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Books I read in 2023
I read 24 books for a total of 7070 pages in 2023. That’s seven more books than last year, which is quite an outstanding result considering the…
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Nicola Iarocci
The wilderness of Poggio Montironi
Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny, cold winter Sunday. I felt like going out and enjoying nature, so I took a solo hike in the Foreste Casentinesi…
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Nicola Iarocci
How Many Hobbits?
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…
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Nicola Iarocci
The Winterkeeper
The Guardian’s The Winterkeeper: A Lifetime Spent Protecting Yellowstone National Park is a beautiful short documentary I truly enjoyed watching. A…
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Nicola Iarocci
Quoting Andrej Karpathy
I always struggle a bit with I’m asked about the “hallucination problem” in LLMs. Because, in some sense, hallucination is all LLMs do. They are dream…
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Nicola Iarocci

November 2023

Intro to Large Language Models (video)
Andrej Karpathy has a very well-done Intro to Large Language Models video on YouTube. As a founding member and research scientist at OpenAI and with a…
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Nicola Iarocci
I am speaking at the .NET Conference Italia 2023
In a few days, on Monday, December 4, at 10 a.m., I will present at the .NET Conference Italia 2023, which will be held at the Microsoft House in Milan…
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Nicola Iarocci
How to use XmlWriter along with StringWriter to properly serialize a UTF-8 string
Today, I (re)learned how to serialize an XML to a UTF-8 string. Like all the other times I did this, I got backstabbed by StringWriter, which only…
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Nicola Iarocci

October 2023

LINQ DistinctBy on a property for .NET Standard and older .NET versions
Today I learned how to implement a custom Enumerable.DistinctBy extension method that returns distinct elements from a sequence according to a specified…
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Nicola Iarocci

August 2023

A few late book reviews
I’ve been reading a few books throughout the summer and needed to be more active in reviewing them here. Rather than writing four individual posts in a…
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Nicola Iarocci
rsync with a different user
Today I learned how to rsync with a user different than the one connected to the remote.
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Nicola Iarocci
The Legacy of Bram Moolenaar
Quoting Jan van den Berg: This weekend we learned that Bram Moolenaar had passed away at the age of 62. And this news affected me more than I expected…
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Nicola Iarocci
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