Spider-Man: Brand New Day, la recensione - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2026/07/spider-man-brand-new-day-recensione-film-marvel/

Poul Anderson coltivava mondi di fantascienza - il mio racconto su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2026/07/poul-anderson-fantascienza/

I soldi che chi vende le AI sta facendo oppure no (spoiler alert: non li sta facendo)

Money quote: "TRACKING THE SPEND AND REVENUE OF FRONTIER AI COMPANIES (JULY 2026)."

https://isaiprofitable.com

Numero speciale Mostly Weekly 387 "L'oroscopo delle generazioni". Come ogni oroscopo, fa danni: un viaggio tra Steve Jobs, Beppe Grillo, il Drugo e Harry Potter per arrivare al motivo per cui la mia generazione non sopporta più quella dopo

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/387/

Lettura per la domenica

La storia agrodolce di un uomo che ripara i guard-rail negli Usa raccontata dal New Yorker.

Money quote: "Melissa remembers watching Hannah dress up for a party on Halloween in 2016. She was going as an obscure character from a live-action role-playing game. Hannah had told her parents that the party was in Athens, and at first they had assumed she meant Athens, Tennessee, about forty minutes away. But the party was actually in Athens, Georgia: a four-hour drive. That night, Hannah and a friend set out in Hannah’s Volvo S80, a car her father had picked because it had a good safety rating. “I remember it like a snapshot,” Melissa told me. “Hannah putting on red lipstick and a white shirt, looking in the mirror across the hall. She was super chipper. It was a singsongy goodbye.”"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/27/one-mans-quest-to-fix-every-deadly-guardrail

archivio: https://archive.is/2OzTd

Nel dubbio su come i giornali italiani avessero tutti quanti tirato fuori gli spiegoni sui pirocumuli francesi, ecco uno degli originali dai quali i nostri epigoni tutti discendono

Money quote: "A huge fire in southwest France has generated the country's first recorded pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud.

Such clouds can only be seen during huge wildfires, and are often reported in Canada during wildfire season, most recently during the Boston Bar fire in B.C.

Here's how these special clouds form and how they can make wildfires worse."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/pyrocumulonimbus-explainer-9.7287545

Il mondo del design si interroga su come fare il suo lavoro nell'epoca delle AI. Ci sono sistemi per inquadrare il problema.

Money quote: "In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman described two modes of thought. System 1 is quick, intuitive and heavily shaped by past experience. System 2 is slower and more deliberate: stop, examine the problem, consider the evidence, then decide."

https://andybudd.com/archives/2026/07/designing-fast-and-slow

Apple ha fatto partire una nuova strategia di vendita degli iPhone con la formula del noleggio, pensata per contrastare l'esplosione dei prezz (in pratica pagandolo a rate e non avendone il possesso sembra di fare un affarone). Secondo Wired è una cattiva idea.

Aggiuno che, se devo giudicare Klarna dalla cavolo di terribile app per tenere le tessere del supermercato, si meriterebbero di essere chiusi stasera stessa.

Money quote: "Apple Upgrade is a partnership with the financial company Klarna, known for its buy-now, pay-later services. If you sign up, you can pay a monthly fee to get a brand-new device. After a year or 24 months, you can keep paying the monthly fee but swap the hardware for something new. If you want something sooner, there’s a fee to swap devices before the 12-month mark."

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-products-are-all-just-subscription-services-now/

archivio: https://archive.is/jHHEm

I miei consigli: 5 libri (e mezzo) di fantascienza da leggere questa estate - Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2026/08/libri-fantascienza-estate-2026-leggere/

Una rivista amatoriale, Northern Earth, racconta le storie, be', del Nord. Affrontando i temi (strutture megalitiche, per esempio) che lentamente percolano nell'immaginario, creando in ultima analisi delle strane percezioni del mondo. Almeno, così sembra.

Money quote: "The question of why megalithic structures are situated where they are is an area of research that is developing and is open to more detailed examination. The surrounding landscape of each megalithic structure is obviously its immediate context. There, a trained or sensitive eye can find evidence for the builders’ concerns and decisions. Very often the local horizon is combined with sunrise and sunset events, weaving the circle’s structure into the landscape and the heavens. This article will demonstrate that the local topographies of two megalithic structures on each side of the Irish Sea were extended at scale as part of a cohesive network of sites aimed at linking widely spread communities."

https://northernearth.co.uk/near-and-far-horizons-megalithic-networks-across-the-irish-sea/

Ma quali vacanze! Ecco Mostly Weekly 388: le parole, le lingue e le macchine; dalla mia tastiera che mette virgole all'AI che scrive le leggi, passando per l'esperanto, mezzo milione di galassie e Raymond Chandler

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/388/

Letture per la domenica

Forse l'interlocutore tra i più lucidi, in questo momento, per inquadrare il tema dell'intelligenza artificiale: padre Paolo Benanti.

Money quote: "«Chi controlla il software controlla tutto», osserva Benanti. È il potere della software-defined reality, della realtà definita dal software. Per spiegare quanto questo tema riguardi la vita quotidiana, il professore di Etica della tecnologia alla Luiss Guido Carli, a Roma, e alla Seattle University, negli States, ricorre a un’altra immagine. «Se domani volete entrare all’aeroporto di Fiumicino con un’arma, non potete farlo. Con l’Intelligenza artificiale, invece, potenzialmente sì. Con tre righe di codice si potrebbe trasformare perfino uno smartphone in un’arma, modificando il funzionamento della batteria fino a provocarne l’incendio»."

https://www.vita.it/padre-benanti-intelligenza-artificiale-contro-i-nuovi-algoritmi-del-potere-serve-una-governance-condivisa/

Argomento scivoloso: le bibite di Gesù

Money quote: "It is notable that while Christ has apparently been putting energy drinks on people’s hearts lately, he has not been putting it on many of their hearts to donate part of the proceeds to feeding the poor. Apparently, the main mission here is brand awareness.

Unfortunately, after trying the Yahweh energy drink, I don’t feel especially compelled to convert. If the goal is evangelism, Blessed Berry, with its heavy, medicinal notes, may not be the strongest missionary. In fact, the aftertaste lingered with some insistence, like Jehovah’s Witnesses evangelizing at your door even after you told them you were agnostic.

If you want a better-tasting first Christian energy drink, I recommend Preachin’ Peach from Agape."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/04/jesus-christian-energy-drink

Un ragionamento sul "nostos", l'idea del ritorno, quello omerico, bellamente mischiato alla "saudade" per tenere assieme un improbabile percorso sulla nostalgia della gioventù. Potenza del marketing dell'Odissea.

Money quote: "Because English has only a few words for nostalgia-adjacent emotions — like heartache, homesickness, or sorrow — English speakers tend to grasp thirstily for what other languages have to say. And other languages certainly seem to have richer accounts of a complex emotion.

In Portuguese, you have “saudade,” which is a deep, melancholic longing for something or someone now lost. The Germans have “Sehnsucht” for that visceral ache that comes on when you yearn for the past, or something lost. In Welsh, “Hiraeth” is a more geographical kind of nostalgia that pines for a certain land and home country. And, of course, you have the Japanese. That sense of drifting pathos for a world that’s left behind is very Japanese. And you’ll find a cottage-industry obsession with the concept of “mono no aware,” or “the pathos of things.”"

https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/how-the-wrong-kind-of-nostalgia-can-endanger-a-society/

Le alternative ai magnifici tre (Linux, macOS e Windows). Perché ci sono almeno 4 alternative (io preferisco Haiku)

Money quote: "Most people who step outside of Windows and macOS assume Linux is the only alternative worth taking seriously. That's understandable, since Linux has a loyal community and many different distros. The operating systems covered here each exist because they solve something Linux can't. They also do it on hardware you already own without handing data to Microsoft or Apple."

https://www.howtogeek.com/linux-isnt-your-only-escape-from-windows-and-macoshere-are-4-alternatives/

Avete presente l'eclisse di sole? Iberia ha auto una bella idea e ha portato un po di giornalisti e altre persone in volo per vederla. Qui il servizio video di El Pais. Divertente e veloce.

Money quote: "Este 12 de agosto, 99 personas sabían que las nubes no iban a impedirles ver el eclipse solar total en España, porque iban a poder observarlo por encima de ellas. Todos ellos viajaban en el vuelo especial que Iberia ha fletado para contemplar este fenómeno a 10.000 metros de altura."

https://elpais.com/videos/2026-08-13/vivir-el-eclipse-solar-desde-un-avion-no-se-puede-explicar-con-terminos-cientificos-es-un-sentimiento.html

Hugh Howey, l'autore dei libri da cui è tratta Silo, la serie di Apple Tv, fa un ragionamento interessante sulla carriera di uno scrittore di genere. In pratica, a parità di talento e determinazione, la fortuna del periodo storico. Lui ha iniziato quando scrivere era ancora difficile ma pubblicare e vendere era diventato facile (Amazon con il self publishing), e ha fatto il suo prima dell'arrivo dell'AI che sta rendendo facile anche scrivere.

Senza stigmatizzare l'uso delle AI per scrivere, fa anche delle previsioni sul futuro (molto interessanti, vi lascio leggere l'articolo e non le spoilero).

Money quote: "I’ve always felt bad for authors who lived and worked before 2007. The choices unavailable to them made life harder than it needed to be. Getting their work out into the world was brutal. After KDP, that brutality became a choice, not a necessity.

I now feel awful for anyone who wants to tell a story post-2026. You will forever be doubted. If you love an em dash the way I do, or you like flowy run-on sentences like I do, if you grew up reading Proust to let the words flow over you in all their glory, if you memorized sonnets so the iambic pentameter would soak into your bones, you’re gonna sound like a fucking bot.

Less than 20 years. More like 10, honestly. You can argue that 2014-ish was when self-publishing became legit and 2024-ish was when the tools made AI writing viable. A decade where it was easy in the ways it should be and hard in the ways it should be. That’s insane. Ten years across the one-hundred-thousand years of language."

https://hughhowey.com/the-end-of-an-era/