Mostly, I Write

Abbiamo immerso talmente tanto il discorso del cambiamento climatico e della trasformazione energetica nell'arena politica che adesso è diventato totalmente manipolato. Tutti abbiamo un'opinione. E sono saltati (come era pianificato che succedesse) i progetti di grande cambiamento. Tranne che in alcuni paesi, come la Norvegia. La quale potrebbe agire forse come "memento", se avessimo voglia di ascoltare queste informazioni. Money quote: "Despite being a major oil and gas producer, Norway aims for all new cars sold to be "zero emission" starting in 2025, which is 10 years ahead of the goal set by the European Union, of which Norway is not a member. In contrast to Brussels' plans, Oslo has not banned the sale of cars with internal combustion engines, having instead opted for a system of generous tax breaks that have made them competitive against heavily taxed internal combustion cars. They have also benefitted from toll exemptions, free parking in public car parks, and the use of public transport traffic lanes." https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250203-norway-nears-100-goal-of-all-electric-cars

Grandi passi in avanti in classici problemi informatici che stanno arrivando alla soluzione perfetta. Ad esempio, il "library sorting problem". Money quote: "“It’s a very important problem,” said Seth Pettie (opens a new tab), a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, because many of the data structures we rely upon today store information sequentially. He called the new work “extremely inspired [and] easily one of my top three favorite papers of the year.”" https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-book-sorting-algorithm-almost-reaches-perfection-20250124/

Scrivere un romanzo è già abbastanza difficile. Progettare anche la copertina è un'attività sovrumana. Money quote: "The authors are not in control. It’s a collaborative process, but not really, because the author is not the expert. As with professional hair and makeup, the recipient is, uncomfortably, witness to an artistic process that is about them, centered on them, yet almost entirely devoid of their participation. But I seem to have overextrapolated from Na Kim and understood that all first book cover designs are drafts. So when my agent suggested playing with different concepts, and asked if I had some ideas or covers I liked as inspiration, my ambient productivity anxiety took over—did I ever!" https://lithub.com/on-trying-and-really-failing-to-design-my-own-book-cover/

Accaparrare le miglia dei programmi frequent flyer: è divertente, è una pratica utile, alle volte una mania, in generale un meccanismo di fidelizzazione gamificato che dà pure dipendenza (credetemi, se prendete spesso l'aereo, è così). Ma ne vale realmente la pena? Una prospettiva americana. Money quote: "Here are questions to ask when pursuing airline status. No traveler’s situation, even if you fly out of the same airport and maintain a similar travel frequency, is the same as anyone else’s. How far will you go to earn miles and eventual status with an airline? Or is it like gambling, that you know to stop when you’re already ahead and before you’re financially in the hole?" https://www.fodors.com/news/photos/is-earning-airline-status-actually-worth-the-hassle

Letture per la domenica. Come si fa a scrivere un best seller, ammesso che interessi ancora a qualcuno? Ecco qui le ricetta secondo l'Economist. Money quote: "Publishing is an odd business. It is worth around $37bn in Britain and America alone, but you would not know this from the literature that it produces, which focuses on books in the brainy vein rather than anything so vulgar as volumes that actually sell. One authoritative history of English literature contains 60-odd mentions of “Shakespeare”; ten on “the sublime”; eight on “blank verse”—but a blank silence for words such as “business” and “turnover”. In another literary history, popular novels—those “jam tarts for the mind” as William Thackeray, the British novelist, called them—are mentioned, but with a wince, under the heading: “Problems of popular culture”. When Gore Vidal wrote an article on bestsellers it opened with the observation that “shit has its own integrity”—and became more dismissive from there. The book business, however, depends on those despised bestsellers." https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/08/25/how-to-write-a-bestseller archivio: https://archive.is/FormG Ma nel mio piccolo ho tradotto un paio di articoli di Ian Fleming e Kurt Vonnegut che spiegano molto bene il loro approccio. https://antoniodini.com/otto-regole-vonnegut/ https://antoniodini.com/come-si-scrive-un-best-seller/

Cosa sono le finestre che si spostano? Nel nuovo numero di Mostly Weekly provo a spiegare la teoria della finestra di Overton applicata a Donald Trump (ma funziona anche da noi) e varie altre cose incluso il perché dei tabù culturali https://antoniodini.com/weekly/311/

Le startup di oggi, veramente tantissime (una cultura insopportabile a tratti) non sono l'eccezione o la novità, ma la regola. È che abbiamo passato un periodo in cui invece non lo erano, ma quella sarebbe l'eccezione secondo Paul Graham. Money quote: "In 1960, most of the people who start startups today would have gone to work for one of them. You could get rich from starting your own company in 1890 and in 2020, but in 1960 it was not really a viable option. You couldn't break through the oligopolies to get at the markets. So the prestigious route in 1960 was not to start your own company, but to work your way up the corporate ladder at an existing one." https://paulgraham.com/richnow.html

Un articolo dell'Economist pre-DeepSeek che però spiega bene le dinamiche economiche del modello costruito da OpenAI e dagli altri Money quote: "High marginal costs mean the model-builders will have to generate meaningful value in order to charge premium prices. The hope, says Lan Guan of Accenture, a consultancy, is that models like o3 will support ai agents that individuals and companies will use to increase their productivity. Even a high price for use of a reasoning model may be worth it compared with the cost of hiring, say, a fully fledged maths phd. But that depends on how useful the models are." https://www.economist.com/business/2025/01/20/openais-latest-model-will-change-the-economics-of-software archivio: https://archive.is/IDsnQ

La simulazione si è rotta, dobbiamo riavviarla: un po' di pensiero divergente per Fumettologica durante questi tempi strani e sempre più oscuri https://fumettologica.it/2025/02/la-simulazione-si-e-rotta-dobbiamo-riavviarla/

Gli otto film indispensabili per conoscere il cinema d'animazione giapponese Money quote: "Abbiamo anime per ogni target possibile e di ogni genere possibile: per bambini, ragazzi e adulti, d'azione, horror, psicologici, fantascientifici, erotici... Seppur la maggior parte possano essere associati a mera forma di intrattenimento, alcuni possono essere definiti vere e proprie opere d'arte. " https://www.cinefacts.it/cinefacts-top8-10/breve-storia-del-cinema-di-animazione-giapponese-8-film-indispensabili.html

La trasformazione delle macchine da scrivere: da strumenti di lavoro e di relazioni speciali, a oggetti nostalgici romanticizzati. Ho letto di recente una bella biografia di Oriana Fallaci in cui in un passaggio si racconta del suo rapporto con la sua macchina per scrivere. Money quote: "There was a time that nearly every home and office had at least one typewriter, ready to tap out letters or lists, invoices or inspirations. Today, of course, the machines have gone the way of vinyl records, romanticized analog nostalgia, a sometimes-useful kitschy artifact with which to wax nostalgic. But, also like vinyl records, typewriters have their enthusiasts, cult followers and collectors drawn to their character and to the mystery of all the ideas and dreams that have been poured, or, rather, pounded, into them. Actor Tom Hanks is a collector, with a rumored 200 or more." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/the-hidden-world-of-the-typewriter/279523/ archivio: https://archive.is/eiNnV

Quell'articolo pazzesco di Truman Capote che gli è costato carissimo, in termini di relazioni e accesso, ma che è anche un piccolo capolavoro di gonzo journalism o new new journalism o come si chiama: "La Côte Basque, 1965”. Per dire: Jackie Kennedy Onassis e Aristotle Onassis, oltre ai cigni Money quote: "Côte Basque is on East Fifty-fifth Street, directly across from the St. Regis. It was the site of the original Le Pavilion, founded in 1940 by the honorable restaurateur Henri Soulé. M. Soulé abandoned the premises because of a feud with his landlord, the late president of Columbia Pictures, a sleazy Hollywood hood named Harry Cohn (who, upon learning that Sammy Davis Jr. was “dating” his blond star Kim Novak, ordered a hit man to call Davis and tell him: “Listen, Sambo, you’re already missing one eye. How’d you like to try for none?” The next day Davis married a Las Vegas chorus girl—colored)." https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a40376194/truman-capote-la-cote-basque/

Vi ricordate la prima volta di Donald Trump? C'erano i democratici alle barricate. Adesso quando va bene sono tutti zitti, sennò inginocchiati a baciare l'anello. Cosa sta succedendo? Money quote: "Amid the “shock and awe” of Trump’s return to the White House, Budde’s and Sherman’s displays of resistance felt small and collapsible, barely big enough to accommodate hope. If Trump’s first Presidency was characterized by widespread revolt, his second term has so far been defined by the lack of dissidence. On the day after Trump’s first Inauguration, in 2017, about half a million people flooded Washington, D.C., in protest, donning pink pussy hats and chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!” Millions of protesters, from Roanoke, Virginia, to Auckland, New Zealand, joined in the global Women’s March, championing messages of equality and collective action. But come 2025, on a day so cold Trump’s Inauguration had to be moved indoors, this purposeful, pointed crisis energy was in short supply. What was it that democracy looked like, again? The outgoing President, Joe Biden, after years of warning us against Trump’s dangerous plots and deranged pathologies, warmly greeted the forty-seventh President atop the White House steps. “Welcome home,” he said." https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/what-happened-to-the-trump-resistance archivio: https://archive.is/mmVKn

Letture per la domenica. E se obbligassimo le aziende tech a dichiarare i loro consumi energetici diretti e indiretti per l'uso dell'intelligenza artificiale? Money quote: "AI is growing at a rate unparalleled by other energy systems, bringing heightened environmental risk, a report by the National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC) said. The report calls for the UK government to make tech companies submit mandatory reports on their energy and water consumption and carbon emissions in order to set conditions in which data centres are designed to use fewer vital resources." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/07/call-to-make-tech-firms-report-data-centre-energy-use-as-ai-booms

Un sacco di cose diverse come ogni domenica con Mostly Weekly. In particolare la storia di una katana e quella dell'intrattenimento per adulti https://antoniodini.com/weekly/310/

Ci sono sicuramente ragioni drammaturgiche, relative alle formule per mettere in scena dialoghi e relazioni, e poi scelte di gusto e di stile, e magari anche altro. Però la nostalgia delle tecnologie analogiche va alla grande, a quanto pare. Money quote: "Despite their obsolescence, however, cassettes routinely appear in popular culture four decades after their heyday, usually serving as surprising symbols of stability and truth. In modern reality, most media are streamed, digitized, and easily vaporized; not so much owned as leased; pockmarked with ads and often tweaked (or falsified) via AI. In modern fiction, meanwhile, vintage media have emerged as tactile objects that symbolize integrity, solve the crime, and radiate realness." https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/01/analog-tech-everywhere-books-and-screen/681508/ archivio: https://archive.is/w2mB4

L'impero delle pippe Money quote: "Onlyfans is the only big company in its market with any real transparency: as a UK private company, it publishes a detailed set of accounts (as 'Fenix International') every year. There are now 4.1m creators and 305m users, both growing at close to 30% year on year; $6.6bn user payments, $1.3bn take rate; $485m net income and $172m in taxes. There's no chance of an IPO, so the owner pays himself all the profits as a dividend". https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10354575/filing-history

Una prospettiva interessante. Cosa succede con i pazienti quando il terapista divorzia un attore noto alle cronache e finisce sui giornali di gossip? Money quote: "Everyone knows that therapists try to keep their private lives out of your sessions with them. But what is a therapist supposed to do when their personal business starts blowing up in the tabloids? This is the predicament Dr. Lilly Jay, a clinical psychologist specializing in perinatal mental health and child development, found herself in after news of her divorce from *Wicked* actor Ethan Slater (and his relationship with co-star Ariana Grande) went public. Lilly realized she had no idea what her patients might know about her, or how it could impact her ability to help others in her practice. In this vulnerable essay for the Cut, she gracefully writes that while she's still learning to accept the inevitability of uncertainty in life, there is a unique power in sharing those insights with others." https://www.thecut.com/article/lilly-jay-divorce-essay-therapy.html

C'è un nuovo documentario su Hayao Miyazaki, e pare sia notevole. Anche perché il suo autore per venti anni ha avuto accesso al regista. Money quote: "Arakawa’s latest work, “Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron,” is his fourth documentary centered on Studio Ghibli and the man behind it, and it offers an unflinching and intimate look at Miyazaki as the now-octogenarian auteur grapples with his legacy, personal mortality and the herculean challenge of creating a masterpiece that could very well be his swan song." https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2025/01/31/film/kaku-arakawa-hayao-miyazaki-interview/

A primavera inoltrata su Netflix esce la serie dedicata all'Eternauta. Money quote: "Netflix ha annunciato la data in cui la serie tv L’Eternauta, ispirata all’omonimo fumetto fantascientifico di Héctor Oesterheld e Francisco Solano López degli anni Cinquanta, esordirà in tutto il mondo sulla propria piattaforma streaming: il 30 aprile 2025." https://fumettologica.it/2025/01/l-eternauta-data-serie-tv-netflix/