Mostly, I Write

I dati sono la cartografia dell'interno della nostra psiche (qualunque cosa sia l'interno della nostra psiche. Però fa impressione dirlo). Tuttavia siamo abbastanza daccordo che il vero rischio scaturente dai grandi bestioni che usano l'intelligenza artificiale e i big data è il fatto che uccidono il pensiero indipendente. No? Articolo breve, podcast medio, libro lungo (ma interessante): “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech”. Dopo due anni se ne parla ancora. Money quote: "“Facebook and Google are constantly organizing things in ways in which we’re not really cognizant, and we’re not even taught to be cognizant, and most people aren’t, and done in a way in which they’re leveraging our data,” Foer said. “Our data is this cartography of the inside of our psyche. They know our weaknesses, and they know the things that give us pleasure and the things that cause us anxiety and anger. They use that information in order to keep us addicted. That makes the companies the enemies of independent thought.”" https://www.recode.net/2018/12/3/18123225/amazon-google-facebook-antitrust-monopoly-franklin-foer-world-without-mind-book-kara-swisher-decode

La piovra è un animale molto, molto intelligente. Gli manca solo la parola. Forse. Money quote: "For scientists who study animal behavior, intelligence is not about acing a calculus test or taking a car apart and putting it back together. Intelligence comprises sophisticated cognitive skills that help an animal thrive. That may include the ability to come up with solutions to the problem of finding food, for example, or a knack for planning for some challenge in the future. Intelligent animals don’t rely on fixed responses to survive — they can invent new behaviors on the fly." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/science/animal-intelligence-octopus-cephalopods.html

Un po' di utility "must have" se passate parte delle vostre giornate nel terminale su macOS Money quote: "Syntax highlighting in cat" https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/12161/os-x-terminal-must-have-utilities

È il momento migliore per acquistare un Mac di seconda mano. Oppure no - il mio articolo per La Stampa https://www.lastampa.it/tecnologia/tutorial/2021/02/02/news/e-il-momento-migliore-per-acquistare-un-mac-di-seconda-mano-oppure-no-1.39848832

Premio Strega 2021: ecco i primi cinque titoli - il mio articolo per Anobii https://blog.anobii.com/it/2021/02/01/premio-strega-2021-ecco-i-primi-cinque-titoli/

È da un po' che sui miei canali - nei percorsi che seguo in rete - continuo ad inciampare su BeOS e la sua versione moderna, Haiku. Un motivo ci dovrà pur essere. Sto cominciando a leggere con maggiore attenzione per capire. E magari, chissà, anche provare. Leggete questo vecchio articolo. Money quote: "And welcome to the world of BeOS and Haiku! Today’s article is going to look at both the classic BeOS (which you’ll see a few screenshots of) and the modern-day successor to the BeOS, the Haiku operating system (which we’ll also have screenshots of here as well)." https://osvoyager.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-beos-and-haiku-unique/

Dice che su clubhouse si incontra gente interessante. Voi ci siete?

Fuga da WhatsApp. Ecco come trasferire le chat su Telegram -il mio articolo per La Stampa https://www.lastampa.it/tecnologia/tutorial/2021/02/01/news/fuga-da-whatsapp-ecco-come-migrare-le-chat-su-telegram-1.39844484

La domanda è abbastanza semplice: se il computer decide chi è il potenziale terrorista, dovremmo poter sapere anche quali sono i criteri con i quali decide? Questo articolo è di due anni fa ma sembra scritto stamani Money quote: "DataRobot’s bread and butter is turning vast troves of raw data, which all modern businesses accumulate, into predictions of future action, which all modern companies desire. Its clients include Monsanto and the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. But not all of DataRobot’s clients are looking to pad their revenues; DHS plans to integrate the code into an existing DHS offering called the Global Travel Assessment System, or GTAS, a toolchain that has been released as open source software and which is designed to make it easy for other countries to quickly implement no-fly lists like those used by the U.S." https://theintercept.com/2018/12/03/air-travel-surveillance-homeland-security/

C’est le Brexit...

Quel piccolo, lurido segreto di Android: la frammentazione. Money quote: "Android fragmentation has always been an issue but it’s one that many industry onlookers (including myself) thought would improve over time. On the contrary, it seems to be as problematic as ever, so while it’s all well and good defending Android’s open source merits and unique features over the idiot-proof usability of iOS, the question seems increasingly null when hardly any Android devices actually run recent software. The latest and greatest Google functionality, therefore, isn’t available to huge swathes of Android users – and this is the crux of the problem with Android fragmentation." https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/iphone-vs-android-3633532

E a New York intanto hanno inaugurato la The Moynihan Train Hall (in ritardo di 20 anni) che risarcisce la distruzione della Penn Station. Money quote "Moynihan Train Hall, as the new facility is called, occupies the middle slice of the James A. Farley Building, which had been—and partially still is—an iconic New York post office, built in 1912, and also a product of McKim, Mead & White’s studio. The new transit facility, sitting just opposite Madison Square Garden between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, is named for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the long-serving United States senator from New York who was among the first to suggest the reportedly underused postal building as a suitable alternative to the botched Penn Station. As the senator is said to have observed, “Where else but in New York could you tear down a beautiful Beaux Arts building and find another one right across the street?”" https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-moynihan-train-halls-glorious-arrivals

Come trasferire le chat da WhatsApp a Telegram e salutare Zuckerberg - il mio articolo per Macity https://www.macitynet.it/come-trasferire-le-chat-da-whatsapp-a-telegram/

Se il logo è la parte emergente di un brand, Naomi Klein in effetti aveva capito tutto quando ha deciso il titolo del libro che l'ha resa famosa. In questo articolo, Will Partin fa un percorso piuttosto lungo per raccontarci tutto quel che dobbiamo sapere del mondo in cui viviamo: cos'è, da dove viene e in qualche misura dove sta andando. Money quote: "Asking these questions means taking stock of the history of branding, which, as it turns out, is also the history of capitalism. If we want to understand what branding is, why it now dominates so much of our lives, and where, if anywhere, it’s going, it helps to know where it all began." https://theoutline.com/post/6698/brandless-brands-instagram-ads-capitalism Peraltro, vale la pena anche solo per il passaggio dedicato a Mario Tronti relativo al rapporto della fabbrica e della società, che fa da chiave di basso per il ragionamento. A cosa mi riferisco? Money quote 2: "The Social factory is a concept developed by Italian autonomist Marxism in the 1960s to help analyse how capitalist social relations had expanded outside the sphere of production to that of society as a whole. Mario Tronti was one of the first theorists to develop the term in his text Factory and Society (1962).[1] Here Tronti uses the Marxist distinction between absolute and relative surplus value to explain how technical and social processes of post-fordist capitalist society become entwined, so that "the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society"" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_factory (la versione italiana stranamente non esiste...) Insomma, stiamo parlando della nostra società in cui i brand sono la fonte primaria di senso, e tocca a noi produrre questo senso, da cui l'idea che - grazie ai marchi - la fabbrica si sia estesa al resto della società. Maledetti marxisti... mi fate sempre sentire giovane.

Apple e la giornata della privacy: stop al tracking – il mio articolo per Macity https://www.macitynet.it/apple-e-la-giornata-della-privacy-stop-al-tracking/

C'è aria di baruffa nel mondo dei software per la produttività per eccellenza: le videoscritture Money quote: "“Work has totally changed,” said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, the online storage company that is building its strategy around unifying data and messaging from a dizzying mix of cloud apps. “Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive.”" https://www.geekwire.com/2018/new-word-processor-wars-fresh-crop-productivity-apps-trying-reinvent-workday/

Il giorno della memoria - il mio articolo per Anobii https://blog.anobii.com/it/2021/01/27/il-giorno-della-memoria/

La storia dei tre Adolf ai giorni nostri - il mio articolo per Fumettologica https://www.fumettologica.it/2020/01/tre-adolf-osamu-tezuka-manga/

Quando vi trovate davanti una categoria generica che ha desiderio di completezza, come ad esempio l'uso e l'abuso dei termini "intelligenza artificiale" e "machine learning", c'è da chiedersi quale complessità stiamo perdendo di vista. Notate poi che la complessità in realtà non è sempre tale, perché una volta aperto l'involucro semantico che nasconde la pluralità di idee, queste non sono necessariamente difficili. Anzi, si finisce per capire di cosa si sta parlando. Nel caso abbiate cominciato a esplorare i vari rami dell'albero delle AI, questo articolo approfondisce il versante del "deep learning". Money quote: "The most surprising thing about deep learning is how simple it is. Ten years ago, no one expected that we would achieve such amazing results on machine perception problems by using simple parametric models trained with gradient descent. Now, it turns out that all you need is sufficiently large parametric models trained with gradient descent on sufficiently many examples. As Feynman once said about the universe, "It's not complicated, it's just a lot of it"." https://blog.keras.io/the-limitations-of-deep-learning.html

Leggendo questo incipit, mi sono sentito un maratoneta. Poi, leggendo, ho capito perché fare ginnastica come si diceva una volta è così difficile. (non era colpa solo mia, allora!). Money quote: “If you live in the U.S. and can claim more than 4,774 steps daily, you're exceeding the average American's total. Comparable figures from England and Japan are 5,444 and 6,010 daily steps, respectively — with this info derived from cellphone data.” https://www.npr.org/2021/01/05/953249677/exercised-explains-why-it-can-be-hard-to-commit-to-working-out-and-why-we-should