I’m a bit late to the party, I know, but The Dead Economy Theory by Owen McGrann is well worth a long, careful read. It sets out – and references – the many concerns that exist regarding the social, economic and political impact caused by t…
Armin Ronacher has a good piece on the recent Mythos/Fable 5 shutdown as seen from a European perspective. We are on a clear path towards a world of division. One should think that if a [LLM] model is too dangerous for everyone, then it is
On 6 April 2026, I reached Lake Pontini, from where I planned to climb to the summit of Monte Comero (1,373 m). Driving up the valley, I saw snow on the ridges, but, misled by the recent spring outing, I did not worry at all. A few hundred
About two months ago, on April 4, 2026, I went on a short hike in the foothills of Romagna. The hike itself is easy and very enjoyable, but what made it special was the presence of two of our kids, Marco and Anna. We left the car in Fratta
Yesterday I was at my favorite library and was about to buy Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert vinyl. I resisted the temptation and put it down. Here’s the problem: I don’t have a turntable. Part of me is convinced that certain fundamental vi…
JA Westenberg reflects on six years of going solo after a career working for various conglomerates. She’s leveraging AI tools to automate most mundane and boring tasks, so she can focus on the creative, challenging, and ultimately fun work.…
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
A couple of days ago I released FatturaElettronica 4.0.6. It adds support for legacy windows-1252 encoding to both XML and P7M invoices, a long-standing annoyance that could previously be circumvented via external code. windows-1252 encodin…
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 break…
Yesterday a pull request came in proposing a fix for a small pagination bug in Eve, the REST API framework I maintain. The intervention is small, precise, and comes with a well-crafted test. Two things stood out: the PR is in draft, and it
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…
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,…