Gianluca Guida

Today my father died. I am going to miss his warmth and generosity for the rest of my life. It took me 40 years to understand him. As a kid, I was angry. It felt like we were a different species, ones who would always pay for their mistakes. We were the ones who would always work harder than everyone else, who should never accept ‘good enough’, who had to follow all the rules, while growing up in a place where the law was nothing more than a vague counterexample. It’s only when life started throwing real problems at me, and when I left the protective umbrella of his credit card in my wallet, that I understood that his gift was the equivalent of a superpower: that I would know, deep down, that at the end of the day only I could solve my own problems, and that, most importantly, I was able to do so whatever the challenge. And it was at that time, about 20 years ago, that he started talking about his childhood. It had never been discussed before, and I accepted as a normal fact that I never met my grandparents. In a single word, it was poverty. Because with poverty comes poor health, and your mother died of a preventable disease when you were 10 years old. With poverty comes ignorance, and in the environment in which you were growing up a man couldn’t raise kids. And since your father didn’t plan to remarry, you and your newborn sister had to go. It was a few days after the death of your mom that the mother of your best friend talked to you about a place where you’d be playing with other kids, and where you’d be happy. It was only when you found yourself alone, in that bus, that you understood you were being abandoned at an orphanage. And there was a focaccia. They gave you a focaccia, to bring to the other kids. “Gianluca, I was hungry but I didn’t eat that focaccia”. You repeated this phrase twice, to underline that it was a fundamental choice of your life. So thank you, because you made your childhood unimaginable to your own son. At the same age you had to go on a hunger strike to assert control over your life, your son’s worst nightmare was saving his unfinished MSX BASIC programs to a cassette, turning off the computer, putting it back in the box, and going out to play with other kids. And finally, with poverty came not knowing how to be successful, and you really believed that you had to memorise every single word coming out of the professor’s mouth during the lecture. Which is why, when mom sat next to you, in those tense campuses of 1969, and started inquiring about the reason for a photograph being taken, while launching herself into a speech about privacy and rights of individuals, you were upset, because she was ruining your recording. It is in that moment, I believe, that the universe that generated me was created, made in equal parts of unconditional love and extreme clashes of characters. Thank you for all your life lessons, including those I have yet to understand. The picture is him in some Opera House, excited as always whenever he saw a picture of a famous — to him — composer, singer, or orchestra director.

Did I just say out loud "Good night" to my agents? Yes I did, weirdly. After all, I left one on night-watch for the various teams left running.

Thinking about computers have always had for me the magic power of bringing me to a calm state. Turns out the above is true even in the darkest of days. Thank you CPUs!

Turns out works in real hardware too! Root filesystem is a USB drive.

It is a fun chip!

Experiment of the past few days: asking a particular workflow that's making me happy to implement an entire operating system from scratch (using my beloved kernel library to speed things up, NUX). One run is using gpt-5.5 and the other gpt-6.1-sol. Findings: they are both proceeding at an insane scale (AHCI, virtio net and blk, RLT8139, E1000 device drivers as found in qemu implemented, all respecting the architecture I asked). BUT: 1. GPT-5.5 constantly tries to chicken out from a complex work, escalating to ask "should I do what you asked or just call the task failed". If you insist to continue, it actually does. 2. GPT-6.1-SOL goes instead where no man has gone before with a courage that would make Captain Kirk smile in approval, but then it finds a security issue in its own code, tries to explain it to itself and trips into its own cybersecurity censorship. Which is funny and not useful at all.

You know you exaggerted with your overnight tests when you wake up and find out that your 2-hour drive distant workstation has stopped responding to pings.

Terrible placing and interesting developments on the pcie lanes routing. Agents believe this does respect the gen1 pcie spec. Too tired to even think of checking.

Fixing and rewinding a MSX cassette tape is useful to remember that nostalgia is the dumbest of feelings.

And this is why I love working with LLMs. You just ask to please test this with a "UNIBUS terminator" and it doesn't think you're a weirdo. Also you don't have to explain UNIBUS.

It's time for self-deprecating humour when the simplest genetic algorithm beats your LLMs hands down, and in 1/10th of the time! Can I call GAs agentic so I can still pretend to be all modern and contemporary? :-)

More automated routing and placing. Grouping implemented.Agent ignored the tl072 datasheet layout suggestion, but this is actually really good. ouf course no ground pouring on a tl072 is highly suggested, but I like how clean this placement is.