Recent content on Nicola Iarocci
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 the advent of AI. What’s unsettling is that the whole argument seems to make a whole lot of sense.
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 too dangerous for Americans too. Instead the US is treating these models like weapons that need to be controlled. It is not just about capabilities, it is about…
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 meters on the trail, and it was flooded by runoff, a clear sign of massive snowmelt above. Indeed, on much of the upper section, I sank into quite a bit of…
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 Terme, then crossed the one-and-a-half hills that lead to the beautiful village of Bertinoro, where we stopped on the famous piazza for a drink and to enjoy the…
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 vinyls are worth having, no matter what. They’re just beautiful artifacts (and TKC happens to be one of the finest). And then there’s the fact that albums such as…
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. According to her experience, these tools, when used effectively, will allow small companies and individuals to compete on equal footing with the giants…
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…
I just released Eve v2.3.1 . In the unlikely event that you’ve been using JSONP callbacks with Eve, you’ll want to update as this patch improves on their security ( changelog ).
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 encoding in Italian e-invoices has been a persistent headache — it’s technically outside the FatturaPA spec (which mandates UTF-8), but it crops up often enough…
Eve v2.3 was just released on PyPI. It adds optimize_pagination_for_speed , a resource-level setting that allows granular control, overriding the equivalent global option that goes by the same name. Many thanks to Emanuele Di Giacomo for contributing to the project.
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…
Eve v2.2.5 was just released on PyPI. It brings the pagination fix discussed in a previous post . Many thanks to Calvin Smith per contributing to the project.
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 includes an AI disclosure: the fix and the test were created by Claude. I don’t have mongo available or all the necessary python versions for testing, so…
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…
“ Archivio Grafica Italiana is the first online archive dedicated to the entire Italian graphic design heritage. ” 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…
Sam over at theTangentSpace has the perfect analysis on Europe’s sorry situation in these troubled times, so much so that I have a hard time picking just one or two paragraphs to quote here. Let’s just go with the opening: 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…
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,…
I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There’s a new…
I read 35 books, or 10726 pages, in 2025. A remarkable step up from the previous year . I have not read so many books since 2015 (36), and I never read so many pages before. Having read a few comic books helps pump up the stats, I reckon, and I suspect switching to ebooks played a role, too, as reading is more accessible than ever. I bought a first-edition Kindle back in the day, but never got…
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.…
Yesterday, the kids came home for the Christmas holidays. Marco surprised me by telling me that on his flight from Brussels, he discovered and listened to “my podcast” on Spotify. I was stunned. I didn’t remember ever recording a podcast, even though I’ve given a few interviews here and there over the years. During my usual morning walk today, I went to look for it, and there it was ,…
The Los Angeles Review of Books on The Bovadium Fragments , JRR Tolkien’s posthumous complete work, which was just recently published. Anyone who has read Tolkien’s letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien’s fury—specifically, ire over mankind’s obsession with motor vehicles. Tolkien’s anger is expressed through…
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
We watched A Private Life in the theatre yesterday, a fine, funny and intriguing French film set in Paris with a solid Jodie Foster as protagonist. But I’m here for the closing piece of the soundtrack, the one you hear over the end credits: Don’t Go To Strangers , by JJ Cale . I immediately reached for Shazam while Serena looked it up on Spotify. Now I’m spending this whole Sunday…
I reluctantly admit that it was Spotify’s Discover Weekly that let me discover Flea’s new solo single, A Plea . It’s jazz, and it’s beautiful. There are echoes of Fela Kuti and Sun Ra in it or, well, that was my first thought. The lyrics may sound naive at first, but they’re not. Instead, they strike me as lucid and match my general feeling about what’s going on…
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…
I swear it’s not an impressionist painting, just a blurry photo I took yesterday during my forest walk. The deer were watching me from the edge of the woods, not far away. The moment lasted a long time, until I ruined it by pulling out my phone. At that point, they took flight. If you’re reading from the RSS feed or the newsletter, click here to see the actual image.
If everything is slow-moving around you, it is likely not going to be good. To fully make use of your brain, you need to move as close as possible to the speed of your thought. – Daniel Lemire, Why Speed Matters .
For most of humankind, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every individual on the face of the earth has not existed. This designation stops at the border of a tribe or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village. — Paraphrased from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History , 1952 ( full quote and context ) I guess my beloved Star Trek future…
On Wednesday, I held a session titled “Feature Flags and Dynamic Configurations in C#” at WPC 2025 . It went well, at least judging by the offline questions that came in at the end of the session and which almost made us late for lunch. Attending WPC is always exciting. The audience is large, the rooms are big and well-equipped, the energy is just right, and there’s always a…
The woods, the jungle, the forest are the boundary between the wild and the civilized, a place of shelter and legendary fears, of hiding and losing oneself. A place of wonder and unease. [..] But what a mythical power lies in this tangle of nature, shadows, and roots, where the unconscious of the world can be found. – Vinicio Capossela
Eve v2.2.4 was just released on PyPI . It is a minor update, with a validation fix contributed by smeng9 . See the changelog for details.
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…
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.
I presented a session at the .NET Conference Italia 2025 in Milan a couple of weeks ago. The title was “Integrating our applications with LLMs and AI via MCP Servers”. It was well received; there were good questions throughout the talk and in the hall afterward. Surprisingly, live coding and demos went relatively smoothly. The fine guys at ASP Italia just published the video in case…
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…
With all the medium-to-very-low-quality productions we’ve been accustomed to from Netflix, it was a pleasant surprise and a relief to watch Train Dreams last night. I’ll quote the most recent review on IMDb: Robert’s life is gently lived and not without profound tragedy. The film evokes our own memories, little joys and sadnesses, discoveries, losses, and hopes, bringing grace to…
I was walking early this morning, as usual , when I came across an unusual advertising sign. It was in Spanish, text only, red background and black typography. I don’t comprehend Spanish well enough to read it, so I photographed it and sent it to Serena, who promptly replied with the translation. Embarrassingly, just yesterday, I got a severe reprimand from Serena because I did not know or…
The story that the Python micro web framework Flask started as an April Fool’s joke is well known in Python circles, but it was nice to see it told by Armin Ronacher himself 1 . I’m fond of Flask. It was a breath of fresh air when it came out, and most of my Python open-source work is based on it. The video is produced by the people who also authored the remarkable Python: The…
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
I’m presenting at the WPC 2025 Conference on December 3rd in Milan. My session topic is Feature Flag Management and Dynamic Configurations in C#. I will use a Web API as an example project, and since I’ll be using curl live to query it, I’ll need to pipe responses through jq to obtain nicely formatted JSON for the audience. The problem with jq is that it crashes on 400s or 500s…
Last night we went to Bologna 1 to see La Niña in concert, a birthday present from the kids to Serena. She loves this artist, whom I didn’t really know before last night. The concert was very nice, even though, not knowing her, I was initially confused, I think by the local folk festival atmosphere, if such a thing exists. It took me a few minutes to understand what I was looking at and what…
An essential part of my fitness routine is my early morning walks . On weekdays, I leave my home on the outskirts of my small provincial town, walk to downtown, and then return. It’s a brisk, almost hour-long loop before I sit down at my desk. On weekends, I take walks in the woods or to the beach, or if I have the time, head out for a mountain hike . These walks make my daily zen moment.…
Super interesting. 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…
It is impossible to tell the story of electronic music without examining the pioneering beats, grooves, and performance aesthetics of Dusseldorf’s Kraftwerk and its founding member, Florian Schneider. Formed in 1970, the band brought an experimental approach to pop music, resulting in some of the most innovative and commercially successful electronic albums of the mid-1970s into the 1980s:…
I’m just back from reading the transcript of Beyond the Machine , a thoughtful and insightful talk by Frank Chimero. 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…
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.…
“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…