Mostly, I Write

Da Kant alla ZTL di Firenze, passando per l’Eternauta e l'Eurostar: un viaggio settimanale tra cose serie, curiose e (quasi) inutili. Mostly Weekly 347 è online https://antoniodini.com/weekly/347/

Che problemi volete che porti mettere in circolazine un servizio gratuito che permette a tutti di chattare con una entità camaleontica come una intelligenza artificiale generativa? Magari che la gente inizi a chattare con il detentore dei segreti dell'universo? Cosa volete mai che possa andare male? Money quote: "Less than a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. It was the second marriage for both after marriages of 15-plus years and having kids, and they had pledged to go into it “completely level-headedly,” Kat says, connecting on the need for “facts and rationality” in their domestic balance. But by 2022, her husband “was using AI to compose texts to me and analyze our relationship,” the 41-year-old mom and education nonprofit worker tells Rolling Stone. Previously, he had used AI models for an expensive coding camp that he had suddenly quit without explanation — then it seemed he was on his phone all the time, asking his AI bot “philosophical questions,” trying to train it “to help him get to ‘the truth,’” Kat recalls. His obsession steadily eroded their communication as a couple." https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

I francesi scoprono Milano (e le gite lampo, stile Ryanair) Money quote: "Symbole de l’Italie industrielle, la capitale lombarde est aussi une ville de culture. La réouverture de la ligne de train Paris-Milan, bloquée depuis le 27 août 2023 par un éboulement, est l’occasion rêvée d’y passer un week-end d’émerveillement." https://www.lemonde.fr/m-styles/article/2025/04/26/voyage-48-heures-a-milan_6600197_4497319.html

Una donna meravigliosa, una attrice fantastica. Ma anche la prima a superare il doppio soffitto di cristallo delle donne e asiatiche nel cinema americano. Money quote: "Wong Liu Tsong en 1905, la fille de blanchisseuse aimait traîner enfant sur les tournages angelins et surprend un jour l’actrice Mae Murray en haillons, sans comprendre que c’est un costume de film. «Mon ambition d’actrice est née à ce moment-là, disait-elle. Peut-être voulais-je lui apprendre comment une star de cinéma doit s’habiller.» Sacrée «plus belle Chinoise au monde» par le magazine Look en 1938, Wong donnait des leçons de grâce. «Ses lèvres bien formées, légèrement voluptueuses, contrastent avec le noir mélancolique de ses yeux […], seul un Van Eyck ou un Holbein pourraient la capturer sur un canevas», s’extasiait son costumier Ali Hubert. Elle aura aussi appris la difficulté d’exister dans une industrie d’avant-guerre l’assignant à l’orientalisme et aux stéréotypes – victime éplorée ou «femme dragon» traîtresse." https://www.liberation.fr/culture/cinema/anna-may-wong-a-la-cinematheque-fee-dartifices-20250423_JNQMLZ72DNEQZHVJ4L2TTR4AKA/

Stiamo andando molto, molto bene. Proprio. Money quote: "A major report on modernizing the education system in Newfoundland and Labrador is peppered with fake sources some educators say were likely fabricated by generative artificial intelligence (AI). Released last month, the Education Accord NL final report, a 10-year roadmap for improving the province's public schools and post-secondary institutions, includes at least 15 citations for non-existent journal articles and documents." https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/education-accord-nl-sources-dont-exist-1.7631364

L'altro giorno avevo messo un articolo di. Poi, continuando a guardare il suo vecchio sito ho trovato questo che mi piace molto. Chissà se l'ha fatto automaticamente oppure a mano: l'idea di piccole cose sparse giorno per giorno con una progettualità comune che si trasformano in un prodotto più ricco. Money quote: "This is an archive of a Twitter thread from 2016 (I since deleted my Twitter account) – unfortunately, you won’t see responses from other people. For context, this is also back when tweets were limited to 140 characters only." https://aresluna.org/japan-design-details/

Letture per la domenica Ho letto il primo romanzo di Woody Allen, "Che succede a Baum". Mi è piaciuto parecchio, perché è furbo, leggero, perfettamente in sintonia con l'autore e soprattutto l'idea che noi abbiamo di lui. E comunque, il primo romanzo a 89 anni! E pure bello! Wow!\ Alcune cose che comunica l'atmosfera le dice bene questa recensione del Guardian: Money quote: "Reading What’s With Baum? is an eerie, almost unearthly experience, like being taken to some secret Narnia part of New York where a new Neil Simon play is about to open, or a record store where you can check out a Burt Bacharach LP in the listening booth, or a TV studio where you can watch a live taping of the Dick Cavett Show, with Robert Wagner, Rex Reed and Gore Vidal. Allen’s mannerisms, his themes, his comedy – and there are some very good gags here – are just the same as they ever were. In fact, this novel is more fluent, more plausible on its own terms, than any of his recent movies – though it finally collapses into perfunctory and unresolved farcical silliness in a very familiar way." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/24/whats-with-baum-by-woody-allen-review-the-film-makers-late-life-first-novel

La morte è l’ultimo bug. E la Silicon Valley pensa di patcharlo. Ecco l'anteprima di Mostly Weekly 346 https://antoniodini.com/weekly/346/

Il giorno in cui il tasto Return è diventato Enter e altre cose carine da sapere sulle tastiere, scritte dall'irraggiungibile Marcin Wichary Money quote: "The carriage return lever was similar to all the other mechanical functions of the typewriter, starting as simple as humanly (and inhumanly) possible. Tab added a few spaces or mechanically zipped the carriage to the next predetermined point. The Shift key moved the carriage up or the key basket down, applying its simple operation to every key equally. Shift Lock was a literal tooth holding Shift in place, placed right next to it for manufacturing convenience first, and ergonomics a distant second. It affected letters, digits, and punctuation in equal measure, in contrast to the later Caps Lock." https://aresluna.org/the-day-return-became-enter/

A quanto pare vietare l'uso degli smartphone negli Usa ha un sottoprodotto interessante: fa leggere più libri agli studenti. Io comincerei a riflettere sul significato del tempo libero e del tempo occupato delle persone e di come si costruisce il loro consumo, perché mi pare che il marketing dei social media ce l'ha chiarissimo, gli educatori e i legislatori molto meno. Money quote: "The Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky this month announced a surprising unintended consequence of a new statewide cellphone ban. In many of the district’s schools, the number of books checked out in the first few weeks of class had skyrocketed compared with last year, before the ban was instituted. In just the first 17 days of the school year at Pleasure Ridge Park High School in Louisville, where only 17 percent of students are proficient in reading according to state assessments, the district said that “students have checked out more than 1,200 books, nearly half the total number borrowed during the entire 2024-25 school year.” At other schools in the district, Kentucky’s largest, the results are even more impressive: 40 percent of students at one high school have checked books out of the library, “double the number who borrowed books all last year.”" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/opinion/phone-bans-schools-kids.html archivio https://archive.is/5lyFw

Se siete utenti Mac e siete passati a macOS 26 Tahoe (come spero abbiate fatto, perché è ottimo) ci sono alcune cose insopportabili. Ad esempio, in Safari, con il nuovo default che cambia il colore della barra in alto a seconda dello sfondo del sito che si visita. Ecco, si può disabilitare. Money quote: "Se non gradite la colorazione mostrata nella barra dei pannelli con alcuni siti, potete disattivare questa funzionalità. Ecco come fare: - Aprite Safari - Selezionate dal menu “Safari” la voce “Impostazioni” - Selezionate la sezione “Pannelli” e da qui deselezionate la voce “Mostra colore nella barra dei pannelli”." https://www.macitynet.it/disattivare-colori-barra-pannelli-safari/ Purtroppo, il Launchpad invece è andato. Ma forse c'è ancora un po' di speranza. https://www.macitynet.it/ripristinare-launchpad-macos-26-tahoe/

Il web semantico e la ricerca semantica. Un tuffo nel passato? Money quote: "Semantic search addresses the problem by using techniques that model relationships between words, concepts, and contexts. Instead of treating queries as bags of keywords, it analyzes intent and contextual clues. For instance, modern approaches use embeddings (vector representations of text) to map words or phrases into a mathematical space where similar meanings are positioned closer together. A model trained on large datasets might recognize that "canine" and "dog" are semantically related, even if they don't share letters. Transformer-based architectures like BERT go further by evaluating entire sentences, allowing the system to disambiguate phrases like "Java developer" (programming language) versus "Java coffee" (island/coffee bean). These models can also handle paraphrases--for example, returning results for "affordable wireless earbuds" when a user searches for "cheap Bluetooth headphones."" https://milvus.io/ai-quick-reference/what-is-the-semantic-gap-problem-and-how-does-semantic-search-address-it

Il creatore del world wide web, Tim Berners Lee, nel tempo aveva provato a far evolvere la sua creatura, ma è stato superato da destra e da sinistra. Solo che l’uomo ha idee abbastanza chiare su come non dovrebbe essere la parte abitata della rete, e sta cercando di fare in modo che torni a essere aperta a tutti. Money quote: "Part memoir, part manifesto, Berners-Lee's chirpy book *This Is For Everyone*is both an engaging history of the origins and evolution of the web and an ingenious road map for how we can reclaim control over our digital lives. His big idea, which has now become his latest personal obsession, is to restore data sovereignty to every individual by redesigning the web. To that end, he has launched a new protocol and founded a start-up to help return ownership of data to users" https://www.ft.com/content/13e4fad3-9fa1-4534-b84e-aafed97ae073 archivio: https://archive.is/yOoAh

La tesi di laurea di Italo Calvino? Su Joseph Conrad. Money quote: "Nel suo lavoro giovanile Calvino, dopo essere partito dagli studi di Emilio Cecchi sullo scrittore anglo-polacco (in Scrittori inglesi e americani), giunge poi a valutazioni critiche del tutto personali. Cecchi, ad esempio, aveva sottovalutato Robert Louis Stevenson, giudicandolo leggero rispetto alla profondità del pensiero di Conrad. Calvino invece esalta la fluidità e la capacità evocativa di Stevenson e, dopo averlo accostato a Conrad per qualità letteraria, contrappone la nitida linearità del primo a certe disarmonie della macchina narrativa conradiana. Nella tesi, nonostante l’evidente e spesso esplicita ammirazione per lo scrittore, Calvino vuole comunque perseguire l’obiettività e il giusto distacco propri del lavoro di ricerca e critica letteraria." https://www.doppiozero.com/calvino-legge-conrad

Letture per la domenica Avete presente il New Yorker? Bene, il suo stile è stato modellato per oltre un secolo da Henry W. Fowler e dal suo manuale di lingua. Money quote: "Despite the manual’s exalted reputation, the magazine’s style sometimes diverged from its prescriptions. In spelling, Fowler favored “judgement”; The New Yorker has “judgment.” And, whereas The New Yorker’s most famous style choice is probably the diaeresis in a word like “coöperate,” Fowler was against it, preferring the clean “cooperate.” But the magazine fell in line on other matters, including doubling the “l” in “travelled” and “marvellous,” banning the word “transpire” to mean “happen,” and placing a comma after the penultimate item in a series. (Fowler wanted a comma after the final item as well, giving the example “Every man, woman, & child, was killed.” Neither The New Yorker nor, as far as I know, any other publication followed him there.)" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/29/the-autocrat-of-english-usage archivio: https://archive.is/gkkhp

Philip José Farmer, il maestro del pastiche che ha rivoluzionato la fantascienza - finalmente ho potuto raccontare la storia di uno dei miei autori preferiti di sempre su Fumettologica https://fumettologica.it/2025/10/philip-jose-farmer-fantascienza-libri/

Articoli pericolosi: le ragioni contrapposte secondo le quali è meglio fare la doccia la sera o la mattina. Money quote: "The benefits of a nighttime shower also only apply if you regularly wash your bed linen. Bacteria can survive on duvets, sheets and pillows for weeks. Dust mites also can accumulate over time, as can fungi, especially on moist areas such as your pillows. While people with a fully functioning immune system can cope with this microbial assault, up to 76% of people with severe asthma are allergic to at least one fungal species. Exposure to A. fumigatus can cause chronic lung disease in people suffering from TB or smoking-related lung disease." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250919-is-it-better-to-shower-in-the-morning-or-at-night

Tecnologia, memoria e responsabilità: tre fili che si intrecciano per raccontare un caso che continua a pesare sul presente. L’anteprima di Mostly Weekly 345 è online https://antoniodini.com/weekly/345/

Stanno andando di moda gli anni Novanta. A un certo punto temo andranno di moda anche gli anni Venti del Duemila. Sigh. Money quote: "Nostalgia Cat is not alone. Video creators throughout social media are using tools like Midjourney and DaVinci Resolve to make increasingly impressive movies. And to thousands of people who aren’t looking closely, and don’t know better because they had yet to be born in the 1990s, these nostalgia posts might as well be the genuine article. “There’s a real curiosity about a time before phones dominating social life,” said the trend forecaster Sean Monahan. “A.I., weirdly, is a backward-looking technology,” he added. “All these large language models are ultimately composites of information from the past.”" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/style/ai-nostalgia-tiktok-90s-80s.html archivio: https://archive.is/2QEEO

Ha vinto il premio Nobel per la letteratura l'ungherese László Krasznahorkai https://elpais.com/cultura/2025-10-09/premio-nobel-de-literatura.html