Archive

“It’s my experience that no musician, classical or jazz, will ever be able to play my music the way I really imagined it. So they might as well put all of themselves into it.” - Mingus (Massarutto, Squaz) I sometimes wish workplaces would be more like jazz workshops.

I am reading and listening to the remarkable course Understanding Superstuctures from the University of Liverpool on FutureLearn. The following description from the course made me reflect on one aspect of computational biology that strongly attracts me - the possibility to write (sometimes) code that meets the criteria for a

I have followed David Larlet's blog for a very long time now, without knowing him personally, and I am often impressed by how some thoughts or feelings he expresses resonate with me. Here is one from his latest post: Je me rends compte que j’ai beaucoup de

I had an interesting exchange with Claude AI today, admittedly nudging it into the direction I wanted it to go. Me: Is it correct to say that to compress a gas with the least amount of effort, it has to be done infinitely slowly, and that any increase in the

Two Orwellian stories that caught my attention today: * The Chinese open-source large-language model DeepSeek R1 explicitly implementing censorship. * The U.S. government purging any reference to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility from official documents, live on GitHub. Yet, the transparency of it is puzzling, and I can only wonder how

Slowly moving away from the fascist-friendly internet: * Social media: * X account: closed some time ago * Threads account: closed recently * Instagram, Facebook: using less * Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed, ghost.io: using more * Cloud tools: * Apps on personal Cloudron server: using more

One such bypass was the decision to erase the Neptune Road neighborhood and Wood Island Park, at the heart of East Boston, to give way to a Boston airport expansion. This was in the 1960s, but the decision still weighs heavily on East Boston, where I lived until recently. Without

This definition from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy seems to apply quite universally to many problematic situations: Bypasses are devices which allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast whilst other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People

This morning I went to get an espresso at one of my favorite local places, Bottega Fiorentina. I had a chat with the waiter some time ago about Stromae, whose songs we both like. So, this morning as he saw me, he added a few of Stromae's songs

I have learned to consider myself an introvert. But in honesty I would say I am a dreamer. I enjoy being surrounded by people and impromptu encounters. I enjoy being part of the mesh of society. But I need time as a spectator to collect my thoughts, dream of what

This poem by Leonard Cohen moved me today (found on The Marginalian): Take a long time with your anger, sleepyhead. Don’t waste it in riots. Don’t tangle it with ideas. The Devil won’t let me speak, will only let me hint that you are a slave, your