I asked an old friend what Edsger Wybe Dijkstra would have made of vibe coding. My friend gave me a good reply: The answer is almost comically predictable — and still interesting. Dijkstra was deeply skeptical of anything that encouraged programmers to rely on intuition, improvisation, or “feel.” He viewed programming as a branch of …
It’s with sadness that I witness how we reached the end of the Droste.
“ドロステのはてで僕ら” (Dorosute no hate de bokura), which literally means “We at the end of the Droste”, was a great movie you should check out if you were into recursion.
Droste, other than being the household name for the Droste Effect, was also a kick-ass cocoa, always in my pantry, in every house I lived in. The company got gobbled up by a larger one that kept the brand name, continued production of some products, but seemingly canned the cocoa. Sadness!
Short meditation on lost memories
Some people are ok with letting a major part of our lives go forgotten. The type of people who delete an email after “taking care of it”. But the world needs memory, lest we forget all the important lessons of our past. I will agree that there is value in “starting fresh” and that not …
Pillars of life
The project A Sign In Space reached an important milestone last year. A team of researchers was able to extract a cellular automaton and obtain a very interesting configuration, displaying what appears to be an amino acid diagram. It might still be too early to discuss the ramifications of this conclusion. But it’s not too …
On programming using LLMs
I have just realized that Il Post released part of an interview I gave on the topic of vibe coding a few months ago (article in Italian). I have many problems with the term Vibe Coding, but I suspect the expression will gradually fade, and it will return to being just “coding”, like wireless phones …
Take the time to go through this
Plotting an equirectangular SVG onto stereographic projection
Github repo. And by plotting, I mean both converting vector coordinates and tracing the result on a piece of paper. Because it all starts with a pen plotter and a love for mini planets. It always amazes me when I seem to be the only person on the planet to have a given problem. No …
I think this music video majestically wraps up the creative zeitgeist of the second half of 2025. Source
Calcomp Pacesetter 2024/2036 Manual
I salvaged a pen plotter from the early ’90s. The owner, a retired architect, was ready to free up some space in their home after decades of disuse. The unit was in fair condition and required hardly any maintenance: some cleaning, tightening of a belt, and a slide rail that needed lubrication; after that, it …
What I love about this quote is that both the word “computer” and “accountable” share an etymology that traces back to the concept of adding up numbers.