, I’d say. On the subject of fairy tales, E.M. Goldsmith has another quote that is worth sharing:

When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale." –Heretics, CW, I, p.143 G.K. Chesterton.

What great of a writer Chesterton was. No wonder Jorge Luis Borges and J.R.R. Tolkien were some of his great estimators. On Chesterton, Borges supposedly³ said: “Literature is one of the forms of happiness; perhaps no writer has given me as many happy hours as Chesterton.”

More than 50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart gave the “mother of all demos” that transformed software forever. The computer world has been catching up with his vision ever since.

More here

Coltrane’s complexity is daunting for the most accomplished musicians. How much more so for non-musicians? It can seem like “you need a doctorate of music to go anywhere near his recordings,” Nicholson writes. But “nothing could be further from the truth.” With its dancing lines and circles, Brother’s visualization gives us another way to appreciate the “sheer joy of music making and the power and energy of his playing” that inspires students, serious fans, and newcomers alike through “universal values that still speak to us now.”

I suddenly want all my music visualized like this.

My nerdiness alarm immediately went off, and I wanted to know more, so I dug a little. Open Culture presentation is remarkable, but what’s mind-boggling is the author’s in-depth article on the fractal structure of the solo. It’s all about fractals, baby!

The series was thus intended to be set against the general public hagiography of Sparta and its intended audience was what I’ve heard termed the ‘Sparta Bro’ – the person for whom the Spartans represent a positive example (indeed, often the pinnacle) of masculine achievement, often explicitly connected to roles in law enforcement, military service and physical fitness (the regularity with which that last thing is included is striking and suggests to me the profound unseriousness of the argument). […] In that light, I think the series holds up fairly well.

As a former 100% Sparta Bro, I qualified for the target audience. Paraphrasing Marx, one could say that ignorance is the opium of the people. Take 300 the movie. I’m glad I saw it as entirely ignorant of Sparta’s ‘real’ prowess, or most fun would have been spoiled.

Actually, some of Yourcenar’s prose is marmoreal, but not so that you can’t get through it. Also, it is beautiful. What made her remarkable, however, was not so much her style as the quality of her mind. Loftiness served her well as an artist: she was able to dispense love and justice, heat and cold in equal parts. Above all, her high sense of herself gave her the strength to take on a great topic: time.

I was caught off-guard by the idea, conceived by many critics, that her writing style resembles a man rather than a woman.

First, many of her narratives were set in the past. Second, they often involved towering passions compacted into tight, steel-band forms. […] She continued to embrace anti-sentimentality; indeed, she showed a fondness for brutality. And those traits, together with her highly controlled prose, encouraged reviewers to say—as they would say throughout her life—that she wrote like a man. As one critic put it, he could not find in her work “those often charming weaknesses… by which one identifies a feminine pen. The hand does not yield, it does not caress the paper; it is clasped by an iron gauntlet.” This opinion was fortified by the fact that most of her protagonists were men.

Intriguing and, now that I have been enlightened, shareable.

A few days ago, they unexpectedly released MarkDoc, the “powerful, flexible, Markdown-based authoring framework” they use internally to build their documentation. I skimmed through it only rapidly and, unsurprisingly, got a great first impression.

Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti, who knows better than me about docs, published a solid first-glance review of MarkDoc that I think is worth reading. Spoiler alert, I’m quoting below his excellent closing thoughts.

The secret to Stripe docs does not lie in superior tooling or magical markup variants: rather, the reason for their success must be found in the quality of their docs team, whose information architecture needs caused Markdoc to happen. This is the kind of magic that happens when you provide enough technical resources to your technical writers and trust them to do the right thing.

Update: MarkDoc even received John Gruber’s endorsement. That’s quite an achievement as Gruber is renowned for dismissing most Markdown extensions.

It’s somewhat consolatory to learn that I’m not alone in this fight. The other day I landed on Clayton Craft’s blog. His [rant on the topic][2] splendidly concludes with the following assessment:

If you know your user is asking for help, show them the damn help. It serves no one to chide them for not guessing the specific way your app wants them to ask for help. Better yet, support a more “common” way to allow users to ask for help if your app doesn’t already.

I agree wholeheartedly.

These musings were recently conjured by reading Neuromancer. The Birth of Cyberpunk, a fine, splendidly illustrated short essay on Gibson’s influence, published by Sabukaru Online (which feed I promptly added to my RSS reader.).

When Gibson penned his opening line ‘the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel’ he merged reality and the digital in a way that seems almost prophetic today, as online footprints grow exponentially and internet universes creep into reality. Instead of two separate realms, there’s a ripple and blur.

I might re-read the novel. I’m curious about my opinion as a senior reader.

The Sun as seen by Solar Orbiter in extreme ultraviolet light from a distance of roughly 75 million kilometres. The image is a mosaic of 25 individual images taken on 7 March by the high resolution telescope of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument. Taken at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum, this image reveals the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, which has a temperature of around a million degrees Celsius. In total, the final image contains more than 83 million pixels in a 9148 x 9112 pixel grid, making it the highest resolution image of the Sun’s full disc and outer atmosphere, the corona, ever taken.

High resolution image and more details on ESA website.

Multifactor authentication (MFA) is a core defense that is among the most effective at preventing account takeovers. In addition to requiring that users provide a username and password, MFA ensures they must also use an additional factor—be it a fingerprint, physical security key, or one-time password—before they can access an account. Nothing in this article should be construed as saying MFA isn’t anything other than essential.

That said, some forms of MFA are stronger than others, and recent events show that these weaker forms aren’t much of a hurdle for some hackers to clear. In the past few months, suspected script kiddies like the Lapsus$ data extortion gang and elite Russian-state threat actors (like Cozy Bear, the group behind the SolarWinds hack) have both successfully defeated the protection.

More here. The article is solid. It first introduces the various forms of MFA, then explains the attack vectors used to bypass them (hint: they prey on distracted, busy, or otherwise unaware people - we’ve all been there.) I appreciate their stressing that MFA is essential while raising awareness of the potential pitfalls.

Of all the stories of maritime adventures I’ve read, that of the Endurance, masterfully told by Alfred Lansing in this book, is the most incredible and shocking.

And I meant that. As the book’s title suggests, that story is simply unbelievable, yet true. Imagine my astonishment this morning at the news that the Endurance was found in the depths of the Antarctic.

Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank. The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

More here, along with incredible footage.

Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.

Ouch. A lesson learned the hard way:

My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like [Tom does][2].

One of the many reasons I don’t write my reviews on Goodreads and host them on my website instead is precisely the risk of losing them all one day¹. The same with Twitter. I have been on Twitter since 2009 and was very active there. I [witnessed][6] the BBS era. Since then, I’ve seen oh-so-many “too big to fail” services coming and going, I could fill a book.

Tweeting is quicker and faster, yes. So is writing a review on Goodreads. If I don’t feel like opening vim to write something, though, then it’s probably not worth sharing in the first place.

Posting on Goodreads or Twitter grants more visibility, that’s for sure. I understand that clicking a link to leave the platform is an effort that not everyone is willing to make. I’m probably losing followers on Twitter and ‘friends’ on Goodreads. That’s fine². Those remaining are likely to be more interested in my content and, ultimately, in me as a person.

Most of the stuff I write here is meant for myself anyway. If what I write happens to also be interesting for other readers, that’s cool, but it’s not the primary goal. I feel much better now that I own my content. The switch from social media content production to [POSSE][4] was beneficial and is something I advise everyone to do.

I don’t want you to conclude that it’s just a matter of aesthetics. Yes, Webster’s definitions are prettier. But they are also better. They’re so much better that to use another dictionary is to keep yourself forever at arm’s length from the actual language.

Recall that the New Oxford, for the word “fustian,” gives “pompous or pretentious speech or writing.” I said earlier that that wasn’t even really correct. Here, then, is Webster’s definition: “An inflated style of writing; a kind of writing in which high-sounding words are used, above the dignity of the thoughts or subject; bombast.” Do you see the difference? What makes fustian fustian is not just that the language is pompous—it’s that this pomposity is above the dignity of the thoughts or subject. It’s using fancy language where fancy language isn’t called for. It’s a subtle difference, but that’s the whole point: English is an awfully subtle instrument. A dictionary that ignores these little shades is dangerous; in fact in those cases it’s worse than useless. It’s misleading, deflating. It divests those words of their worth and purpose.

You can read it all here. It’s worth your time..

Not happy with the essay alone, he also added instructions on installing Webster’s on a Mac. Unfortunately, I could not get them to work on Catalina: the DictUnifier app would crash as soon as I dragged the [dictionary file][4] on it. A little research revealed that DictUnifier has a [problem with Catalina][2]. The suggested workarounds did not work for me. In the process, I learned that DictUnifier has gone unmaintained. Thankfully, a couple of years ago a good soul released [DictConv][3], a “Node.js version of DictUnifier”. DictConv did the trick. Webster’s 1913 is now happily residing in my macOS Dictionary.

Thom [Yorke]’s band had a keyboard player — [whom] I think they didn’t get on with because he played his keyboard so loud. And so when I got the chance to play with them, the first thing I did was make sure my keyboard was turned off … I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard, and they didn’t know that I’d already turned it off.

They made quite a racket, quite a noise. It was all guitars and distortion — and so I would pretend to play for weeks on end and Thom would say, “I can’t quite hear what you’re doing, but I think you’re adding a really interesting texture, because I can tell when you’re not playing.” And I’m thinking, “No, you can’t, because I’m really not playing.” And I’d go home in the evening and work out how to actually play chords and cautiously over the next few months, I would start turning this keyboard up. And that’s how I started in with Radiohead.

Full interview is available here.

Scientists say that urine diversion would have huge environmental and public-health benefits if deployed on a large scale around the world. That’s in part because urine is rich in nutrients that, instead of polluting water bodies, could go towards fertilizing crops or feed into industrial processes. According to Simha’s estimates, humans produce enough urine to replace about one-quarter of current nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers worldwide; it also contains potassium and many micronutrients (see ‘What’s in urine’). On top of that, not flushing urine down the drain could save vast amounts of water and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded sewer systems.

More here.

The Fremen got it right from the get go.

Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word “reddit” to the end of our queries. […] Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.

More here.

I switched to DuckDuckGo a long time ago, and you probably should too.

Really, this is less about the technologies themselves and more about the nature of states.

Because while I can offer no real opinion as to if any of these new technologies will succeed in their technical objectives […], proponents of these technologies typically envisage them eventually producing large social effects, in particular they imagine that blockchain technology will create an economic and social space outside of the control of the state, traditional banking institutions or society at large. And here is a space where a historian’s expertise is valuable and also almost completely lacking among blockchain enthusiasts.

More here.

Not long after we began dating, my now wife, Christine, and I started making up stories about the child we might have.

We named the child—or, in the stories we told about him, he named himself—Suzuki Noguchi. Among the things we liked about him was that he was cheerfully indifferent to us. He did not wish to be either Irish (like Christine) or Indian (like me). Suzuki was eight, and he chose this name because he was into Japanese high fashion. When we told him that he couldn’t just go around claiming to be Japanese, Suzuki said that he was a child of God and who were we to say that God was not Japanese. In addition to being a dandy, Suzuki was a criminal. He dealt in yellowcake uranium and trafficked in endangered animals. Sometimes we asked him how his day at school had gone and he would warn, “Do you really want to be an accessory after the fact?” We imagined him banging on our bedroom door when we were having sex and shouting, “Stop! You can’t get any child better than me.”

My wife was forty-eight and I was forty-seven, and we started inventing these stories as a form of play. It also soothed some hurt part of us.

More here.

I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms—but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—have to look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse.

I can’t say I can relate as my kids of ages 21, 18, and 16 do their best to stay clear from the music I like, but anyways, Ted Gioia’s latest piece on recent music trends is super-interesting.

After a quarter-century of effort by tens of thousands of people, more than $10 billion in taxpayer funding, and some 350 deployment mechanisms that had to go just so, the James Webb Space Telescope fully unfurled its wings. The massive spacecraft completed its final deployments, and, by God, the process went smoothly.

Ars Technica’s Eric Berger has long been my go-to pusher for space-related stuff. His report on Saturday’s milestone is accurate and to the point as usual. Today he has another article on ESA Arianne 5’s fundamental contribution to the mission. I love how modern, successful space missions are almost always the result of no-bullshit joint efforts by multiple international actors.

Update: The James Webb Telescope has reached its final destination.

Some of his insights on technology are also interesting. For example, on distributed vs. centralized systems:

A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face. This isn’t a funding issue. If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time. That is a problem for technology, because the rest of the ecosystem is moving very quickly, and if you don’t keep up you will fail.

His point on the urgency to reduce the burden of building software is also poignant:

At this point, software projects require an enormous amount of human effort. Even relatively simple apps require a group of people to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, every day, forever. This wasn’t always the case, and there was a time when 50 people working on a software project wasn’t considered a “small team.” As long as software requires such concerted energy and so much highly specialized human focus, I think it will have the tendency to serve the interests of the people sitting in that room every day rather than what we may consider our broader goals.

My foray into cryptocurrencies and blockchain happened almost ten years ago when the craze started. After a few experiments, I tagged it all as a nerds game and moved away. Moxie’s article served me well in catching up on the whole scene. Can’t say I’m thrilled by what I see.

As I read Maher’s post, I thought it would be great to fetch the original System Shock box from my sparse collection of now ancient video games and keep it by my side as I kept reading (I am known for lending myself to such romantic gestures.) I reached for the bookshelf. Microprose’s Falcon 3.0 was there along with Origin’s Ultima VII Serpent Isle and a few others, but System Shock was missing. It was released in 1994. I was 24. A lot of time has passed since then, but heck, I was sure I bought that game at the time. I have fond memories of many thrilling nights exploring the SHODAN-controlled space station. In the following days, I spent quite some time rummaging through all my belongings: bookshelves, drawers, garage shelves, even the cellar to no avail. The System Shock box was lost. Along with the careless disposal of Charlie, my Commodore 64, the loss of System Shock was one of my computer griefs.

Then, yesterday I went to visit my parents at their place. I was with Anna, my third kid. We were chatting about what sons and parents usually talk about on Christmas break when my dad mentioned that he’d been reordering stuff around the house and that I should probably take a close look at a couple of boxes he put aside for me. They contained old things from when I lived with them. I went to check on them. You never know; there might be some memorabilia like the comics or the books I used to read. Imagine my surprise when the original System Shock box surfaced out of the first box. Oh, joy! Best Dad’s Christmas present ever¹.

let me point out something that I’ve been saying both internally and externally for the last five years (although never on a stage—which explains why I’ve been staying away from stages talking about MySQL): MySQL is a pretty poor database, and you should strongly consider using Postgres instead¹.

As [@brandur][3] appropriately puts it, in the world of software engineering, it rarely gets more definitive than that. And authoritative, I might add, given both the role he covered at Oracle and his overall [track record][5]. The whole short post is worth reading².

I think it is relatively straightforward to think of cool things to do with SpaceX Starships, so recent posts have focused on trying to understand the more mixed consequences for incumbent industrial organizations that are not ideally positioned to exploit the coming advances. It is, however, a fun exercise to enumerate all the ways in which Starship and related technologies can help execute bold, ambitious missions of scientific discovery.

It’s long-form, yes, but well worth it. Oh, and while you’re at it, you might as well read Starship is Still Not Understood, Casey’s previous article on the topic.

As I hope this makes clear, with Baker, music is only part of the story. In order to fully grasp his significance within popular culture, we must also look at the mythos surrounding him and the often less salacious truth that lies beneath that dramatic surface. It is only by looking concurrently at Baker’s music and image that we can truly understand why he has endured despite the existence of more technically-gifted trumpeters and impressive vocalists. Many such musicians came to the fore throughout his tumultuous lifetime, but few have captured the public’s attention or endured in the way that Baker has. For all of his limited range, not to mention the dramatic loss of the youthful good looks that are at the root of his image, he managed to make a living as a musician for decades and has persisted in the popular imagination and jazz fans’ collections almost 35 years after his death.

I’ve always listened to Barker with little attention, knowing and researching little about the artist and his music. This article fills a hole. Also, I am grateful to Duffus for letting me discover a gem like Live in Tokyo, an album recorded on stage less than a year before his premature, tragic death and then released posthumously. I am listening to it as I write this note, and man isn’t it just great.

So it was interesting to read Atlas Obscura’s The Humble Brilliance of Italy’s Moka Coffee Pot to learn more about Moka’s roots, history (with the ups and downs), and design relevance. Of all this stuff, I was only marginally aware.

The Moka pot is a symbol of Italy: of postwar ingenuity and global culinary dominance. It is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and other temples to design. It is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most popular coffee maker and was for decades commonplace to the point of ubiquity not only in Italy but in Cuba, Argentina, Australia, and the United States. It’s also widely misunderstood and maligned, with approval in the modern coffee world coming perhaps a bit too late, in only the past few years. Get one while you can.

If humans were to disappear from the face of the Earth, what might dogs become? And would they be better off without us?

Unfortunately, the answer I can infer from the article is not very pleasant to my guilt.

In The Word for Web is Forest², Claire L. Evans brilliantly reverses the perspective. If the wood wide web metaphor holds, we can see the world wide web as a live, intermingled network of interconnected, initially decentralized and perhaps symbiotic entities. The issues we face in the modern web are not dissimilar from those faced by ill forests worldwide.

The wood wide web has been a powerhouse metaphor for popularizing the mutualistic relationships of healthy forests. But like a struggling forest, the web is no longer healthy. It has been wounded and depleted in the pursuit of profit. Going online today is not an invigorating walk through a green woodland—it’s rush-hour traffic alongside a freeway median of diseased trees, littered with the detritus of late capitalism. If we want to repair this damage, we must look to the wisdom of the forest and listen to ecologists like Simard when they tell us just how sustainable, interdependent, life-giving systems work.

Suzane Simard, the Canadian ecologist who revealed the cooperative nature of forests, explains that Mother Trees (the eldest trees) serve as “central hubs of the wood wide web. They are the strongest, the most resource-rich, with taproots stretching far beneath the earth.” When a Mother Tree dies, it shares its resources with the forest while many other Mothers guarantee the continuity and integrity of the ecosystem. This used to be the case with the Web too, but not anymore.

The web isn’t what it used to be. When the editors of Nature compared mycorrhizal fungi to a computer network, the web was still predominantly peer-to-peer, its users sharing their thoughts on personal home pages and homespun message-boards. Online advertising was in its infancy. But as the web has centralized, it has strayed further and further from the ideal presented by the wood wide web [..] By selecting for the most inflammatory and emotional content, Big Tech has algorithmically weeded the forest into a field of commercial timber.

Evans then proceeds to suggest that we should probably strive to imitate mycorrhizal networks and (re?)build decentralized networks, with “Mother nodes – sites in the network bearing a responsibility of care.” I’ll stop here. Read the article now, there is a lot to absorb. She doesn’t go into the details of her proposed solution, but offers us an original, courageous and pregnant point of view to consider.

Hello! On Wednesday I was talking to a friend about how it would be cool to have an nginx playground website where you can just paste in an nginx config and test it out. And then I realized it might actually be pretty easy to build, so got excited and started coding and I built it.

The playground is available here. Make sure you also read Julia’s introduction to the tool. In there, she recounts why and, more importantly, how she built it.

We found that ageing brings about a series of inevitable losses that deeply challenge people’s sense of connection to the world around them. Loneliness can often be oversimplified or reduced to how many friends a person has or how often they see their loved ones.But a particular focus for us was to better understand what underpins feelings of loneliness in older people on a deeper level. Researchers have used the term “existential loneliness” to describe this deeper sense of feeling “separated from the world” – as though there is an insurmountable gap between oneself and the rest of society. Our objective was to listen carefully to how people experienced and responded to this.

A difficult yet worthwhile read.

Do I have to migrate to the new hosting model

No, you don’t have to. It’s the preferred way to host ASP.NET Core applications from .NET 6 and onwards but you aren’t forced to change your project layout. This means you can upgrade from .NET 5 to .NET 6.0 by changing the target framework in your project file from net5.0 to net6.0.

.NET6 Release Candidate is out, so the guide is unlikely to receive updates, but I’m sure that David will be ready to do so if required.

We are about to release several brand new web services in the coming weeks. They are all ASP.NET 5, currently in beta, but before release we’re likely to upgrade them to NET6. NET6 is LTS, NET5 isn’t, and offers significant advantages, remarkable [performance gains][2] included.

Today I learn that, in English, there are in fact two different and conflicting quotation mark punctuation styles: American and British.

There are different ways of combining quotation and punctuation marks. In the American style, you almost always put periods and commas inside the quotation marks […] In the British style, however, you put periods and commas outside the quotation marks, unless they are part of a complete sentence that is fully contained between the quotation marks:

In The American Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation Makes No Sense the author illustrates the differences between the two styles, then argues that “the British approach makes more sense, so use that one.” Whoops.

For the first time in 14 years, experience Daft Punk like never before! The first professionally recorded live show; revived meticulously by remastering and restoring the audio and video. The Alive 2007 show is considered a staple in live performances featuring the signature ‘Pyramid’ and groundbreaking visuals, which is now complemented by a fully remastered audio track which aims to maximize the experience. Presenting the ultimate authentic Daft Punk experience.

You think vaccines don’t fucking work? Oh, fuck off into the trash, you attention-seeking fuckworm-faced shitbutt. This isn’t even a point worth discussing, you fuck-o-rama fuck-stival of ignorance. Vaccines got rid of smallpox and polio and all the other disgusting diseases that used to kill off little fucks like you en masse. Your relatives got fucking vaccinated and let you live, and now here you are signing up to be killed by a fucking disease against which there is a ninety-nine-percent effective vaccine. You fucking moron. Go in the fucking ocean and fuck a piranha. Fuck. Fuck that. Fuck you. Get vaccinated.

For .NET 6, we have made FileStream much faster and more reliable, thanks to an almost entire re-write. For same cases, the async implementation is now a few times faster! We also recognized the need of having more high-performance file IO features: concurrent reads and writes, scatter/gather IO and introduced new APIs for them. TL;DR File I/O is better, stronger, faster!

If you have the time, make sure you read the whole blog post. Learning about the low-level details on how they achieved such (pretty phenomenal) results is fascinating. They’re not stopping at file IO either. In another lengthy blog post, they had to add a table of contents, or we would get lost in the myriad of improvements.

Don’t worry, I don’t cover all of them here, but grab a large mug of your favorite hot beverage, and settle in: this post takes a rip-roarin’ tour through ~400 PRs that, all together, significantly improve .NET performance for .NET 6.

There are a ton of new things coming up, too, of course.

It’s just another day… and you’re just doing what you need to do. You’re getting things done, and the day moves forward in this continuous sequence of checklists, actions, and respites. But at various moments of your routine, you pause and take a good look at your surroundings. The scenes of your everyday life. The blur of this all-too-familiar film. And you can’t help but to wonder… If there is more to it all. For some reason — this country, this city, this neighborhood, this particular street — is the place you are living a majority of your life in. And it is this thought that allows a daydream to seep in. You start thinking of all the other places you could be in this world. Or more accurately, all the places you’d rather be in. Somewhere more exciting. Somewhere new. Somewhere that can provide experiences that are foreign to you.

While I agree with the article, I’d also mention that travel or putting some distance from the Box of Daily Experience, as the author calls it, is a great way to appreciate what we leave behind; to re-evaluate it from a different perspective.

As I read the article, I kept thinking, this is not particularly original; I read something like this before. Then, by the end of the piece, a note tells us that the text is, in fact, an adaptation of Seneca’s letter to Lucilius on the subject of travel. Seneca’s moral letters to Lucilius are just pure awesomeness.

In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. The reason: The country applies the “Housing First” concept. Those affected by homelessness receive a small apartment and counselling – without any preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected thus make their way back into a stable life. And: All this is cheaper than accepting homelessness.

Finland’s take on the homelessness problem is remarkable and gives hope. I live in a small town where the problem is not as apparent as in, say, San Francisco. Whenever I think back to my short time in San Francisco, I shudder at the terrifying homelessness situation I met there. There, in San Francisco, I realized the magnitude of “true liberalism”’s failure.

Like many others, however, I worry about code quality issues and the risk of license infringements¹. I am also concerned that the advent of Copilot-like tools might fundamentally change the software developer experience, if not the software developer role as a whole, and for the worst.

I wrote down some notes preparing for an in-depth Copilot article, but then I stumbled on Jeremy Howard’s ‘[Is Copilot a blessing, or a curse?][3]’. In that piece, Jeremy covers all of my points and then some more. Also, given his background, Jeremy’s musings on deep learning carry way more weight than mine. My advice is to read his article. I especially appreciate his critique on Copilot’s so-advertised role as “AI pair programmer”:

GitHub markets Copilot as a “pair programmer”. But I’m not sure this really captures what it’s doing. A good pair programmer is someone who helps you question your assumptions, identify hidden problems, and see the bigger picture. Copilot doesn’t do any of those things – quite the opposite, it blindly assumes that your assumptions are appropriate and focuses entirely on churning out code based on the immediate context of where your text cursor is right now.

He then mentions both automation and anchoring biases and explains how they might influence the developers using advanced AI-powered automation tools like Copilot.

The code proposed to Copilot seems to solve most problems, yes, but it appears to average quality at best. Jeremy explains why: Copilot trains on public repositories, with no filter on the overall quality of the material at hand –something complicated to achieve, indeed. The developer is expected to carefully review the suggestions, and that’s where automation and anchoring biases might affect judgment. Besides, who enjoys doing code reviews? I certainly don’t. Any day, I’d instead take on the challenge and churn out my own solution. Yes, it might require effort and time, or see me googling for some help (those Stack Overflow hints have usually been reviewed, amended and commented on by fellow programmers; both quality and review, right there). When my solution works, I am thrilled. That feel of self-accomplishment and satisfaction is what I enjoy the most. It’s what I look forward to in the morning when I sit at my desk.

I also don’t want to renounce deep understanding. When we delegate code creation, we’re taking a step toward shallow knowledge in our field. Eric Sink’s ‘[Will deep understanding still be valuable?][4]’ has an excellent discussion around this topic:

In my nearly 4 decades of writing code, I have consistently found that the most valuable thing is to know how things work. Nothing in software development is more effective than the ability to see deeper. […] I am utterly convinced that deep understanding is important. But increasingly, I feel like I’m swimming upstream. It seems like most people in our industry care far more about “how to do” rather than “how does it work”.

Copilot is great and feels like magic². And precisely for that reason, at my company, we’re not going to adopt it.

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.

We need more content like this.

Being the Tablet “a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture”, it makes sense that a good part of the article focuses on Proust’s ambivalence about his Jewishness. Still, there are many other interesting tidbits to be learned. On the novel itself and its development, on some relevant characters and their real-world counterparts, and Proust himself.

Most of these matters, as is natural in early drafts, differ from the final versions: the iconic madeleine in these pages is the far more prosaic toast. Sound, not just taste or the narrator’s position standing on cobblestones, is added to the battery of things that can revive the past. Proust writes here, after trying in vain to resuscitate a lost day of his youth, that “I let my spoon fall onto my plate. There was then produced exactly the same sound as that of the hammer of the brakemen who that day struck the wheels of the train at its stop. At that same moment the burning and blinded hour when this noise rang out was revived for me …” Perhaps most surprisingly, the Narrator, here given his actual name, has a younger brother, an annoying one to boot, who “though only five-and-a-half years-old, was of a rather violent nature.”

Jazz is so interesting to me because of its fusion of intricate underlying structure with improvisation and spontaneity. As Ken Burns put it, jazz is “familiar, but brand new every night”. Moreover, I enjoy the intellectual demandingness of jazz as a genre. Jazz musicians seem to be the most thoughtful and intelligent of any genre. Many of the more Avant Garde songs mentioned in this post don’t sound good unless you’re really concentrating. Some of it sounds cacophonous to a newcomer. This is why jazz is considerably more difficult to get into than other genres and has a lack of listenership among the youth.

Sam put a lot of effort into his selection, and it shows. Should his list be overwhelming for you, my shortcut advice would be: listen to Kind of Blue, especially the first two tracks, So What and Freddie Freeloader. If they don’t move you, I am sorry, you’re probably not a jazz person.

As John Gruber affirms, this is one rant we can all get behind.

[…] it’s inexpensive for maintainers to support a small number of users with relatively similar demands - but once a project achieves critical mass and the demand on the maintainers exceeds their desire to supply, something will have to give.

Case in point, IdentityServer. The license change was, in my opinion, long overdue. The new agreement is very reasonable; the package remains free for most users. I understand the so-called “Procurement Rage.”

[…] once maintainers affix a dollar amount as the entry fee to benefit from all of their institutionalized knowledge and expertise developers now have no choice other than violating the license terms (legal won’t stand for that) or dealing with the procurement bureaucracy to allocate company money for the purchase.

Procurement is undoubtedly an obstacle to open-source adoption within the Enterprise. Yet, it is true that there is no such a thing as a free lunch. Either be prepared to pay or send some value back to your dependencies, in one form or another (the article lists several great options). The conclusion is just perfect:

Creating virtuous cycles where you continuously exchange value with OSS producers is the inevitable conclusion to the “Open Source Sustainability Crisis” - and everyone will be better off for it. So you should start the conversation with your team and find some projects to support - because it’s in your own self-interest to see them sustained.

I subscribe to every single word. I find this case even more disheartening because most protesters are asking Microsoft to roll their own alternative. No gratitude or sympathy, nothing, really, for the people who worked hard for years, covering complex and strategic subjects such as authentication and authorization, providing excellent value for free. Baby-crying and asking Microsoft to “solve the problem” is so sad. It’s also so typical of certain Enterprise culture. They just don’t understand open-source or, just for convenience, they pretend not to get it.

It should also be mentioned that there already exist some valid, open-source, IdentityServer alternatives (IS4 included.) These should be the default go-to solution for those who abandon ship. The last thing we need is yet another “official” package by the behemoth. If anything, we need more variance, certainly not less.

I humbly confess that, until yesterday, I never made the obvious connection between TW2002 and Eve Online. That’s quite startling considering that I’ve been a beta player first and then an avid Eve player for a few years (Eve was also the last game I seriously played on a computer.)

In retrospect, what’s surprising is that Station Interaction, possibly the best trait of TW2002, never really made it to Eve Online (not in my playing timeframe, at least).

The StarDock was a key addition to Martin’s version of the game that went a long way toward making its galaxy feel more like a dynamic, living place. It’s filled with things to do: shop, gamble, visit a theatre to watch ASCII-art sci-fi parody “movies” (short animations) with titles like Vulcan Thunder. But more interesting are the chances for community interaction. The StarDock’s tavern provides a range of different ways to interact with fellow players: among other options, you can pay credits to post a public message that everyone will see, add to the graffiti scrawled on the bathroom wall, or pay a “grimy Trader” in the back room to learn information about other players, such as what sector their ship was last seen in. The grimy trader could share a huge selection of hints and useful info about the game state, provided you could think of the right things to ask him about and had the credits to pay.

And of course:

The StarDock also holds secrets: the large menu of available commands doesn’t show all the options available. Pressing a key not listed on the menu would describe your character exploring the seedier, lesser-known parts of the station. A particular unlisted key would lead you to a locked door and a secret password which, once learned—from the grimy Trader, perhaps, or another player—admits you to the Underground, where nefarious players can buy illicit goods and coordinate against law-abiding Federation forces.

Eve was (probably still is) a fantastic concept. I was Jexter the Caldari. With my friend Fist, we founded a small roleplaying space-pirate group known as Jokers. Back in our time, I think we made the news.

But what we found always missing was space station interaction. Besides a generic system-wide chat, nothing encouraged players to spend time (and roleplay!) while their ships were docked at those stunning space stations. That’s something TW2002 nailed down to near perfection. I wish Eve had that. It could have kept me in the game for far longer.

One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and writing novels have many common traits and similar processes.

It is a worthy read. I especially appreciate his conclusions on what programming can actually learn from writing:

I believe programming, in this regard, can learn something from writing: when writing the first core of a new system, when the original creator is still alone, isolated, able to do anything, she should pretend that this first core is her only bullet. During the genesis of the system she should rewrite this primitive kernel again and again, in order to find the best possible design. My hypothesis is that this initial design will greatly inform what will happen later: growing organically something that has a good initial structure will result in a better system, even after years of distance from the original creation, and even if the original core was just a tiny faction of the future mass the system would eventually assume.

I suspect that his line of reasoning might be influenced by some sort of confirmation bias¹. We are inclined to notice similarities between our own activities, especially so when we perform them passionately. While common patterns emerge naturally, differences, even remarkable ones, tend to go unnoticed.

Savolainen perspective is interesting because he is a Finn living in the US. He experienced the Scandinavian system first hand, then moved to a (very) different culture.

The Nordic ethos stands in particularly stark contrast to the American culture characterized by “extreme emphasis upon the accumulation of wealth as a symbol of success,” as observed by the sociologist Robert K. Merton in the 1930s.

In comparing the different lifestyles, he also touches on the social differences. Scandinavian people are not famous for their openness or the quality of their small talk, that’s for sure. I do admire their low-aspirations attitude, which is well described in the article.

Moreover, they embrace a cultural orientation that sets realistic limits to one’s expectations for a good life. […] People are socialized to believe that what they have is as good as it gets—or close enough. This mindset explains why Finns are the happiest people in the world despite living in small apartments, earning modest incomes—with even more limited purchasing power thanks to high prices and taxes—and, unlike Iceland, having never even made it to the World Cup!

I have always been fascinated by the North. When I went to Stockholm to present at Pycon Sweden, I fell in love with the city. I was lucky, though. We were in May, and the weather was beautiful all week. Daylight lasted until midnight. To my enthusiasm, the locals objected I should come back in the winter season to really appreciate what living in the North entails. As a Mediterranean guy, I imagine I might soon feel the long for warmer climates and still, the dream of moving North persists.

Only 24 people have journeyed far enough to see the whole Earth against the black of space. The images they brought back changed our world. Here is a selection of the most beautiful photographs of Earth — iconic images and unknown gems — digitally restored to their full glory.

Toby Ord’s recent Earth Restored project is a must-see.

The case, along with a similar problem revolving around the stability of a peculiar lego structure, is reported by an intriguing Nature article on the topic of psychology and human behaviour. The paper linked to the piece demonstrates that people consistently consider changes that add components over those that subtract them.

What are the implications of Adams and colleagues’ findings? There are many real-world consequences of failing to consider that situations can often be improved by removing rather than adding. For instance, when people feel dissatisfied with the decor of their home, they might address the situation by going on a spending spree and acquiring more furniture — even if it would be equally effective to get rid of a cluttering coffee table. […] On a grander scale, the favouring of additive solutions by individual decision-makers might contribute to problematic societal phenomena, such as the increasing expansion of formal organizations4 and the near-universal but environmentally unsustainable quest for economic growth. (source)

Is the innate tendency to favour additive solutions contributing to the entropy of the software systems we build? And if so, isn’t over-engineering, the scarecrow of software systems, its most apparent consequence? I’m in no way an expert in human behaviour and its implications in software engineering. Still, my bet is on a hard yes on both questions.

The name SQLite is a nice name, but the “lite” part is misleading, it sounds like it is only useful for tiny things - which is very wrong. SQLite should be named AwesomeSQL, because that is what it is. SQLite is probably the only database you will ever need in most cases

Yeah. This article resonates with me. SQLite is the de-facto standard engine for embedded systems. But it should also be the go-to database for all those websites and services that don’t need to scale to multiple machines. Which, in the real world, happens way more frequently than we all imagine.

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book.

But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn’t just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book… was illegal. The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. It was a self-published book created without permission from music publishers or songwriters. It was duplicated at photocopy shops and sold on street corners, out of the trunks of cars, and under the table at music stores where people used secret code words to make the exchange. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It’s a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book.

The whole story, both as text or podcast, is available here.

I try to keep my windows well arranged. The typical setup might be two windows, from two different apps, tiled side by side. Maybe the browser, or Postman, on the right, and my favourite editor on the left. Stuff like that.

Hookshot is excellent for doing just that. I discovered this tiny little app a few weeks ago, thanks to Robin Rendle. Before, I was using Moom, which is also good. I like Hookshot’s dead-simple keyboard shortcuts. Once the single modifier key combo Control+Command clicks, you’re done. Rearranging windows becomes a no-brainer. In a way, the experience reminds me of Vim and its unique muscle-memory superpower. The ten days trial ended today, and I purchased the license right away.

This is a maintained technical guide that aims to provide introduction to various online tracking techniques, online id verification techniques and guidance to creating and maintaining (truly) anonymous online identities including social media accounts safely and legally. No pre-requisites besides English reading are required.

At a glance, I suspect most people will be tempted to dismiss The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity as borderline paranoia. But make no mistake, it is a great resource. Granted, not everyone on the Internet is interested in anonymous identities (I am not) or concerned about NSA or the Mossad hunting them down. People have different threat levels.

Ideally, however, everyone should have a basic understanding of how his/her activities can be tracked down on the Internet. The Hitchhiker’s Guide does a great job at panning out of all that. Armed with this kind of knowledge, we can then decide our threat level and act accordingly. The website is also chocked-full of links to valuable resources.

When we talk about getting better at programming, we often talk about testing, writing reusable code, design patterns, and readability. All of those things are important. But in this blog post, I want to talk about a different way to get better at programming: learning how the systems you’re using work! This is the main way I approach getting better at programming.

Once again, Julia Evans has great sensible advice up on her site.

I appreciate her note on how today we work with so many complex systems that it is next to impossible to understand all of them. The experienced developer comes at peace with that, acknowledges ignorance, and, more importantly, understands when it’s worth digging deeper. In other words:

Being a senior developer is less about knowing absolutely everything and more about quickly being able to recognize when you don’t know something and learn it.

Let’s jump into the article.

A service has constant administration costs which are paid by the service provider. A properly designed library instead moves these costs to the users of the library.

This ignores the issue of support. You are going to have to support your users. Support comes at a cost. I would argue that, given the distributed nature of libraries, supporting them can become very costly. Your library is probably residing in a myriad of diverse, local environments. Issues are hard to replicate or reason about. It is hard to isolate your own code from the surrounding environment.

People say, “services are easy because you can upgrade them centrally, so you can avoid slow-to-upgrade users making everyone’s lives worse.” But this assumes that slow-to-upgrade users can have negative effects on everyone else. If one user can’t have a negative impact on other users, then you don’t care if some users are slow to upgrade; they’re only hurting themselves.

Again, support. Those slow-to-upgrade users are going to not just hurt but torture your support service with years-old obsolete issues. If you think it’s the user’s responsibility to keep dependencies up to date, good luck with that. That assumes that developers adopting the library control their deployments, which isn’t often the case. They might employ the library in a desktop application distributed to dozens (or thousands) of end-users. It could be next to impossible for them to make sure that all their deployments are up to speed. Old versions are a pain point and one (if not the most) significant cost factor. Maintaining a service comes at a cost too, and you’ll likely need to offer some sort of support there as well. A service, however, ensures that all your users are on the same version, which tremendously reduces the support effort.

When weighting costs, support must be factored in, along with all the rest: development, maintenance, distribution, documentation, etc. Maybe the article’s author has the luxury of not having to deal with support himself. Still, there’s someone else at his company who has to do that.

A service, on the other hand, represents a single point of failure. If it goes down, all users are immediately affected¹. By contrast, a nasty bug in your library will only affect the unlucky users on that version. Now, this makes a significant advantage for distributed libraries.

Your service, however, will talk to all languages via REST, GraphQL, or any other interface of choice. The library will usually speak just one language. Yes, you might provide language-specific SDKs for your service, but that’s just an option.

Do you need to hold state? If you do, most of the time, a service will be a better option. With state comes responsibility, however. You have to ensure regular backups, resilience, and maintenance, all of them at a cost.

The author suggests a few approaches to circumventing library limitations. Some are reasonable, like dynamic linking where it is applicable (not all stacks support it). Others, quite frankly, I don’t understand.

Many factors influence the choice between service and library, use case and prevailing circumstances being the main ones. I am not even sure they are comparable, as they tend to solve different problems.

My pusher of digital memorabilia is Jimmy Maher, also known as [The Digital Antiquarian][5]. One month ago, he wrote a [fantastic article][3] on Origin’s Ultima VIII Pagan. Then, just the other day, he doubled down with a [terrific piece][4] on Looking Glass’ System Shock. Both are games I played fervidly¹.

Maher is not kind to Pagan:

But then, for the eighth game in the mainline Ultima series, Origin decided to try something just a little bit different. They made a game in which you played a thoughtless jerk moving on rails through a linear series of events; in which you never went to Britannia at all, but stayed instead on a miserable hellhole of a world called Pagan; in which you spent the whole game adventuring alone (after all, who would want to adventure with a jerk like you?); in which the core mechanics were jumping between pedestals like Super Mario and pounding your enemies over the head with your big old hammer.

It hurts to admit it, but he’s exactly right. Nonetheless, I enjoyed exploring Pagan’s world. When I later joined the Ultima Online Beta, it was amazing to see that the same graphic engine and all of Pagan’s art were recycled.

System Shock was a game I loved. I found it to be revolutionary. Games like this one were precisely the kind of entertainment I strived for: immersive simulations.

[…] Moving through said spaces, picking up bits and pieces of the horrible events which have unfolded there, quickly becomes highly unnerving. The sense of embodied realism that clings to every aspect of the game is key to the sense of genuine, oppressive fear it creates in its player. Tellingly, Looking Glass liked to call System Shock a “simulation,” even though it simulates nothing that has ever existed in the real world. The word is rather shorthand for its absolute commitment to the truth — fictional truth, yes, but truth nevertheless — of the world it drops you into.

I have always been a System Shock guy more than a DOOM person. I really like how Maher compares the two games and the software companies that produced them, more or less in the same time-span².

In Maher’s reconstructions, what I find to be more appealing is not the games themselves with their mechanics but rather the history behind them. How the dev-team conceived and then developed their projects.

After so many years, I am thankful to Maher for bringing these two games back to memory. Now, I am impatiently waiting for his Ultima Online installment. I know it must be on his list, right?

There is a secret that needs to be understood in order to write good software documentation: there isn’t one thing called documentation, there are four. They are: tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation. They represent four different purposes or functions, and require four different approaches to their creation. Understanding the implications of this will help improve most documentation - often immensely.

I dig Daniele Procida’s take on writing good software documentation. It just makes sense. The system is simple, comprehensive, and, crucial, universally-applicable. The “four different functions” scheme works equally well if you are writing for a technical-savvy audience or the general public, which is excellent. The users I’m writing for are software developers, in some cases, and desktop or web application users in others.

I also like how he goes deep into explaining how and why each function has a different goal, should be isolated and written differently from others.

Each of them requires a distinct mode of writing. People working with software need these four different kinds of documentation at different times, in different circumstances - so software usually needs them all, and they should all be integrated into your documentation. And documentation needs to be explicitly structured around them, and they all must be kept separate and distinct from each other.

Last but not least, the framework itself serves as a guide for the author.

This division makes it obvious to both author and reader what material, and what kind of material, goes where. It tells the author how to write, and what to write, and where to write it. It saves the author from wasting a great deal of time trying to wrestle the information they want to impart into a shape that makes sense, because each of these kinds of documentation has only one job.

I wish I had this resource at hand when I was writing the docs for my open source projects. I think will adopt this framework on the next occasion, which will be very soon.

@nicolaiarocci on Twitter*

I discovered you can use the “diskpart” tool to compact a VHDX. This allows you to shrink a WSL2 virtual disk file, reclaiming disk space. It appeared to work for me without any data corruption, taking the file size down from 100GB to 15GB. (source)

I adore Parallels “reclaim disk space” feature. Just the other day, I got back 70GB off my Windows Guest in a breeze. I’m coming from VirtualBox, where reclaiming disk space is a significant pain. I would expect optimize-vhd to achieve the goal with WSL2, but it’s nice to know there are alternatives, like Stephen’s above

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? When I was living in London at the start of my career in the mid-1970s, I became friends with Philip Roth, who took an avuncular interest in my work. Where many others thought my writing was wild and weird, he thought I wasn’t being wild enough. He once came to my apartment and spread the typescript of my first novel (The Cement Garden) over the floor. He was on his hands and knees, moving the chapters around. What he wanted was for me to be bolder, crazier. He said, “You have to write as though your parents are dead.” My parents were alive. I took that advice.

Great advice. How often do we restrain from writing, posting, or expressing our thoughts because of our shyness? Or fear of being judged? Besides, I would take any advice from someone who has this to say about Bach:

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, TV show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without? Since the age of 16, my constant resource has been the music of Bach. Piano first, then all the rest. Like all music, it is as abstract as literature is specific, but Bach’s inventions are more so—like the processes of thought before language, deeply human without saying anything at all. In his music I think I confront the most naked demonstration of genius. Wrapped inside the beauty is a form of merriness and a joyful pulse. The same pieces that thrilled me in my teens—the Goldberg Variations, the Well-tempered Clavier—thrill me now.

I loved how he saved the day by brilliantly answering the most boring writer question of all times.

What time of day do you write? The morning. My philosopher friend Galen Strawson divides humanity into those who feel they are living in a constantly unfolding narrative, a life story that informs our every moment, and those who existence is discontinuous. I now understand that I belong in this latter group, even while I’ve often persuaded myself I was in the first. […] Now I can relax. I belong with those whose lives are lived in discrete patches. We can, of course, remember our childhoods, our first loves, our failures and joys when asked to, but almost all of our daily experience is disconnected from any awareness of the past. We also acknowledge that most of that past is lost to us forever. We, the non-narrativists, or episodists, wake in the mornings and we begin anew. I am my own blank sheet. As the day wears on, familiar concerns—domestic, professional, political, crowd in. The thing about that waiting desk is that you must turn up—and get there before the blank sheet that is you turns dog-eared.

I stumbled upon Cleaning Up Your Postgres Databases. It offers useful advice on spotting performance bottlenecks in your Postgres database. Take the cache and index hit queries, for example.

The first thing you’re going to want to look at is your cache hit ratio and index hit ratio. Your cache hit ratio is going to give the percentage of time your data is served from within memory vs. having to go to disk. Generally serving data from memory vs. disk is going to orders of magnitude faster, thus the more you can serve from memory the better. For a typical web application making a lot of short requests I’m going to target > 99% here.

I will be trying them real soon. Like, today.

From my perspective as an open-source maintainer, I can tell you that versioning is hard. Judging when a new release is going to break backward compatibility is not as simple as it might seem on the surface, and Hynek does a great job explaining why. Sometimes it is also hard for me to tell if a change in a codebase classifies as a new feature, small improvement, or fix—subtle differences. In the context of SemVer, it matters a lot because version numbers have a meaning. Consumers will likely decide whether to upgrade or not based on that meaning.

Admittedly, and precisely because I did not feel comfortable giving guarantees, the Eve project has been 0-versioned for seven years. Seven years! I wanted it to be mature, battle-tested and stable; only then would I feel comfortable going 1.0. In Eve’s case, 1.0 means not only “stable” but also “done.” All major features are in, and they are stable. I am not alone, of course. Flask, the web-framework on which Eve builds, has been 0-versioned for many years too. I’ve also been on the receiving hand of SemVer-related issues, check the Eve backlog. The same happened with my other projects (Cerberus is the exception as it has no dependencies.)

Hynek’s point, I think, is that SemVer is a just convention. At each new release, a semantic-versioned package expresses the maintainer’s intention, but there are no guarantees.

This does not mean that SemVer is bad or worthless. Knowing the intentions of a maintainer can be valuable – especially when things break. Because that’s all SemVer is: a TL;DR of the changelog. What it does mean though, is that you can’t rely on the semantic meaning of SemVer and you must treat every update as potentially breaking.

Make sure you read the Taking Responsibility section. It has sound advice on protecting your project from dependency hell.

As someone who’s been fighting the protection/obfuscation cat & mouse game for twenty+ years, let me tell you one thing. The way this guy reverse-engineered parts of the GTA5 codebase and then proceeded to single-handly triage and fix a long-standing (7+ years) performance issue is simply mindblowing. All he had to work with were heavily obfuscated dlls. This also shows how we, the protectors, are always playing a losing game.

There seems to be some sort of an obfuscation/encryption at play here that has replaced most instructions with gibberish. Not to worry, we simply need to dump the game’s memory while it’s executing the part we want to look at. The instructions have to be de-obfuscated before running one way or another.

Make sure you read this stuff.

Indeed the personal story of Marlinspike, along with that of the ascent of Signal, is fascinating. I did not know, for example, that in 2013 he met Brian Acton, founder of WhatsApp. Brian expressed interest in adding end-to-end encryption into WhatsApp. Then came Facebook’s acquisition, and, for obvious reasons, Signal Protocol never landed into the messaging service. The story was not over, however:

That year, Acton left Facebook, later attributing his departure to intractable differences about privacy practices. At the heart of the conflict was tension with Facebook’s top executives, Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, who wanted to extend Facebook’s targeted-ad network to WhatsApp. End-to-end encryption precluded the collection of message content that would be valuable to advertisers. In early 2018, Acton and Marlinspike announced the formation of the Signal Foundation, a nonprofit. Acton, the foundation’s chairman and sole member, seeded it with a no-interest, fifty-million-dollar loan.

What a plot twist. What’s even more remarkable is Moxie’s personal biography. He is not your average startup co-founder, not by any mean. He kind stands at the interconnection between activism, ethical hacking, and anarchy, and yet he’s the CEO of a booming startup.

Today, the looming disruptions of climate change have altered the risk calculus around nuclear energy. James Hansen, the NASA scientist credited with first bringing global warming to public attention, in 1988, has long advocated a vast expansion of nuclear power to replace fossil fuels. Even some environmental groups that have reservations about nuclear energy […] have recognized that abruptly closing existing reactors would lead to a spike in emissions.

I am surprised that the author, who clearly researched the topic well, did not mention Bill Gates’ Mini-Reactors approach to the problem. It might have been a deliberate choice, as at some point, she does note that “scientists are working on smaller, more nimble nuclear reactors.”

Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times’s classical music editor, has been working on Five Minutes To Make You Love Classical Music. This remarkable project aims at “hooking readers on classical music, five minutes at a time.”

Once a month online, about 15 musicians, pop-culture figures and Times writers and editors each select the piece they would play for a friend tied to a theme, be it an instrument, composer, genre or voice type. The series aims to make classical music accessible to readers as a Top 40 track […]. You don’t need to know the difference between a cadenza and a concerto. “It’s about pure pleasure and exploration.” (source)

I find this project interesting for many reasons, the main one being the variance of choices and themes. Picks are often excellent and not obvious. This is, I think, because of the wide range of people involved with the selections. You may have Yo-Yo Ma suggest a Concerto for the Cello installment, and then Mark Hamill or Condoleeza Rice propose a listening for the Mozart segment. How about Cecilia Bartoli for Baroque music?

Mind you, I am not a classical music expert. I just try and like to listen to good music, regardless of the genre. I am probably the ideal target for a project like this, which explains why I keep coming back. My favorite? Probably Five Minutes That Will Make You Love the Cello, although I am having a hard time accepting that Bach’s Suite No. 1 is not included in the selection (Suite No. 5 is, though.)

Official NYT playlists for the series are available on Spotify and, I presume, other platforms. I know because I wasted a couple hours building my own before finding out.

The New York Times features a good article on the fifty-year parable of The Game of Life. What’s appreciable, they asked some of Life’s most steadfast friends to reflect upon its influence and lessons over half a century. Among them, Brian Eno, who, being Brian Eno, has some smart things to say:

[The Game of] Life shows you two things. The first is sensitivity to initial conditions. A tiny change in the rules can produce a huge difference in the output, ranging from complete destruction (no dots) through stasis (a frozen pattern) to patterns that keep changing as they unfold.

The second thing Life shows us is something that Darwin hit upon when he was looking at Life, the organic version. Complexity arises from simplicity! That is such a revelation; we are used to the idea that anything complex must arise out of something more complex. Human brains design airplanes, not the other way around. Life shows us complex virtual “organisms” arising out of the interaction of a few simple rules — so goodbye “Intelligent Design.”

• The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life, on NYT

$ workon eve
dyld: Library not loaded: @executable_path/../.Python

I never really took the time to look into it. When this happens, because I am in a rush (and because I am a lazy old fart), I shrug it off, recreate the virtual environment on the spot, and get back to work.

My friend Justin Mayer knows better. The other day, he posted a short insightful article about this very same issue:

Perhaps you heard stories about why you shouldn’t use the system-bundled Python, so instead you use Homebrew to install Python and then use its interpreter to create a virtual environment. A month later, you activate that same environment, and when you try to use it, you see this inscrutable error: (…) What happened? The Python interpreter referenced by the virtual environment… no longer exists. But how can that be? You didn’t change anything! You didn’t change anything… but Homebrew did.

Homebrew is the culprit. If you have been affected (and if you have done any length of serious Python work, you have), then go read Justin’s piece. He explains the whys and then goes into the hows you solve the problem for good.

Typed languages are better when you’re working on a team of people with various experience levels

Typed languages are better, period.

Software architecture probably matters more than anything else. A shitty implementation of a good abstraction causes no net harm to the code base. A bad abstraction or missing layer causes everything to rot.

Perfect. I am stealing this line.

Clever code isn’t usually good code. Clarity trumps all other concerns.

Good and clever code is very possible, though. Agree on the second part.

Bad code can be written in any paradigm

Ça va sans dire

So called “best practices” are contextual and not broadly applicable. Blindly following them makes you an idiot

Not following them also makes you an idiot.

Designing scalable systems when you don’t need to makes you a bad engineer.

But how do I know in advance whether I need to be scalable or not? Not always an easy call. Also, scalability doesn’t necessarily imply complexity.

In general, RDBMS > NoSql

In general, use the right tool for the right job.

Functional programming is another tool, not a panacea.

The jury is out on this one. In my admittedly limited experience, functional programming tends to win over OOP. It’s not a coincidence that most OOP languages keep adding functional features (looking at you, C#.).

Pencil and paper are the best programming tools and vastly under used

Old fart me concurs.

Trading purity in exchange for practicality is usually a good call

Don’t get carried away with that.

Talking directly to the customer always reveals more about the problem, in less time, and with higher accuracy

:s/always/sometimes

The word “scalable” has a mystical and stupefying power over the mind of the software engineer. Its mere utterance can whip them into a depraved frenzy. Grim actions have been justified using this word

I plea guilty on this one.

Despite being called “engineers,” most decision are pure cargo-cult with no backing analysis, data, or numbers

I am a software craftsman.

People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia are insane weirdos

I am an insane weirdo.

Code coverage has absolutely nothing to do with code quality

It also has nothing to do with tests quality.

Monoliths are pretty good in most circumstances

:s/most/some

TDD purists are just the worst. Their frail little minds can’t process the existence of different workflows.

Ouch. This hurts.

I am not sure I would have had so many well-formed opinions only six years in. Read them all on Chris’ website.

Unbundling is a neologism to describe how the ubiquity of mobile devices, Internet connectivity, consumer web technologies, social media and information access in the 21st century is affecting older institutions (education, broadcasting, newspapers, games, shopping, etc.) by “break[ing] up the packages they once offered (possibly even for free), providing particular parts of them at a scale and cost unmatchable by the old order.” Unbundling has been called “the great disruptor.”

Every year Benedict Evans, former Andreessen Howoritz partner and now independent analyst, produces a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, The Great Unbundling.

Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China has more smartphone users than Europe and the USA combined, and India is close behind

• technology and innovation will be much more widely spread. For that and lots of other reasons, tech is becoming a regulated industry, but if we step over the slogans, what does that actually mean? Tech is entering its second 50 years.

I find this work to be worth studying. It draws a detailed, informed picture of what happened in technology and the economy these last years. It also offers insights, with some foresight, into what might come next.

Find the presentation at ben-evans.com

By enveloping the message into an original short, touching story, he achieves two goals. First, he captures the reader’s attention; second, he makes the experience memorable. Please, go and read it; I’ll wait here.

In the second paragraph, we’re already knee-deep into the story:

In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn’t look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console – a PlayStation Portable. She stares at it intensely; blocking out the world with Candy Crush. Or, at least, that’s what I thought.

Then, in the second to last paragraph, when the story is long over, notice the expedient of echoing elements from the story (the woman’s chair; the small obsolete device; both uncomfortable) to reinforce the message:

Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you’ve created?

For added momentum, the last paragraph reconciliates the story and the message—worth a read. Style notes aside, of course, unless your website serves static content, some Javascript is probably going to be unavoidable. The point still stands, though: do not overdo it. Or, as Confucius would say, do not use a cannon to kill a mosquito.

When he was found dead April 14, Phil Katz was slumped against a nightstand in a south side hotel, cradling an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps. The genius who built a multimillion-dollar software company known worldwide for its pioneering “zip” files had died of acute pancreatic bleeding caused by chronic alcoholism. He was alone, estranged long ago from his family and a virtual stranger to employees of his own company, PKWare Inc. He was 37.

In the late 80s, when the culmination of Katz’s work on compression algorithms, PKZIP, emerged as the clear winner of the so-called “compressors war,” I was running my own little BBS, Lorien, which later evolved into Phoenix BBS, a fully-fledged FidoNet node. When Lorien went first online in 1987, most if not all downloadables were in ARC format. Three years later, in 1990, when Phoenix emerged from Lorien’s ashes, ZIP archives ruled the world. Fast forward 30 years. A couple of days ago, I wrote C# code that receives data streams over a REST API and then stores them as ZIP files.

I would be hard-pressed to find another piece of shareware, single-handly developed software that has been as influential, pervasive, and widespread in the industry as PKZIP from PKWare. Of course, Linux and SQLite, although both came later (the former in 1991, the latter in the spring of 2000.)

Katz’s story is indeed a cautionary tale of genius, torment, and horrible demise. I cannot help but wonder: would his life trajectory have been different had he not been so successful? Probably not, given the details revealed in the article, but who knows. For sure, the tormented story of Phil Katz leaves me with one clear takeaway. Success does not grant happiness.