epoche antiche: greci, romani e arabi costruiscono in Sicilia importanti opere idrauliche per approvigionare d'acqua la regione. una fra tutte, i qanat arabi (famosi i qanat di Palermo), canali "costruiti per portare acqua in superficie, intercettando le falde naturali del terreno. Oltre a costituire una primaria fonte d'acqua molti qanat venivano utilizzati anche per rinfrescare gli ambienti interni durante i caldissimi giorni dello scirocco. Grazie ai particolari flussi d'aria, convogliati opportunamente, si poteva ottenere in essi una temperatura inferiore a quella dell'ambiente esterno."

2025: come ogni anno, la Sicilia è in piena crisi idrica, la popolazione in intere zone è senz'acqua e costretta a lavarsi una volta a settimana, le temperature sfiorano i 50 gradi MA HEY ECCO 15 MILIARDI PER IL PONTE YEEEEE

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech’ will build us all a better world

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/02/billionaire-big-tech-frugal-elon-musk-innovation

A contact just told me that my old "LLMs generate nonsense code" blog post from 2 years ago is now very outdated with GPT5 because it's so awesome and so helpful. So I asked him to give it a test for me, and asked it my favorite test question based on a use-case I had myself recently:

Without adding third-party dependencies, how can I compress a Data stream with zstd in Swift on an iPhone?

and here is the answer from ChatGPT 5: https://chatgpt.com/share/68968506-1834-8004-8390-d27f4a00f480

Very confident, very bold, even claims "Works on iOS 16+".

Problem with that: Just like any other LLM I've tested that provided similar responses, it is - excuse my language but I need to use it - absolute horseshit. No version of any Apple SDK ever supported or supports ZSTD (see https://developer.apple.com/documentation/compression/compression_algorithm for a real piece of knowledge). It was never there. Not even in private code. Not even as a mention of "things we might do in the future" on some developer event. It fundamentally does not exist. It's completely made up nonsense.

This concludes all the testing for GPT5 I have to do. If a tool is able to actively mislead me this easy, which potentially results in me wasting significant amounts of time in trying to make something work that is guaranteed to never work, it's a useless tool. I don't like collaborating with chronic liars who aren't able to openly point out knowledge gaps, so I'm also not interested in burning resources for a LLM that does the same.

Switched my search engine to #Qwant with the news they are starting the use of a new European-made search index #Staan over Google/Bing indices. Let's see how they fare!

The index is a part of the European Search Perspective project, which aims to provide viable alternatives to the US big tech services and a pathway to increasing the digital sovereignty of Europe.