An unexpected Antigravity

I confess, when I started using Antigravity I had many doubts, because the new revolutionary editor produced by Google seemed to me like just another clone of Microsoft’s VS Code.1 But as soon as I started using the agentic features of Google Antigravity, I had to change my mind, because there is truly something good there.

2025 was a turning point for this little blog. Leaving the comfort zone of Wordpress.com was neither easy nor painless, especially when I discovered that once the site was online, Jekyll was slow, too slow to be usable. Thankfully, Hugo saved the day, although there are still many details to be ironed out, first and foremost the website’s graphic design.

The video above is the official presentation of Google Antigravity, an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that is not just a simple IDE but is “a new way of working for this next era of agentic intelligence”. I haven’t yet figured out what that truly means, but it surely sounds very smart and up‑to‑date.

It is not just a matter of disk icons. As soon as I saw what Tahoe had done to the icons of many applications installed on my Mac, I decided I had to do something to restore the original look of the icons. I tried several times, using Apple’s home‑automation tools, Automator and Shortcuts, but nothing worked and there was always some function missing. Or maybe I’m just not very good at using them.

After less than two months since the official release, Tahoe seems poised to become another one of those macOS versions to be forgotten, like Lion, Mavericks, Sierra, Catalina, or Ventura. Aside from Liquid Glass, which I’ll discuss in a moment, what does Tahoe have that’s memorable? There’s the telephone‑call filter, which actually belongs more to iOS than macOS and still has many limitations, and there are also improvements to Spotlight search. But is it really worth upgrading an operating system just for that?1

Learning a language is hard work: you have to learn vocabulary, study grammar, repeat endlessly. And then, once you know a bit of the language, you have to start reading, listening, speaking with others. In short, it’s no joke. In the past it was even worse. We studied from massive tomes full of rules, made especially to make you hate the language. My high‑school English book dedicated fifteen pages just to the use of the definite article “the”. I never read a single line of that book.

– Source: Macworld. The contrast between the two characters is striking. Tim Cook was born into a working-class family of the Deep South and rose to lead the world’s most important technology company through his own hard work and talent. He is openly gay and proud of it, as well as a defender of the rights of minorities.

I’ve always had great respect for Steve Wozniak, the tubby nerd who, in the eyes of those in the industry, has always been considered one step behind (if not more) his friend and Apple Computer co-founder, Steve Jobs. Without Steve Jobs’ commercial genius, Apple would never have become the giant it is today. Instead, it would have remained just another company selling personal computers of various shapes and functions in the 1980s, alongside the likes of Tandy, Sinclair, Commodore, Osborne, Atari, Compaq and many others.

It all started with Severance, the cult TV series that almost everyone liked. To promote the final episode of the second season, Apple launched a webpage showcasing the Lumon Terminal Pro, the computer used by Lumon Industries employees – a replica of a vintage Data General terminal (more images available here and here). This sparked a race among fans to own a keyboard inspired by that terminal.

The Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) is a method for performing calculations without the need for parentheses. RPN was popularized in the ’70s and ’80s by Hewlett-Packard (HP), that used it in all its scientific and financial calculators. When using calculators from rival Texas-Instruments, which all relied on parentheses, it was easy to lose track of how many parentheses had been opened or closed, often forcing users to re-enter the entire expression from scratch. Those who used an RPN calculator didn’t have these problems, although they had to overcome a small initial learning curve to get used to the new notation.