Come usare due sim fisiche su iPhone 12 - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/come-usare-due-sim-fisiche-su-iphone-12/

Cortana, che fa simpatia perché è l'AI amichetta di Master Chief in Halo, sta cambiando pelle. E chi ci si era abituato, avrà una brutta sorpresa, soprattutto se ha comprato un'automobile con la signorina come assistente vocale.

Money quote: "Microsoft has been transitioning Cortana from a personal digital assistant similar to Alexa and Google Nest to more of an embedded productivity aide tied into Microsoft 365 for the past few years. And with hands-free/touch-free scenarios becoming more important as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, the importance of voice interaction to handle work tasks is only growing."

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-end-support-for-cortana-app-on-mobile-harman-kardon-speakers-in-early-2021/

A lungo tutto è stato gratuito. Se le nostre ambizioni digitali erano modeste, si poteva fare praticamente di tutto su Internet senza spendere una lira a parte la connessione. Alle volte neanche quella. Poi è venuta fuori la storia del tracciamento e della violazione continua della privacy delle persone. Adesso la festa sta finendo. Un articolo da incorniciare.

Money quote: "There is, they say, no such thing as a free lunch. But on the internet, there was no such thing as a paid lunch. It was all free lunches, all the time. Every site was a digital all-you-could-eat buffet, and while software may have been eating the world, the world was eating up software as well. With so much available for free, the idea of charging for news or emails or photo storage was untenable. If you charged for your service, it simply wouldn’t be used. A number of now-defunct paid services discovered this the hard way. “You weary giants of flesh and steel,” John Perry Barlow wrote in 1996 in A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, “You are not welcome among us.” It seemed the laws of economics weren’t welcome either."

https://onezero.medium.com/we-have-reached-the-end-of-free-6a21698446e2

C'è gente che non riesce a immaginare le cose. Letteralmente

Money quote: "Reading around the topic, I discovered that this quirk had been commented on before. Francis Galton, the first psychologist to measure the vividness of visual imagery, recognised in the 1880s that a small number of those whom he approached lacked imagery entirely: their ‘powers of visualisation … [were] zero’. But oddly this intriguing observation had lain in the long grass since. One reason might have been that it lacked a convenient name. So when my colleagues and I came to describe in the research literature the 21 individuals who’d made contact with us, we decided to coin one. At the suggestion of my classicist friend David Mitchell, we borrowed from Aristotle, who used the term ‘phantasia’ to denote the mind’s eye, adding the prefix ‘a’ to denote absence. In 2015, we published our paper reporting these participants as having ‘congenital aphantasia’."

https://psyche.co/ideas/when-the-mind-is-dark-making-art-is-a-thrilling-way-to-see

Sono convinto da tempo che non stiamo realmente sfruttando le possibilità offerte dal digitale: ragioniamo invece come se fossimo ancora in un mondo in cui i dati e le informazioni sono fatte di carta anziché di bit.

La pubblica amministrazione ne è un esempio eclatante, anche perché la sua funzione è quella di strutturare e facilitare la società, l’azione di governo, i servizi al cittadino. Una trasformazione diigitale profonda porrebbe nuovi problemi (l’inclusività) ma ne risolverebbe molti altri.

Ho provato a scrivere due o tre cose al riguardo qui:

https://antoniodini.com/codice-fiscale/

Ho appena fatto la seconda dose di vaccino: eterologa con Moderna dopo aver fatto AstraZeneca 81 giorni fa. Ho chiesto alla dottoressa se potevo farmi il selfie (si può, basta non riprenderla) e lei mi ha regalato anche la spilletta "vaccinato!". Se però il Wi-Fi a casa adesso non prende più mi arrabbio...

Scherzi a parte, vacciniamoci dai così la finiamo con questa cosa del Covid! Dai!

Secondo ITV News, Il secondo servizio di informazione britannico dopo la BBC, Amazon distrugge tonnellate di prodotti ogni giorno perché "è il suo modello di business". Pensateci, durante il primenday.

Money quote: "Under cover filming from inside Amazon's Dunfermline warehouse reveals the sheer scale of the waste: Smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers, top of the range headphones, computer drives, books galore, thousands of sealed face masks – all sorted into boxes marked “destroy”."

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millions-of-items-of-unsold-stock-in-one-of-its-uk-warehouses-every-year-itv-news-investigation-finds

La mancanza di movimento uccide milione di persone ogni anno e un miliardo e mezzo di persone sono al di sotto di tutti gli standard medici per il movimento fisico. È un problema che non ha tanto a che fare con il carattere e l'indole delle persone, è facile dire che uno "è pigro", quanto con come le persone vengono educate, come le alimentiamo, in quale clima e geografia vivono e soprattutto come progettiamo il mondo attorno a loro. (hint: male)

Money quote: "Inactivity is currently the world’s fourth leading cause of death. It's a problem often confused and conflated with laziness and personal choice, but in reality the issue is geographic, systemic, and woven into the structure of modern living.

In short: if we want to fix our increasingly sedentary world, we have to redesign it."

https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/03/30/inactivity-kills-millions-but-movement-is-the-miracle-pill-that-could-save-people-and-plan

Andare controcorrente. Fare giochi solo testuali, ad esempio.

Money quote: "In an industry obsessed with photorealistic graphics, focus-tested gameplay, and ever-evolving open worlds, Twine’s simplicity felt liberating. It imbued games with the DIY spirit of homemade zines, many of them weirder, sharper, and queerer than their mainstream counterparts. According to some of its biggest fans, Twine was nothing short of a revolution."

https://www.theverge.com/22321816/twine-games-history-legacy-art

La depressione stagionale è una condizione riconosciuta e legata alla lunghezza delle giornate, si chiama (con un acronimo giocherellone) SAD. Ma non c'è solo la depressione: altre funzioni cognitive vengono colpite, e la persona durante l'inverno semplicemente cambia. Oppure, cambia durante l'estate, dipende dai punti di vista.

Money quote: "The idea that our brains and emotions are affected by winter was first put on a scientific footing in the 1980s by biological psychiatrists in the United States, who described the condition known today as seasonal affective disorder, referred to as SAD by its wink of an abbreviation. People diagnosed with SAD are reported to have recurrent episodes of depression in winter that go away in spring as the days become longer. Looking back, one could wonder why SAD was first described in the US at latitudes where northern Europeans might travel to for a winter break, such as Rome or Madrid. Nevertheless, the notion spread north and south, and studies have subsequently documented patients with purported SAD in many countries."

https://psyche.co/ideas/what-happens-to-our-cognition-in-the-darkest-depths-of-winter

Proprio oggi è online l'anagrafe digitale. L'avevo provata in beta e avevo scritto questo lungo articolo ad aprile. Secondo me c'è ancora molta strada da fare, però la direzione è buona.

https://antoniodini.com/codice-fiscale/

A quanto pare c'è un vaccino di tipo tradizionale, Novavax, che è il migliore di tutti incluse le varianti di COVID. Ma nessuno ne parla.

Money quote: "At the end of January, reports that yet another COVID-19 vaccine had succeeded in its clinical trials—this one offering about 70 percent protection—were front-page news in the United States, and occasioned push alerts on millions of phones. But when the Maryland-based biotech firm Novavax announced its latest stunning trial results last week, and an efficacy rate of more than 90 percent even against coronavirus variants, the response from the same media outlets was muted in comparison. The difference, of course, was the timing: With three vaccines already authorized for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the nation is “awash in other shots” already, as the The New York Times put it."

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/06/novavax-now-best-covid-19-vaccine/619276/

Eccola! L’ultima puntata della prima stagione di Tilde. Quella in cui spieghiamo ben benino come abbiamo fatto a far condurre per la prima volta un podcast a una intelligenza artificiale, consigliamo qualche libro per l’estate e salutiamo tutti. Buon ascolto.

https://tilde.show/podcast-18/

Un tizio ha un'idea, la realizza e guadagna un botto di soldi. La solita storia.

Money quote: "Fast forward 7 years later, minus 6 days. I saw some people sharing screenshots of their iPhones after discovering that iOS 14 now allows you to add custom icons to your home screen using the Siri Shortcuts app. This was the first time you can really customize iOS, and it was catching on.

This is something people have been doing for years on jailbroken iOS and Android devices, except this time, you can do it natively on iOS."

https://tr.af/6

Cosa succederebbe ad Apple, se dovesse aprire l'App store agli "estranei" - la mia analisi per Wired

https://www.wired.it/economia/business/2021/06/25/apple-app-store-side-loading-app-scenari/

Altri 99 piccoli consigli non richiesti di Kevin Kelly. Semplicemente geniale

Money quote: "In all things — except love — start with the exit strategy. Prepare for the ending. Almost anything is easier to get into than out of."

https://kk.org/thetechnium/99-additional-bits-of-unsolicited-advice/

Non so se dopo aver letto questo articolo finiremo tutti in galera per terrorismo o cose del genere. Comunque questi tizi fanno armi al confine tra Pakistan e Afghanistan. (Se un giorno posterò foto su Instagram da quell'area, sappiate che sono prigioniero e non posso dirlo)

Money quote: "As of this year, 2019, Darra is the last main tribal arms market and manufacturing town that remains in the Pak-Afghan FATA region (Federally-Administered Tribal Region – FATA pronounced Faa-Thaa locally), the last vestige of old-world freedom in the area. Over the last few years, the other manufacturing hubs and markets in towns like Landi Kotal, just a few minutes’ drive from Torkham border on the Khyber Pass, have finally died out leaving a handful of shops and a couple of gunsmiths who repair the large number of firearms still found across the region. Peshawar’s massive arms bazaars have also disappeared leaving a few licensed manufacturers in a small industrial estate on its outskirts and a few licensed dealers scattered throughout the city."

https://silahreport.com/2019/08/23/the-last-gunsmiths-of-the-khyber-pass

Per adesso viviamo questo sogno tecnocratico tutto italiano in cui, magicamente, se tutti i nostri figli sapessero programmare, le aziende diventerebbero digitali e l'attrito provocato dalla burocrazia scomparirebbe. Semplificazione figlia dell'ignoranza di cosa sia la tecnologia.

Questa che segue è sì una storia di successo, ma su come si è riusciti creativamente a togliere attrito dall'interno di una azienda già totalmente digitale. Pensa te.

Money quote: "The major key to this was changing the role and goals of the infrastructure team. We rebranded it as Engineering Capabilities (Eng Cap), and their goal was to actually build tools to enable teams to do the sorts of things that the infrastructure team used to be responsible for. This way, as time goes on, the Eng Cap team becomes less and less responsible for manual work and transitions towards yet another development team with their own systems."

How developers can be their own operations department - Stack Overflow Blog
https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/05/24/how-developers-can-be-their-own-operations-department/

Visitare il primo Apple store di sempre in realtà virtuale. Grazie a un video promozionale voluto da Steve Jobs abbiamo tutto l'ambiente che è stavo digitalizzato da Apple e trasformato in un museo virtuale. Quanti ricordi...

Money quote: "The augmented reality model below represents a painstaking reconstruction of that original store, from the number and color of Macs on each table to the third-party software titles on the shelves. Artwork on the walls and window displays are true to the era. The model is designed to be as accurate as possible within the parameters of available information."

https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/19/20-years-apple-retail-stores-tysons-corner-augmented-reality/

Un articolo agghiacciante, non a caso di un giornale americano, che trasforma l'archeologia nel mediterraneo in un caso di suprematismo bianco e di nostalgia del colonialismo. Un regalo alla macchina culturale degli immaginari cinesi enorme e gratuito.

Il vero pericolo è il revisionismo culturale americano e la cancel culture che straborda in Europa. Non dimentichiamo che i principi centro di studio della classicità mediterranea sono tutti negli USA.

Money quote: " Why do we pay so much more attention in the West to Egyptian archaeology than to Chinese archaeology — even though each is important to our understanding of human history? Egypt strikes a chord partly because of a kind of romanticism that is a legacy of colonialism: Stories of Western archaeologists competing to find tombs in the 19th century riveted Western Europeans, and today’s news coverage is a product of that imperialist tradition (even though the team that discovered Aten was Egyptian). And the focus on discoveries in the Mediterranean world reflects a persistent bias situating the United States as a lineal descendant, via Europe, of Mediterranean civilizations. Links among ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome — and Egypt’s appearance in the Christian Bible — allowed ancient Egypt to be appropriated and incorporated into European heritage and therefore into the story of American identity."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/05/11/chinese-archaeology-egyptian-bias-sanxingdui/