Recent content on Stefano Chiodino
LLMs won’t replace engineers AI is improving at a sustained, impressive pace. During 2025, models went from being a novelty with potential to being a genuinely useful tool that I use daily. The improvement in both models and tooling has been remarkable. That said, I’m still not convinced that LLMs will replace software engineers. It will just make engineers more productive and reduce…
The boring prose bit Journaling has been a useful tool for personal reflection. One thing that I really like is that it’s private, which means that I can be open and honest. I don’t need to worry to be judged or hurt people’s feeling. It’s just like thinking, but with rubber-ducking included. It’s interesting to go back and read old entries, and I find it it’s…
The idea of pirate treasure derives from a single incident involving William Kidd in 1699. Kidd was about to be arrested, but before confronting the authorities he buried his treasure on Gardiners Island. He first asked permission to John Gardiner, the island’s owner, who later handed over the treasure to the authorities. This is the whole history of pirate treasure. It inspired Robert Louis…
Do you want to add geotagging (latitude and longitude coordinates) to your photos? This is particularly useful if you use DSLR or mirrorless cameras that often lack this feature. All you need for this is to have location history enabled in google maps. This process will add a location to a photo based on where your phone reported you where when the photo was taken. Go to your timeline . and…
Ask for more money Have you received a new job offer? Ask for more money. Have you received a pay raise? Ask for more money. If you cringe at the idea of asking for more money, you likely really need to ask for more money. Every year you have (hopefully) improved. You are wiser, learned some tech for a whole year, learned the processes, met the people, and therefore are worth more. So ask to be…
Here are some non obvious thoughts about reviewing code. … it depends This has little to do with code reviews, yet it’s some of the best advice you’ll ever find around: it depends. Don’t take this article, or any other articles out there, for gospel. When you are looking for a review Do your homework Do not submit code for reviewing before you reviewed it yourself.…
I have found out that recruiters have hunted me down using the email address I have inadvertently used to commit in Github. Unfortunately it’s not straightforward to replace this, but here is what I’ve done: From an empty folder clone all your public repos using github API. Replace YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME . for SSH_URL in $(curl -s https://api.github.com/users/YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME/repos |…
We need to fight the urge to abbreviate everything!
My notes on the book Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz
My notes on a business writing course
Most of the sun energy is in the green wavelength, why do plants not absorb it?
Kim Il-sung died in '94 but it's been nominated eternal President of the Republic
The Redundant Acronym Syndrome
A skeuomorph is an object that maintained design cues that have become non functional. For example the tiny handle on maple syrup bottle is to retain the distinctive appearance of the much bigger jugs maple syrup was once stored in. Other examples are many icons on modern mobile phones and computers, light bulbs in the shape of candles, etc. Source: Googling for the reason why maple syrup bottles…
Dicots and monocots differs on several more features other than the one that gives them their names: the number of cotyledon (leafs) in their embryo. Monocots have parallel veins in their leafs, which usually means elongate leafs as well, complexly arranged vascular system, fibrous roots, and floral parts usually in multiple of three. Dicots have a network of branching veins, a vascular system…
Plasmodesma is a narrow thread of cytoplasm that passes through the cell walls of adjacent plant cells and allows communication between them. Source: Coursera’s Understanding Plants - Part II: Fundamentals of Plant Biology Week 1 1.7 The vacuole and plasmodesmata URL: https://www.coursera.org/learn/plant-biology/lecture/gwRmz/1-7-the-vacuole-and-plasmodesmata
Xylem are tubes that allows water and substances to go through a plant. They are made of cells that die through apoptosis (programmed cell death). This process thickens the side walls, remove the top and bottom ones, and progressively kills the cell, leaving a tube of all those cell walls in their place. Source: Coursera’s Understanding Plants - Part II: Fundamentals of Plant Biology Week 1…
The Fundamental attribution error is the tendency for people to attribute far too much importance to personality rather than situations. Source: Coursera - Yale’s Introduction to Psychology https://www.coursera.org/learn/introduction-psychology/lecture/Urm4G/attribution
In the USA the value of a life has been estimated to be worth 10 million USD. This was initially much smaller, being just what a person would earn for the rest of his life, in average. It was later adjusted to reflect what a human life is worth, other than just work, by calculating how much the market values the danger of more risky job to be worth, but also what is it worth to their dears.
Conjunction fallacy occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one. Source: Rationality Course Via: Harvard URL: 45 minutes in https://harvard.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=a780e65f-e1d0-47a2-97c4-ab3b0140edfb
To produce an Amazon basic alkaline battery may require 100 times more energy than what the battery can actually produce. Source: The Verge Via: Apple News
After the Second World War forecasts were that Asia was going to be a trouble area because it was poorer that Africa and without the same amount of resources. Turned out that labour force and education can overcome that. Source: Masters in business podcast
If I flip a coin and look at the result in secret, being heads, then the chances that it’s heads it’s 100% for me, but 50% for everybody else. Source: Rationality Course Via: Harvard URL: 32 minutes in https://harvard.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=a780e65f-e1d0-47a2-97c4-ab3b0140edfb
My notes from the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
What happens if the CSS background-image URL is empty?
A review of Forestry.io for Hugo websites
How to delete all the passwords stored in Google passwords https://passwords.google.com
How to write content, deploy automatically and host your website
Load testing a $5 Digitalocean server