<antirez>

The Raspberry Pico is suddenly becoming my preferred chip for embedded development. It is well made, durable hardware, with a ton of features that appear designed with smartness and passion (the state machines driving the GPIOs are a killer feature!). Its main weakness, the lack of connectivity, is now resolved by the W variant. The data sheet is excellent and documents every aspect of the chip. Moreover, it is well supported by MicroPython (which I’m using a lot), and the C SDK environment is decent, even if full of useless complexities like today fashion demands: a cmake build system that in turn generates a Makefile, files to define this and that (used libraries, debug outputs, …), and in general a huge overkill for the goal of compiling tiny programs for tiny devices. No, it’s worse than that: all this complexity to generate programs for a FIXED hardware with a fixed set of features (if not for the W / non-W variant). Enough with the rant about how much today software sucks, but it must be remembered.

From a theoretical standpoint, the best reply provided by an LLM is obtained by always picking the token associated with the highest probability. This approach makes the LLM output deterministic, which is not a good property for a number of applications. For this reason, in order to balance LLMs creativity while preserving adherence to the context, different sampling algorithms have been proposed in recent years.

Today one of the most used ones, more or less the default, is called top-p: it is a form of nucleus sampling where top-scoring tokens are collected up to a total probability sum of “p”, then random weighted sampling is performed.

My usual process for writing blog posts is more or less in two steps:

1. Think about what I want to say for weeks or months. No, I don’t spend weeks focusing on a blog post, the process is exactly reversed: I write blog posts about things that are so important to me to be in my mind for weeks.

2. Then, once enough ideas collapsed together in a decent form, I write the blog post in 30 minutes, often without caring much about the form, and I hit “publish”. This process usually works writing the titles of the sections as I initially just got the big picture of what I want to say, and then filling the empty paragraphs with text.

I'll start by saying that this article is not meant to be a retrospective on LLMs. It's clear that 2023 was a special year for artificial intelligence: to reiterate that seems rather pointless. Instead, this post aims to be a testimony from an individual programmer. Since the advent of ChatGPT, and later by using LLMs that operate locally, I have made extensive use of this new technology. The goal is to accelerate my ability to write code, but that's not the only purpose. There's also the intent to not waste mental energy on aspects of programming that are not worth the effort. Countless hours spent searching for documentation on peculiar, intellectually uninteresting aspects; the efforts to learn an overly complicated API, often without good reason; writing immediately usable programs that I would discard after a few hours. These are all things I do not want to do, especially now, with Google having become a sea of spam in which to hunt for a few useful things.

The Idle scan was conceived at the end of 1998, evidenced by emails. I had moved to Milan a few months prior, having been there since September if I recall correctly, brimming with new ideas, unaware that my stay in that city would be brief. I spent the summer on the beaches of Sicily, mainly occupied with reading many books recommended by the folks at Seclab (mostly by David). However, those readings needed a catalyst: the Idle scan was an attack born from theoretical rumination, but the stream of thoughts originated from a rather practical circumstance. I had recently created Hping, a tool whose logo was borrowed from that of Nutella. I mention this to emphasize the seriousness that governed my efforts at that time — after all, I was only twenty-one and already in Northern Italy with a full-time job on my shoulders; some understanding was warranted.

A few days ago, on Twitter (oh, dear Twitter: whatever happens I’ll be there as long as possible – if you care about people that put a lot of energy in creating it, think twice before leaving the platform). So, on Twitter, I was talking about a very bad implementation of linked lists written in Rust. From the tone of certain replies, I got the feeling that many people think linked lists are like a joke. A trivial data structure that is only good for coding interviews, otherwise totally useless. In a word: the bubble sort of data structures. I disagree, so I thought of writing this blog post full of all the things I love about linked lists.

(English translation of this post: http://antirez.com/news/136)

Dopo due anni di lavoro, finalmente, Wohpe, il mio primo libro di fantascienza, ma anche il mio primo scritto di prosa di questa lunghezza, è uscito nelle librerie fisiche italiane, su Amazon, e negli altri store digitali. Lo trovate qui: https://www.amazon.it/Wohpe-Salvatore-Sanfilippo/dp/B09XT6J3WX

Dicevo: il primo scritto di questa lunghezza. Ma posso considerarmi del tutto nuovo alla scrittura? Ho scritto per vent’anni in questo blog e in quelli passati che ho tenuto nel corso del tempo, e molto spesso ho usato Facebook per scrivere brevi racconti, frutto di fantasie o basati su fatti reali. Oltre a ciò, ho scritto di cose tecniche, specialmente riguardo la programmazione, per un tempo altrettanto lungo, e sono stato un lettore di racconti e di romanzi per tutto il corso della mia vita. E allora perché scrivere Wohpe è stato anche imparare a scrivere da zero?

(Traduzione italiana di questo post: http://antirez.com/news/137)

[Sorry for the form of this post. For the first time I wrote a post in two languages: Italian and English. So I went for the unusual path of writing it in Italian to start, translating it with Google Translate, and later I just scanned it to fix the biggest issues. At this point GT is so good you can get away with this process.]

After two years of work, finally, Wohpe, my first science fiction book, but also my first prose writing of this length, has been released in Italian physical bookstores, on Amazon, and in other digital stores. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.it/Wohpe-Salvatore-Sanfilippo/dp/B09XT6J3WX

One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and writing novels have many common traits and similar processes.

The most obvious parallel between the two activities is that in both of them you write something. Code is not prose written in a natural language, yet it has a set of fixed rules (a grammar), certain forms that most programmers will understand as natural and others that, while formally correct, will sound hard to grasp.

A new idea is insinuating in social networks and programming communities. It’s the proportionality between the money people give you for coding something, and the level of demand for quality they can claim to have about your work.

As somebody said, the best code is written when you are supposed to do something else [1]. Like a writer will do her best when writing that novel that, maybe, nobody will pay a single cent for, and not when doing copywriting work for a well known company, programmers are likely to spend more energies in their open source side projects than during office hours, while writing another piece of a project they feel stupid, boring, pointless. And, if the company is big enough, chances are it will be cancelled in six months anyway or retired one year after the big launch.