Well, Italian *nonnas rarely used more than one pan for cooking, and it was very common to just put pasta without the sauce in the plate, and a generous spoonful of sauce on top. This is what you used to find in restaurants, too.
The cooking water in the large pan is a rather new thing.
Or maybe it's something just from my region :)
Can't speak for all italian regions as there are many differences; but this "spooning some sauce over naked pasta" right on the plate always struck me as positively un-italian. I would always expect the pasta and sauce to be mixed in the kitchen, and the pasta to be completely coated in sauce when the plate reached my table. Maybe it's something italian-american ?
It might be a potato culture thing as it was historically common when pasta showed up on shelves in Sweden that the older generation just went with the instructions separately, cooking pre-peeled potatoes loses so much of it's flavor so if boiled, it's done so separately, getting a new ingredient you probably do it as you've always done.
New Gemini models are quite good, Gemini 2.5 Pro is 1st in the user-benchmarks [1]. They also have Gemma, very good model that can run locally [2]. Benchmarks are not oracles of truth, but I feel like Google is not a kid who arrived late at the party anymore.
Considering that several key breakthroughs happened at Google that made GPT-style LLMs possible (e.g. Attention is all you need paper), it's more like they took a long smoke break than showed up late.
Yeah, with Gemini 2.5 Google stepped up to the grown up AI table and added on top. I still have a soft spot for Claude for general purpose chats, but have fully switched to Gemini for dev.
> Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make.
This is so true. It has happened too often that a professor has decided to explain the most difficult topic in 5 minutes overtime. Before lunch. What a mistake.
This kind of project reminded me of the homework we had to do in uni for the "formal methods for real-time systems" course. We had to use UPPAAL [1] to verify the stability of a transportation belt with some machines doing things with some delays and other stuff.
As far as I remember UPPAAL provides also some python libraries, that can be used to make automated tests.
It would be interesting to see how Hay Day scenarios could be implemented in UPPAAL and test different approaches.
Anyway, very nice project, the article is really well written as well.
