Ecco qua: Mostly Weekly 383. Forse stiamo vivendo gli ultimi anni in cui saremo noi a fare acquisti online. Nel frattempo ci sono Mythos, l'Odissea, gli Ossi di seppia e gli amanti di Siddo. Sembra tutto a casaccio, ma invece c'è una logica

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/383/

Letture per la domenica

Erté, cioè R-T, cioè Romain de Tirtoff. È forse l'artista che più ha interpretato il gusto dell'Art Decò. Ecco la sua storia.

Money quote: "Erté muore a Parigi il 21 aprile 1990, lasciando un’eredità artistica straordinaria. Le sue opere continuano a essere esposte nei più importanti musei del mondo e a influenzare designer, illustratori e artisti. Ancora oggi è considerato una delle figure simbolo dell’Art Déco: un maestro dello stile che ha saputo trasformare eleganza e decorazione in una forma d’arte senza tempo."

https://www.telanarrante.com/erte-maestro-eleganza-art-deco-la-vita-e-le-opere-icona-del-novecento/

Non sono i modelli che vanno peggio, siamo noi che sbagliamo a scrivere i prompt. Usiamo ancora il "vecchio stile" di due anni fa che non va più bene. A fine maggio Anthropic e OpenAI hanno pubblicato le nuove guide sul prompting. Ecco cosa dicono.

Money quote: "Il succo: se continuate a scrivere istruzioni vaghe, uno dei due modelli farà troppo poco e l’altro farà troppo. Il risultato, in entrambi i casi, vi deluderà. E la colpa non sarà del modello.

Vi racconto cosa è cambiato, perché, e cosa potete fare da lunedì."

https://avvocatogiovannapanucci.substack.com/p/anthropic-e-openai-hanno-pubblicato

Una mostra su Fidel Castro.

Money quote: "Il percorso espositivo si articola su periodi differenti. La prima sezione isola la dimensione formativa di Castro: gli anni degli studi e le prime azioni rivoluzionarie, dove l’obiettivo fotografico racconta l’uomo ai suoi albori, prima della codificazione ufficiale del leader. A questa parte seguono le immagini dedicate alla liberazione di Cuba, alle grandi riforme strutturali (dall’alfabetizzazione di massa alla riforma agraria) e al complesso legame tra Castro ed Ernesto “Che” Guevara, un rapporto fatto di sintonie e profonde differenze. Lo sguardo si sposta successivamente verso l’icona globale di Castro. Qui il mezzo fotografico testimonia i numerosi incontri con i leader mondiali, fino agli scatti che segnano il disgelo con la Chiesa cattolica, documentato dagli incontri di Castro con tre pontefici: Giovanni Paolo II, Benedetto XVI e Francesco."

https://www.artribune.com/arti-visive/2026/06/mostra-fidel-castro-jesi/

Stiamo entrando nell'era dei loop? E come funzionano?

Money quote: "a loop is a recursive goal. you define a purpose, the agent iterates against it, and the loop keeps running until a real stopping condition is met. the agent forgets everything between runs. the loop does not. that single fact is the entire architecture."

https://x.com/mikenevermiss/status/2066401066518802637

La fine dei bullshit jobs?

Money quote: "There are a lot of things to be worried about with AI. Things that I’ve written about extensively in other parts of this blog. But the thing that I am most excited about is the complete and total elimination of bullshit overhead. The future of work may be complex and crazy. But you know what it won’t involve? Having a founder staying up late at night making sure the linear story points are aligned with the things merged into GitHub so that the eng team sync meeting can save fifteen minutes of everyone’s time."

https://12gramsofcarbon.com/p/agentics-i-no-longer-spend-time-counting

La fantascienza è preziosa per la filosofia perché consente di esplorare scenari che vanno oltre la normale esperienza umana, approfondendo i concetti filosofici in modo assai dettagliato. Può inoltre aiutarci a immaginare e a prepararci a potenziali sviluppi futuri, come la creazione di esseri artificiali. Qui ci sono cinque libri e una intervista a un filosofo. Un esempio dei libri: “Stories of Your Life and Others” di Ted Chiang, una raccolta di racconti di fantascienza filosofica veramente straordinaria. Ma c'è molto di più.

Money quote: "A wonderful example of this is Derek Parfit’s work on personal identity. Ordinarily, a person has one body that continues in a specific way over time, permanently connected to one mind that also continues in a specific way over time. There’s a familiar body and a consistent personality. You have memories that move from one moment to the next and experiences that overlap. All of these things go together, and we think of them as constitutive or partly constitutive or somehow involved with or correlated with being a person. In the ordinary run of human experience, these things never come apart. But in science fiction-type thought experiments you can wonder, okay, what would happen if you took someone’s mind, just to put it crudely, and put it in someone else’s body? Would it be the same person? Would the person follow the mind or would they follow the body? What if you stepped into a machine and two duplicates of you walked out? What if you lived 800 years, gradually acquiring a new personality every century and entirely forgetting your past?"

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/science-fiction-and-philosophy-eric-schwitzgebel/

Arriva Mostly Weekly 384. Le macchine parlano benissimo, ma non sudano: il problema è solo questo. E poi: Watchmen, il Bucintoro di Gardini, l'Odissea (ancora!), Tokyo (come sempre) e quell'estate del 1936 che ha cambiato come si vestono gli americani

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/384/

Letture della domenica

Tre cose da leggere (forse) sul futuro dell'AI e dintorni.

Money quote: "Two months ago, I posted some big questions about AI. We had 600 essays submitted for this contest. Below is a bit of information of the 3 winners, followed by all 3 full essay. Thanks to everyone who participated!"

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/blog-prize-winners

Insomma, i grandi scrittori russi dell'Ottocento sono una figata. Tosti per i contenuti, lunghi per numero di pagine, ma scrivono da dio e scorrono alla grande. Sort of.

Money quote: "The Russians are hilarious. And the prose is easier to read than Dickens, let alone Joyce. Yes, the content is often difficult, and disturbing. But the prose? The prose is clear as water! English translated from Russian has a glorious clarity, and, I think, an inherent dry wit. It’s totally different from the interminably-meandering frankenparagraphs of, say, Michel de Montaigne."

https://www.autodidacts.io/dostoyevsky-isnt-difficult/

Oggi è l'anniversario della presa della Bastiglia. Un simbolo potentissimo per noi Europei. Diventa un po' più difficile articolare il perché sia importante, di solito. Qui lo spiegone facile facile.

Money quote: "Costruita nel XIV secolo come parte delle fortificazioni difensive della città, la Bastiglia è originariamente una torre fortificata destinata a proteggere la Porta di Saint-Antoine. Nel corso dei secoli, però, perde la sua funzione difensiva e diventa un carcere di Stato per volere dei re di Francia."

https://cultweb.it/cultura/storia/cosera-la-bastiglia-e-perche-la-sua-presa-fu-simbolica-per-la-rivoluzione-francese/

Un'idea simpatica nel modo di rapportarsi ai propri superiori. Non fare domande che portino a un sì, fare domande che portino a un no. Ha una sua logica, altro che.

Money quote: "Now, let’s take the alternative approach.”Hey, boss, I am going to install action X, which should solve the XYZ problems we’ve been having. Will take care of this on Monday unless I hear differently from you.”

Do you see the change in tone?"

https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3518

Perché così tanti libri di fantascienza diventano introvabili - la mia rubrica per Fumettologica tocca un tema piuttosto sentito nel settore

https://fumettologica.it/2026/07/libri-fantascienza-introvabili/

L'idea è fantastica: prendere il flusso di dati in tempo reale di una partita di baseball e usarlo per ricrearla con la grafica 8-bit.

Money quote: "This is kind of fantastic: Ribbie lets you watch actual MLB baseball games “rendered pitch by pitch in a cozy 8-bit view while they happen”."

https://kottke.org/26/06/watch-baseball-games-in-realtime-in-8-bit-view

Una teoria un po' radicale ma che ha senso, in un certo qual modo. Cambiare solo il 3% di tutto quanto. Può essere un'idea.

Money quote: "At the beginning of my career, I believed I’d be rewarded for the originality of my ideas. The truth is that you’re rewarded for identifying and solving problems efficiently. And odds are, smarter people before you have already done both. So, turn stealing into a skill: spend your days identifying what you ought to steal, why you ought to steal it, and how much you’ll steal of it."

https://ben-mini.com/2026/stealing-is-a-skill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qie5VITX6eQ

Letture per la domenica

Intervista un po' tecnica ma molto interessante a Doug Brooks, senior product manager di Apple silicon, i processori di Apple. Viene fuori veramente tanta roba, a partire dal perché i Mac mini e Studio sono gli strumenti preferiti da chi vuole lavorare con l'AI in locale.

Money quote: "Jason Hiner: Tell us where Apple silicon is today when it comes to AI.

Doug Brooks: We're seeing tremendous momentum with how people are using Apple products and Apple silicon, particularly in on-device AI workflows. We're really proud of that fact and of the way Apple silicon provides a strong foundation for AI. It really highlights the tent poles of Apple silicon. It's a very balanced architecture that provides CPU, GPU, unified memory, and the Neural Engine all contributing to performance across the chip. That's particularly important for these evolving agentic workflows. It's not just about the GPU crunching on an LLM anymore. It's about the whole chip contributing to different parts of the task, tool-calling, and the things that are happening around those workflows. It really plays to the strengths of Apple silicon."

https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/how-apple-s-decade-long-bet-on-chips-won-ai

È bello leggere i libri sui lettori come il Kindle e il Kobo (o il mio X3). Il problema è che ogni tanto i file epub non funzionano bene. Ma ci sono dei motivi e delle cure, se siete un po' tecnici.

Money quote: "And so I threw my book into Adobe Digital Editions. As expected, it failed to load. But how! Without an error message, without the slightest whimper. The book just wouldn’t load. The only sign that it had even tried was that when loading it again ADE told me: “you can’t import that book, you already added it”. While showing a white screen.

Classic Adobe."

https://andreklein.net/your-epub-is-fine-kobo-disagrees-blame-adobe/

Un'altra cosa un po' tecnica. Come si fa a salvare una pagina web in locale? Ecco qua kage, facile facile. (Scherzo, ovviamente).

Money quote: "You already know the problem. You hit "Save As" on a page you want to keep, and six months later you open it to find a blank screen, a spinner that never stops, or a copy that still tries to phone home to an analytics server that no longer exists. The page was never really yours. It was a thin client for someone else's JavaScript.

kage takes the other road. It drives a real browser, lets the page finish doing whatever it does, grabs the finished result, and then rips every script out of it. No tracking, no network calls, no surprises. Just .html files you can open straight off disk, hand to a friend, or pack into a single file and forget about for a decade."

https://github.com/tamnd/kage

Tutto sul complesso sistema iconografico per comunicare concetti senza usare le parole scritte. In Giappone. Oh yeah. Strati su strati di complessità.

Money quote: "A place where symbols without words naturally arise is in the world of vehicles. Every manufacturer of cars around the world puts a logo at the front of their car as a symbol of who made it. What’s interesting is that Japan takes things a little bit further with their police and fire services.

The police system in Japan is sort of a hybrid national-local system, where there is a national organization that oversees all the police, but most of the actual work is still done and organized locally. Fire systems, just like a lot of other places in the world, are mostly local.

And yet both of these systems have established some national standards. For police cars, one of those is a golden badge depicting the rising sun with rays radially around it. It is placed on police cars in lieu of the standard front badge."

https://arun.is/blog/japan-symbols/

Per le nuove generazioni: la storia di Calvin e Hobbes e il prezzo che il loro creatore, Bill Watterson, ha pagato per mantenere la propria integrità.

Money quote: "This is how he likes it. The simpler things are, the more control he has over the work — which is the hill on which he’ll die and take everyone with him if he has to. For Watterson, it’s a question of maintaining artistic integrity. He derives an enormous amount of pride from the fact that he can say, “I write every word, draw every line, color every Sunday strip, and paint every book illustration myself.” The strip is a “one-man operation” because he’s convinced it’s the only way to preserve the integrity of his craft.

For Watterson, craft has never been a side dish to the main course. It’s inextricable from the truths he wants to express and the meaning he hopes his work might have for its readers. It’s his belief that half a century ago, the best comics were more than amusing to look at; they were beautiful and undoubtedly counted as capital-A Art. Here in the mid-nineties, he “can’t think of a single strip today that comes close to that standard of craftsmanship”."

https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/calvin-and-hobbes-and-the-price-of

Alla fine, tutto torna.

Money quote: "arry and Sergey’s 2004 letter to investors said “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” However, laying off 12,000 workers, despite having a $114B war chest, $60B in 2022 profit and growing revenue[1], was a conventional act of a company complying with minority investor demands and copying other companies, even down to their PR wording.

I was one of the workers laid off."

https://david.newgas.net/my-google-epitaph/