Stefano Pigozzi

Software developer from 🇮🇹 Co-founder and former maintainer at @mpv_player. I tweet about finance, programming, climbing, mountains, and various weeb stuff.

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

@ianmiles You had me until "come to Dubai". At least they are not being bombed in Spain.

[Aman @Amank1412]

US AI labs: "China will never catch up!"

The US AI lab:

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

@garrytan Use this https://t.co/ghOSDyuccy

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

China is run by engineers and builds for redundancy and resilience. Europee is run by Lawyers & MBAs and optimizes for margin.

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock

my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive

when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost

what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise

I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily

the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…

China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally

so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine

the gap is ARCHITECTURAL

it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks

it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…

and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now

BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee

I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one

Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name

it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

@shan3v @imcalshort @garrytan Not really. With minitest my test suite (2500 assertions and counting) takes less time (<3s) than tsc in a few typescript projects I worked on.

Yes, I do profile my test suite and try to make it faster when it goes beyond 3.5s.

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

@gosesshou @claudeai See Apple and 1984 commercial, the think different commercial, the Mac vs PC commercial. But yeah arguably they didn't become the market leader for personal computers.

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

@MichaelArnaldi @AnthropicAI Started about Wednesday/Thursday-ish for me. I've used GPT 5.2 + OpenCode through my free Copilot Pro plan and it's running circles around Claude for the particular feature I'm working on.

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

@levelsio @official_php Packaging for various distros is a lot of work and it's generally considered uninteresting work by system software developers. I was in the core team of a well known linux utility (mpv) and we didn't have official packages as well.

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

@strzibnyj not sure where I should contact you.

this line in the Kamal Handbook 2 is wrong
sed -i 's@PasswordAuthentication yes@PasswordAuthentication no@g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config;

should be

sed -i 's@#PasswordAuthentication yes@PasswordAuthentication no@g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config;

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

@thdxr Been using Brave for years. Initially got it for my Android phone, and quickly switched on the desktop as well.

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

@atorstling @MichaelArnaldi @MKassabov Pretty much this.

[Michael Arnaldi @MichaelArnaldi]

"The creation of effect.ts developers effect-schema is probably the most feature-complete. I haven’t found any way to break it, and it perfectly handles complex Typescript inference."

https://t.co/ToSnm9vjt4

[DHH @dhh]

This guy "forgot" to share that to create this clip he artificially throttled his browser to 3G. If you do the same on, say, Google Calendar, a full SPA, the result is as bad or worse. Yes, web apps require a web connection to work. News at 11!

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

AI is coming for your job

[Joe Youngblood - SEO, Futurology, AI, Marketing @YoungbloodJoe]

Here's another disturbing health claim that seems to come from a comedy/satire website (edit: or is that from a real website??).

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

You've read it first on il Sole24Ore! BTP Valore is way better than US Treasuries. Hurry up and buy! 🙃

https://t.co/8gqlXAE3J7

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

@riffraff ねん(nen): it's the reading for the kanji 年, which means "year".

Usually you would write 2024年

[Stefano Pigozzi @pigoz]

Replace the class with some Effect using @EffectTS_ and you have something great ✌️🙂

[Andy Ingram 🌀 @andrewingram]

For those who can't see beyond an illustrative slide...

[Ryan Cavanaugh 👉 searyanc.dev on bsky @SeaRyanC]

@AdamRackis I can't believe these 12 lines don't explicitly demonstrate every layer of a real app architecture. Also, where are the tests? Are they saying you shouldn't write tests? I would have put tests, docs, and a diagram showing the load balancer, all on this one slide, for clarity