Mostly, I Write

Video di una conferenza a Stanford in cui si ripensa il computer. Cose facili oggi, insomma. Money quote: "While our software systems have become increasingly elastic, the physical substrate available to run that software (that is, the computer!) has remained stuck in a bygone era of PC architecture. Hyperscale infrastructure providers have long since figured this out, building machines that are fit to purpose -- but those advances have been denied to the mass market. In this talk, we will talk about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side machine -- and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc&list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkiseTHzWj6vu

Siete topolini da batteria? State scalando la gerarchia della fabbrica del formaggio? Qualche consiglio utile per capire come mai è più facile essere il capo di 4 persone che di una persona sola. Money quote: "It’s easier to manage 4 people than it is to manage one person. The primary reason for this is the inherent over-reliance in the relationship between a manager and a single report. Let’s dive deeper." https://staysaasy.com/management/2020/07/24/Managing-One-Person.html

Chissà, magari un giorno mi rifaccio il sito e lo faccio tutto con questa grafica, che ne dite? Perché partendo dai font di una volta non ci vuole niente ad arrivare alle "interfacce pseudo-grafiche a riga di comando" stile Ms-Dos e Apple II (in alto a destra potete provare sei vecchi font quasi originali: in totale ce ne sono più di 200). Money quote: "The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack started out with the idea of paying tribute to ancient PCs and their bitmapped, pre-GUI typography (if you can call it that). It was inspired by similar efforts that cover other vintage machines: classic system fonts from the Amiga, C64, Apple II, Mac, ZX Spectrum, Atari 8-bit/ST etc. are all celebrated. On the other hand, the IBM PC and its clones seem to get little love... except for that one VGA text mode font (which has been remade numerous times, to varying degrees of success). This collection is here to remedy that, and to bring you pixel-perfect remakes of various type styles from text-mode era PCs - in modern, multi-platform, Unicode-compatible TrueType form (plus straight bitmap versions)." https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/

Programmare è contemporaneamente qualcosa di molto diverso da quello che la maggior parte delle persone pensa e qualcosa di molto più diffuso di quel che non si crede. Oltre ad avere a che fare più con i dati che non con il codice. Questo articolo è un interessante (e provocatorio) punto di partenza. Money quote: "Code culture can be solipsistic and exhausting. Programmers fight over semicolon placement and the right way to be object-oriented or functional or whatever else will let them feel in control and smarter and more economically safe, and always I want to shout back: Code isn't enough on its own. We throw code away when it runs out its clock; we migrate data to new databases, so as not to lose one precious bit. Code is a story we tell about data." https://www.wired.com/story/databases-coding-real-programming-myth

La storia degli ultimi rinoceronti bianchi del mondo, raccontata da Sam Anderson, uno dei migliori giornalisti del New York Times di questa generazione. Money quote: "In the last years of his life, Sudan had become a global celebrity, a conservation icon. He lived, like an ex-president, under the protection of 24/7 armed guards. Visitors traveled from everywhere to see him. Sudan was a perfect ambassador: He weighed more than two tons but had the personality of a golden retriever. He would let people touch him and feed him snacks — a whole carrot, clamped in his big boxy mouth, looked like a little orange toothpick. Tourists got emotional, because they knew they were laying hands on a singular creature, a primordial giant about to slide off into the void. Many hurried back to their cars and cried." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/magazine/the-last-two-northern-white-rhinos-on-earth.html

Ehi mi ero quasi dimenticato: come ogni domenica è uscita Mostly Weekly. Eccola qui. https://antoniodini.com/weekly/141/

Perché le stroncature, l'epoca dell'amore universale via internet, generano solo odio e minacce. Money quote: "Later that month, fellow longtime critic Jeff Weiss, writing on behalf of The Washington Post, attended Post Malone’s inaugural Posty Fest in Dallas and did not care for it at all. (Opening lines: “Him? The most popular young artist in the most unpopular young nation is a rhinestone cowboy who looks like he crawled out of a primordial swamp of nacho cheese. Post Malone is a Halloween rental, a removable platinum grill, a Cubic Zirconium proposal on the jumbo screen of a last-place team.”) The result, as Weiss recounts now, was death threats, amid an avalanche of Twitter invective that included Post Malone’s own father referring to Weiss as “a petty little cuck.”" https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2019/1/10/18176366/bad-reviews-jeff-weiss-a-o-scott-greta-van-fleet-post-malone-bohemian-rhapsody La riflessione in realtà è più profonda e tocca un tema - quello della critica ma anche quello della manifestazione delle proprie idee - che è piuttosto complesso. Ci possiamo anche chiedere: alle volte forse è meglio non esprimere un giudizio negativo.

"The French Dispatch" è un gran film - la mia recensione super positiva per Fumettologica https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/11/the-french-dispatch-wes-anderson-recensione/

Il famoso articolo di Cory Doctorow su come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza Money quote: "When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to take climate change seriously, we can get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds, or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case for us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more we’re boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us." https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

A quanto pare, se c'è un libro che dovremmo leggere, è questo. Money quote: "The Book of Why Pearl and Mackenzie’s book is really three books woven together: 1. An exposition of Pearl’s approach to causal inference based on graphs and the do-operator. 2. An intellectual history of this and other statistical approaches to causal inference. 3. A series of examples including some interesting discussions of smoking and cancer, going far beyond what you’ll generally see in a popular book or a textbook on statistics or causal inference." https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/08/book-pearl-mackenzie/

Avete presente le tab dei browser? Le ha inventate un tizio. Qui viene intervistato e racconta come ha fatto e perché. Money quote: "In the summer of 1997, a 25-year-old Pasadena software developer named Adam Stiles started working on a new web browser in his spare time. On January 4 of the following year, when Stiles published SimulBrowse, the first users would have noticed a peculiar feature at the bottom of the browser window: small grey boxes, each corresponding to a different webpage, which could be toggled between by clicking. Those boxes were the first browser tabs, the now-standard unit of internet navigation." https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-the-man-who-invented-tabs

Capire l’informazione e i dati: sembra ovvio ma in realtà ci sono tecniche sofisticate per farlo, ancora non lo si fa bene e altre tecniche vengono modellate, come le wavelets. Interessante Money quote: “Wavelets are representations of short wavelike oscillations with different frequency ranges and shapes. Because they can take on many forms — nearly any frequency, wavelength and specific shape is possible — researchers can use them to identify and match specific wave patterns in almost any continuous signal. Because of their wide versatility, wavelets have revolutionized the study of complex wave phenomena in image processing, communication and scientific data streams.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-wavelets-allow-researchers-to-transform-and-understand-data-20211013/

L'apertura in video di un evento della Microsoft sta facendo impazzire Twitter. Nel video i presentatori fanno il politicamente corretto all'estremo. Ammettono pubblicamente che il campus aziendale sorge su terra dei popoli nativi americani e poi si descrivono e descrivono come sono vestiti per l’inclusività e l’accessibilità. Tutto con tono da sciroppati, visto il format spumeggiante da conduzione sportiva e con Satja Nardella che guarda e sorride stile Monna Lisa accondiscendente dal una schermata minore. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1456344147103653889?s=21 Fra le altre cose, il Land acknowledgments non è una pratica neutra e rappresentanti dei nativi americani ritengono che dovrebbe essere terminata. https://theconversation.com/land-acknowledgments-meant-to-honor-indigenous-people-too-often-do-the-opposite-erasing-american-indians-and-sanitizing-history-instead-163787

Ogni tanto ci sono stroncature che passano alla storia della critica. Quella del New York Times per Pearl Harbour, il film di Michael Bay del 2001 è leggendaria e ancora oggi studiata da chi vuole stroncare con il machete. Money quote: "The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II has inspired a splendid movie, full of vivid performances and unforgettable scenes, a movie that uses the coming of war as a backdrop for individual stories of love, ambition, heroism and betrayal. The name of that movie is ''From Here to Eternity.'' ''Pearl Harbor,'' the noisy, expensive and very long new blockbuster from Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, steals an occasional glance in the direction of ''Eternity,'' Fred Zinnemann's durable 1953 melodrama, adapted from James Jones's sprawling best seller. A couple smooches in front of pounding Pacific surf, though they don't actually roll around in it, as did Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. Military police officers break up a barroom fight. And since the movie is in ripe, lustrous color, the sun dresses and Hawaiian shirts look just fabulous. But ''Pearl Harbor'' has as little interest in character as it does, ultimately, in history." https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/25/movies/film-review-war-is-hell-but-very-pretty.html?mtrref=undefined

Se la vostra cosa è scrivere qualche riga di codice in Lisp e contemplarne la bellezza ovunque, anche in vasca da bagno, ecco a voi il computer perfetto, grande come un badge e autocostruito. Money quote: "This is a self-contained computer with its own display and keyboard, based on an ATmega1284, that you can program in the high-level language Lisp:" http://www.technoblogy.com/show?2AEE

Grandi occasioni!

A quanto pare, se i soldi in famiglia scarseggiano, i genitori parlano sempre meno con i figli Money quote: "In the first experiment, researchers sought to observe how parents would interact with their children (in this case, 3-year-olds) after the parents were asked to describe times in which they had recently experienced scarcity. A control group of parents were instead asked to describe other recent activities. Of the 84 parents in the study, those in the experimental group who described their experiences of financial scarcity spoke less to their 3-year-olds during laboratory observations than parents who reflected on other forms of scarcity (like not having enough fruit), or parents who had not been asked to recollect experiences of resource insecurity." https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/07/16/word-gap-when-moneys-tight-parents-talk-less-to-kids/

"Eternals" cambia il passo ai film Marvel - la mia recensione per Fumettologica https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/11/eternals-film-marvel-recensione/

Folli e bellissime visualizzazioni di informazioni georeferenziate Money quote: "Scott Reinhard is a Brooklyn-based graphic designer. He works at the New York multi-disciplinary design studio 2 × 4 and was formerly a Senior Designer at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and VSA Partners. Scott has taught in the Graduate Communications Design program at the Pratt Institute and holds a Master of Graphic Design from North Carolina State University." https://scottreinhard.com/Mapping-and-Visualization

New York City ha un nuovo sindaco, per la seconda volta di colore. Ma è solo l’inizio. Money quote: “New York is about to have: a Black Attorney General a Black DA for Manhattan a Black DA for the Bronx a Black US Attorney in Manhattan a Black US Attorney in Brooklyn/Queens And a Black mayor of NYC. Let's see if it makes a difference in policy.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/nyregion/alvin-bragg-wins-manhattan-da.html