loading . . . Up to week 43 ### Personal
In the last weeks there were some ups and downs, I had to deal with some anxiety, but it has been much better than week 39. The change of season and the switch from DST to Standard Time always takes a toll on my mental health.
That said, I'm not a hermit. I'm still enjoying going out with my girlfriend and friends. My agoraphobia kicks in only when I'm alone.
In the past weeks, in random order:
#### Conegliano & The Winged Lion
We visited some friends in Conegliano (one of the birthplaces of Prosecco wine), we visited the "Winged Lion" made by Marco Martalar. Martalar's sculptures are made with the wood of the fallen trees caused by the Storm Vaia in 2018. There are a few of these sculptures. You can see them here.
Martalar's Lion
After a short hike, we had lunch together at Andreetta restaurant: fine wines and delicious food.
Probably the next sculpture we are going to visit will be the "Winged Dragon" in Lavarone.
#### Halloween
The last time I did something fun on Halloween night was in 2010. That night, one of the main rivers in Vicenza (my hometown), flooded our district, Borgo San Pietro. We went to a treasure hunt that night, dressed up as monsters. The next day we woke up with 30cm of brown water inside the house. By the end of that morning the water rose to about 1m, so we fled and got hospitality from family members and friends. We moved back in our home a year after.
2010 flood
So no, I don't really like Halloween, and for years after I couldn't enjoy the sound of the rain.
This year we celebrated Halloween after 15 years, I dressed as a vampire (quite easy), and my gf as a voodoo queen. We met with some friends at a local club and "enjoyed" a cover band of Nightwish and Epica (not really my music genre). I was tense at the beginning, but after a couple of Americano I started to enjoy the evening.
Me and my friend Carmine on the left, my gf on the right
### Code
#### LLM
I discovered OpenRouter and cancelled my OpenAI plan. OpenRouter allows to get access to multiple LLM models thanks to a unified API and it also automatically routes your prompts to the "best" model based on cost, latency and availability. (I'm not related with OpenRouter in any way, I just think it's a wonderful service).
Thanks to OpenRouter I managed to:
* Deploy an instance of OpenWebUI, to have a "personal" Chat and RAG experience, choosing between 500+ models.
* Implement a couple of useful n8n workflows, such as transforming documents, photos, or vocal memos directly to org-mode, ready to be copied and pasted through a Telegram bot.
* Start to use Claude Code cli tool. Thanks to Claude Code Router (ccr), I can use OpenRouter models instead of Anthropic models (they're not cheap). At the moment I'm really enjoying GLM 4.6 from Z.ai for coding and Gemini 2.5 Flash for quick tasks.
* I also added claude-code.el by Steve Molitor to my Emacs configuration. It's nice to have an AI assistant inside the editor. I don't do any vibe-coding sessions, but it's helpful for tedious tasks. I tried ECA and Aider before, but I wasn't completely satisfied with the integrations and the configuration. I will keep a look at ECA, anyway, in case Claude Code will stop working with ccr.
#### Go
After giving up with Rust, I took a look at Zig, but I don't think the ecosystem is mature yet for production and, like Rust, it's too low level for my needs.
Instead, I started to study Go. I'm still not a fan of imperative programming, but I find Go better than Python TBH. First of all, Go can be compiled to a single portable binary: this is useful with docker images, where with Python I need to produce huge images with all the project dependencies. Go does not need external libraries or funny tricks for async or concurrency, and does not have Python GIL limitations. Also, thanks to Clojure core.async, I'm already familiar with the CSP model.
### Notable links
* Anthropic: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
* E.W.Dijkstra Archive: Home page
* Big Tech Is Faking Revenue - YouTube
https://marco.dallastella.name/posts/up_to_week_43/
