About

About me

I'm an Italian programmer based in La Spezia. I'm currently leading technical development at AI Technologies. I hold an MS in Computer Science (AI focus) from the University of Pisa, where I was advised by Professor Davide Bacciu and worked on Recurrent Neural Networks.

Since the advent of LLMs, my focus could not have been elsewhere: the number of possible applications of this technology are incredible, but what really fascinates me is something else. Studying the latest advances in the field of AI is to me more exciting than any other fields of science because AI doesn't "simply" try to understand how things work, but is concerned with building an artificial form of intelligence – systems that learn. It even happens to create extremely useful things which are more complex than we are able to understand. There is no other domain that combines the beauty of mathematics¹ with the the theory of computing and information², takes inspiration from neuroscience studies (sometimes), and builds systems that mess with people's understanding of what is human.³

People have been trying to define intelligence for decades. Every time a new system beats humans at a task, its definition shifts, and the bar moves a little.⁴ Maybe it cannot be defined altogether, and we are bound to never understand how high level cognition work. Maybe LLMs are teaching us that some emergent properties cannot really be understood, if not by analogy and with metaphors, much like art?

Back to the topic...

I also enjoy reading classics of literature, but my biggest hobby is single-player (preferably short) videogames – especially the ones trying to use the medium to find unique solutions and experiences. These characteristics are almost uniquely relegated to indie developers nowadays. I'll mention a few masterpieces: Outer Wilds, The Witness and Metal Gear Solid 2

About this website

I hate that software is becoming progressively more complex and slower even though the hardware is getting better and better. I believe in incentives, so, when the hardware was slow and limited, contraints forced performant solutions. I don't believe that the Clean Code and progressively more abstract coding methodologies lead to simplicity, readability, nor mantainability. I like building things from scratch – it's the best way to understand things. I'm fascinated by the early internet culture before socials exited: simple open source software, forums, simple websites, less ads...

For these reasons, I built this website to recreate the feeling of reading some 70/80s programming magazine, or some old technical documentation, like an old IBM manual, or an RFC. Nonetheless, the intent is not to be historically accurate, indeed I tried to keep it light and modern.

The website is built with no frameworks, no external dependencies, only moderately recent features supported by the browser (the most recent feature is the shadowDOM). It was fun to face some early challenges, modularity for common website elements; darkmode; templating; how to write articles in markdown and publish them well formatted with syntax highlighting...