Mostly, I Write

Cari i miei paranoici digitali: ripulite casa vostra da tutte le cimici digitali e le videocamere nascoste. Su su... Money quote: "The simple strategies that we are going to show you will effectively clear most rooms for hidden cameras and bugs without having to use super expensive countersurveillance gear or an outside company." https://www.senteltechsecurity.com/blog/post/how-to-find-hidden-cameras/

Si parla sempre della censura cinese, che io trovo affascinante soprattutto dal punto di vista di come si ottiene. Se ci pensate, il censore è una persona ed è esposto proprio al tipo di "male" da cui vuole curare la società. Ecco, questo è uno dei pochissimi articoli che racconta la storia da questo punto di vista. Cioè, è l'unico articolo che in effetti racconta una storia. Money quote: "Mr. Li works for Beyondsoft, a Beijing-based tech services company that, among other businesses, takes on the censorship burden for other companies. He works in its office in the city of Chengdu. In the heart of a high-tech industrial area, the space is bright and new enough that it resembles the offices of well-funded start-ups in tech centers like Beijing and Shenzhen. It recently moved to the space because customers complained that its previous office was too cramped to allow employees to do their best work. “Missing one beat could cause a serious political mistake,” said Yang Xiao, head of Beyondsoft’s internet service business, including content reviewing. (Beyondsoft declined to disclose which Chinese media or online companies it works for, citing confidentiality.)" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/business/china-internet-censor.html

Possiamo abbandonare la nostra preziosa e costosa macchina fotografica e usare solo il nostro prezioso e costoso telefonino? Nel 99% dei casi sì, sostiene quest'uomo. Money quote "Getting ready for this trip I was seriously nervous. I’d never traveled without at least one dedicated camera and yet here I was, making the decision to leave my beloved FujiFilm X-T20 home. Trusting that all of my precious photos would only be shot on my smartphone was a serious leap of faith. Ireland was shot on Nikon, Norway on Olympus, and Canon was my wing-man through Mexico and a large chunk of mainland Europe. Dumping all of that gear and going solo on my iPhone was going to take more than nerves of steel, it was going to take some serious testing. I needed to build up some faith that the phone would perform up to a reasonable standard before I was willing to give it a go. So, as a test, I decided to use a family vacation to Walt Disney World in Florida to figure out if this was going to work long term." https://medium.com/@robert.rittmuller/walt-disney-world-and-the-end-of-dedicated-cameras-89289a91aceb

Rimanda, ma con criterio 🍪 https://www.internazionale.it/opinione/arthur-c-brooks/2022/01/01/strategia-rimandare

Siamo tutti digitali, sort of. E le immagini si moltiplicano. Serve ordinarle per poterle trovare. E qui entrano in campo un po' di scelte di campo e alcune finezze. Vediamo la prospettiva del professionista. Money quote: "All that data is easy to generate and it’s quite common for photographers to share their results every single day online. But there’s one thing that still require some effort, something that many photographers overlook. Archiving" https://medium.com/@zellersamuel/ten-good-reasons-why-you-need-an-archive-if-youre-a-photographer-6f3117113f76

A partire dal 2 febbraio sarà distribuita in edicola in allegato a Corriere della Sera e Gazzetta dello Sport, e in collaborazione con Mondadori, una nuova collana settimanale dedicata ai romanzi di fantascienza intitolata Urania: 70 anni di futuro. 👉https://www.fumettologica.it/2022/01/uscite-collana-urania-corriere-gazzetta/

Un po' di previsioni tecnologiche per il 2019, tanto per farsi un'idea di come sia poi andata veramente (visto che siano a fare quelle del 2022) Money quote: "As George Saville, the 17th-century English statesman and essayist, once wrote, “The best qualification of a prophet is to have a good memory.” It’s a fancy way of saying the past is prologue, and no vision for the near-future is possible without analyzing past trends. That’s what I’ve done to concoct these informed guesses about the state of tech in 2019. https://medium.com/s/the-upgrade/the-technology-that-will-define-2019-48c041e98532

Secondo me era tutta una scusa o ha scritto l'articolo perché in realtà non lo chiamava mai nessuno... Money quote: "Nearly 4 months ago — after my relationship of 3 years ended — I decided to create a Tinder profile. The following is the story of that profile (in data). If you’re lazy and don’t care about the details, skip to the bottom and there is a Sankey diagram that sums up a lot." https://towardsdatascience.com/117-days-of-tinder-in-data-755fe9ed853e

Alla fine, era meglio se eravamo tutti filosofi. Potevamo pensare l'impensabile. Money quote: "Ethicists, at least within their academic work, are encouraged to be skeptical of intuition and the naturalistic fallacy (the idea that values can be derived simply from facts). Philosophers are also familiar with tools such as thought experiments: hypothetical and contrived descriptions of events that can be useful for clarifying particular intuitions or the implications of a philosophical claim. These two factors make it unsurprising that philosophers often publicly adopt positions that are unintuitive and outside mainstream thought, and that they might not personally endorse." https://aeon.co/ideas/philosophy-can-make-the-previously-unthinkable-thinkable

Mi spiace molto: non riesco a trovare il tempo materiale e lo spazio mentale per scrivere quel che vorrei sull'informatica, l'insegnamento, la tecnologia. Nel frattempo, come un foglietto di carta buttato nel vento, segnalo questo articolo. Il punto, che è quello di cui sono convinto anche io, è che non è importante insegnare a scrivere codice. Ma non è un problema di informatica: il tema è molto più ampio e riguarda le nostre società. Money quote: "The subjects we learned in school were mostly static. The answer to two plus two was always four. Interpretations of certain subjects may have differed from place to place and evolved over time, but we were taught that the world was based on certain facts. We were evaluated on the basis of knowing those facts. Yet, as the complexity theorist Sam Arbesman has pointed out, facts have a half-life. As the accumulation of knowledge accelerates, those half-lives are shrinking. For example, when we learned computer programming in school, it was usually in BASIC, a now mostly defunct language. Today, Python is the most popular language, but will likely not be a decade from now." https://medium.com/s/story/these-are-the-skills-your-kids-will-need-for-the-future-hint-its-not-coding-9b5d47f372f1

Le lunghezze focali degli obiettivi fotografici sono una cosa difficile da capire, perché sono relative alla dimensione del piano sul quale viene catturata l'immagine, sia essa pellicola o sensore. Fare i calcoli e avere un riferimento di equivalenza, arbitrariamente stabilito nel formato digitale "full frame" cioè della pellicola 24x36, è utile ma comunque fuorviante. Approcciare le differenti lunghezze equivalenti immaginando l'effetto pratico di ciascuna, cioè l'angolo di visione e la profondità prospettica (la geometria dell'obiettivo), ha molto più senso. Ma alla fine, a cosa pensiamo quando pensiamo a un certo tipo di obiettivo "normale", "grandangolare" o "tele"? Money quote: "I realized that I really think about photography in terms of the classic focal lengths — 35 / 50 / 85 / 100 / 135. This article explains what I think about when I think about focal length. 35mm film / full frame equivalents are used throughout this article." https://medium.com/ice-cream-geometry/focal-lengths-1a281a3509ed

Lavoriamo tutti da casa, e facciamo fuori i nostri capi. Olé Money quote: "One of today’s biggest fads is the ‘bossless company’. According to proponents of this idea, management is passé. The American management guru Gary Hamel declared in 2011: ‘First, let’s fire all the managers … Think of the countless hours that team leaders, department heads, and vice presidents devote to supervising the work of others.’ Hamel suggests that all management is waste and, implicitly, that all that managers do is ‘supervise’ – both highly dubious claims." https://aeon.co/essays/no-boss-no-thanks-why-managers-are-more-important-than-ever

Un mio articolo di un bel po’ di tempo fa, ma sempre attuale: Perché nessuno ce la fa contro Gundam https://antoniodini.com/nessuno-contro-gundam/

Non pubblico quasi mai cose che vengono da Reddit, ma faccio in questo caso una bella eccezione, perché la storia è simpatica. Money quote: "Some Task Manager lore: I'm the Microsoft (Redmond, '93) developer that wrote TaskMgr at home in my den in about 1994 and then the NT silverback devs let me check it into the main tree even though I was a greenhorn at the time. So that meant I got to bring it into work and polish it up and make it an official part of Windows, where it remains to this day. So I got to define my own day job, actually, which was nice! I don't know if it's still like that, but great culture and people." https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/gqb915/i_wrote_task_manager_and_i_just_remembered/

La capacità degli esseri umani di vivere in condizioni pietose è qualcosa di sorprendente. In Brasile, oltretutto, hanno inventato il concetto stesso di bidonville con le loro favelas nate a causa delle truppe sbandate dopo le guerre latinoamericane. Invece, in questo caso Manaus (i lettori più ferrati in geografia o quelli che sono appassionati di Mister No la conoscono un po' di più) ha dato spettacolo con un quartiere di case galleggianti o ancorate a palafitte che ospitava più di diecimila persone. Come Venezia, ma totalmente diversa. Money quote: "For more than 40 years, Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, had a neighborhood that floated on the river. Located near the Meeting of the Waters, the Floating City was a labyrinthine maze of houses, churches, shops, bars, and restaurants, connected through precarious streets made of wood planks. At its peak, it had around 2,000 bobbing houses built on top of trunks, and a population of more than 11,000 people." https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/floating-city-manaus-brazil-history

In questo articolo del buon Alberto Brambilla su Fumettologica si fa un percorso storico fondamentale per chiarire cosa siano e come funzionino le comic strips americane. Imprescindibile, ben scritto e molto interessante. Money quote: "È quasi impossibile per chi frequenta i fumetti non avere in mente questo formato, semplicissimo e versatile, che ha costituito la colonna portante dell’industria statunitense per quasi un secolo. Eppure, forse proprio per la loro ricchezza, non è facile destreggiarsi al loro interno. Le strip hanno una serie di tecnicismi, di formati propri, di regole di narrazione e impaginazione che rischiano di disorientare il neofita. Questa guida è stata pensata proprio per fornire ai lettori di Fumettologica qualche punto cardinale, in modo da poter apprezzare al meglio una raccolta di Krazy Kat, dei Peanuts, di Prince Valliant o di Little Nemo." https://www.fumettologica.it/2020/05/strisce-fumetti-cosa-sono/

Spazzatura, musei della spazzatura, mostre della spazzatura, ricerche sulla spazzatura, archeologia con la spazzatura, isole piene di spazzatura, gente che seppellisce la spazzatura, gente che la tira dal finestrino. Cosa ci sta succedendo? Money quote: "Garbage is a snapshot of what people chose to consume in a particular place and time, and archaeologists often lean on rusted, smashed-up odds and ends to narrate stories about how people lived. Along the remains of old Route 66 that slice through Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, for example, archaeologists have combed through mounds of trash that built up 10 to 15 feet from the road—roughly the distance that someone could lob a bottle out of the window of a zipping car. This boundary earned the name the “throw zone,” and its cracked contents revealed travelers’ preferred brands of soda and beer." https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mackinac-island-trash-dump

Siccome "Mostly, I Write", il saggio di questa tipa rende ahimè abbastanza bene come mi sento e come opero più spesso che no. Money Quote: "I want to go do something else, I want to water the plants, I want to sit next to the plants and write my essay in a notebook with a fountain pen. But first I have to see if someone is angry, if someone has misunderstood me, if something needs clarifying. Things might explode at any moment. I pour out the last half cup of coffee in the pot and drink it black and cold. I need to stay focused. Something may happen." https://lithub.com/someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet-a-study-in-pandemic-distraction

Se nasceva adesso Dario Argento la figlia l’avrebbe chiamata Luna Vittoria Rossa Money quote: "We report analysis results of the reflectance spectra (0.48 to 3.2 μm) acquired by the Chang’E-5 lander, which provides vital context of the returned samples from the Northern Oceanus Procellarum of the Moon. We estimate up to 120 parts per million (ppm) of water (OH + H2O) in the lunar regolith, which is mostly attributed to solar wind implantation." https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl9174

C'è un'azienda americana che sta lavorando per diventare la piattaforma che gestisce l'autenticazione delle identità digitali. E vuole espandersi fuori dagli aeroporti. Money quote: "At its core, Clear monetizes trust. When the company verifies a person’s identity, whether that be to enter an airport, a stadium, or buy a beer at a concession stand, Clear is affirming that they are who they say they are. Right now, this verification process means priority access to an airport or stadium security line as a trusted Clear member. But in the future, documents and slideshows reviewed by OneZero suggest Clear plans to be the company that verifies your identity every time you would have swiped a credit card, shown your ID at a door, or handed over a health insurance card." https://onezero.medium.com/clear-conquered-u-s-airports-now-it-wants-to-own-your-entire-digital-identity-15d61076e44d