L'apertura in video di un evento della Microsoft sta facendo impazzire Twitter.

Nel video i presentatori fanno il politicamente corretto all'estremo. Ammettono pubblicamente che il campus aziendale sorge su terra dei popoli nativi americani e poi si descrivono e descrivono come sono vestiti per l’inclusività e l’accessibilità. Tutto con tono da sciroppati, visto il format spumeggiante da conduzione sportiva e con Satja Nardella che guarda e sorride stile Monna Lisa accondiscendente dal una schermata minore.

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1456344147103653889?s=21

Fra le altre cose, il Land acknowledgments non è una pratica neutra e rappresentanti dei nativi americani ritengono che dovrebbe essere terminata.

https://theconversation.com/land-acknowledgments-meant-to-honor-indigenous-people-too-often-do-the-opposite-erasing-american-indians-and-sanitizing-history-instead-163787

Capire l’informazione e i dati: sembra ovvio ma in realtà ci sono tecniche sofisticate per farlo, ancora non lo si fa bene e altre tecniche vengono modellate, come le wavelets. Interessante

Money quote: “Wavelets are representations of short wavelike oscillations with different frequency ranges and shapes. Because they can take on many forms — nearly any frequency, wavelength and specific shape is possible — researchers can use them to identify and match specific wave patterns in almost any continuous signal. Because of their wide versatility, wavelets have revolutionized the study of complex wave phenomena in image processing, communication and scientific data streams.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-wavelets-allow-researchers-to-transform-and-understand-data-20211013/

Svegliarsi presto la mattina. Due risate con il The New Yorker

Money quote: “Nine Successful Renaissance-Era Popes Who Woke Up at 4 a.m. and the Completely Bonkers Inferences We Can Draw from Their Lives (Plus, My New Morning-Success Webinar!)”

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/winners-wake-up-early-every-article-ive-written-about-my-morning-routine

Oggi ci sono un po' di storie su Mario Tchou nell'anniversario della sua morte. Innanzitutto il libro di Ciaj Rocchi e Matteo Demonte, "La macchina zero", che ho recensito qui

https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/10/la-macchina-zero-olivetti-mario-tchou/

stasera viene presentato alle 18 all’ADI Design Museum in piazza Compasso d’Oro 1, 20154 a Milano.

Ho scritto varie volte in passato di Tchou, della Olivetti di quegli anni, e della storia dell'Elea 9003, il primo mainframe a transistor della storia che è made in Italy e di cui esiste ancora un esemplare funzionante. Sul mio sito:

https://antoniodini.com/sottsass-elea-9003/

Una storia da conoscere.

Il social network conosciuto una volta come Facebook ha fatto la mossa e vuole costruire il metaverso del futuro. L'idea di Meta (ex Facebook) e di altri attori parigrado è che ci sia un solo, titanico metaverso. Ora, io personalmente penso sia una clamorosa bolla per succhiare investimenti e dare una verniciata di nuovo a gente che altrimenti non saprebbe cosa dire, ma a parte questo, c'è anche chi argomenta ragionevolmente e sostiene che se ci deve essere un metaverso c'è già: è Minecraft. Molto più di Fortnite e Roblox.

Money quote: "The truth is, a thriving metaverse already exists. It’s incredibly high-functioning, with millions of people immersed in it for hours a day. In this metaverse, people have built uncountable custom worlds, and generated god knows how many profitable businesses and six-figure careers. Yet this terrain looks absolutely nothing the like one Zuckerberg showed off.

It’s Minecraft, of course."

https://debugger.medium.com/the-metaverse-is-already-here-its-minecraft-99c89ed8ba2

Cambiare vita, riprendere il controllo, ripartire. Cosa succede dopo la pandemia.

Money quote: "For me, I realized I wanted to be more present in my children’s lives. I no longer wanted to optimize my life with productivity apps and outsource activities to nannies (no shame though to those that do). I wanted to bask in all the mundane parenting things before my kids were all grown up. It irked me to think that my oldest may already be halfway through his “living-under-my-roof” chapter of his life.

And ideally, I wanted all this to happen without sacrificing my career. Or requiring my partner to hyper focus on his. I enjoyed what I did for a living and the financial freedom it afforded my family. My burnout wasn’t going to magically evaporate if I jumped to another company."

https://forge.medium.com/i-just-dont-want-to-be-busy-anymore-ac4dd37c8119

Il prossimo che mi parla di home office e banfa su quanto sia fico il suo, gli faccio vedere questo articolo e poi vediamo cos'ha da dirmi.

Money quote: "AN ARCHITECT IN BARCELONA HAS spent almost half a century renovating an old cement factory into his home office—and managed to create a gorgeous statement of functionality and enchantment along the way.

Known as “La Fábrica,” the modern-day fortress that houses Ricardo Bofill’s firm, Taller de Arquitectura, is a visual incongruence of exposed concrete and rich green flora. After purchasing the cement factory in 1973, Bofill transformed the eight spacious silos into a lofty interior for his workshop."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/la-fabrica-the-factory

Avete presente le tab dei browser? Le ha inventate un tizio. Qui viene intervistato e racconta come ha fatto e perché.

Money quote: "In the summer of 1997, a 25-year-old Pasadena software developer named Adam Stiles started working on a new web browser in his spare time. On January 4 of the following year, when Stiles published SimulBrowse, the first users would have noticed a peculiar feature at the bottom of the browser window: small grey boxes, each corresponding to a different webpage, which could be toggled between by clicking.

Those boxes were the first browser tabs, the now-standard unit of internet navigation."

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-the-man-who-invented-tabs

A quanto pare, se c'è un libro che dovremmo leggere, è questo.

Money quote: "The Book of Why

Pearl and Mackenzie’s book is really three books woven together:

1. An exposition of Pearl’s approach to causal inference based on graphs and the do-operator.

2. An intellectual history of this and other statistical approaches to causal inference.

3. A series of examples including some interesting discussions of smoking and cancer, going far beyond what you’ll generally see in a popular book or a textbook on statistics or causal inference."

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/08/book-pearl-mackenzie/

Il famoso articolo di Cory Doctorow su come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza

Money quote: "When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to take climate change seriously, we can get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds, or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case for us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more we’re boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us."

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

"The French Dispatch" è un gran film - la mia recensione super positiva per Fumettologica

https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/11/the-french-dispatch-wes-anderson-recensione/

Perché le stroncature, l'epoca dell'amore universale via internet, generano solo odio e minacce.

Money quote: "Later that month, fellow longtime critic Jeff Weiss, writing on behalf of The Washington Post, attended Post Malone’s inaugural Posty Fest in Dallas and did not care for it at all. (Opening lines: “Him? The most popular young artist in the most unpopular young nation is a rhinestone cowboy who looks like he crawled out of a primordial swamp of nacho cheese. Post Malone is a Halloween rental, a removable platinum grill, a Cubic Zirconium proposal on the jumbo screen of a last-place team.”) The result, as Weiss recounts now, was death threats, amid an avalanche of Twitter invective that included Post Malone’s own father referring to Weiss as “a petty little cuck.”"

https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2019/1/10/18176366/bad-reviews-jeff-weiss-a-o-scott-greta-van-fleet-post-malone-bohemian-rhapsody

La riflessione in realtà è più profonda e tocca un tema - quello della critica ma anche quello della manifestazione delle proprie idee - che è piuttosto complesso. Ci possiamo anche chiedere: alle volte forse è meglio non esprimere un giudizio negativo.

Ehi mi ero quasi dimenticato: come ogni domenica è uscita Mostly Weekly. Eccola qui.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/141/

La storia degli ultimi rinoceronti bianchi del mondo, raccontata da Sam Anderson, uno dei migliori giornalisti del New York Times di questa generazione.

Money quote: "In the last years of his life, Sudan had become a global celebrity, a conservation icon. He lived, like an ex-president, under the protection of 24/7 armed guards. Visitors traveled from everywhere to see him. Sudan was a perfect ambassador: He weighed more than two tons but had the personality of a golden retriever. He would let people touch him and feed him snacks — a whole carrot, clamped in his big boxy mouth, looked like a little orange toothpick. Tourists got emotional, because they knew they were laying hands on a singular creature, a primordial giant about to slide off into the void. Many hurried back to their cars and cried."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/magazine/the-last-two-northern-white-rhinos-on-earth.html

Programmare è contemporaneamente qualcosa di molto diverso da quello che la maggior parte delle persone pensa e qualcosa di molto più diffuso di quel che non si crede. Oltre ad avere a che fare più con i dati che non con il codice. Questo articolo è un interessante (e provocatorio) punto di partenza.

Money quote: "Code culture can be solipsistic and exhausting. Programmers fight over semicolon placement and the right way to be object-oriented or functional or whatever else will let them feel in control and smarter and more economically safe, and always I want to shout back: Code isn't enough on its own. We throw code away when it runs out its clock; we migrate data to new databases, so as not to lose one precious bit. Code is a story we tell about data."

https://www.wired.com/story/databases-coding-real-programming-myth

Chissà, magari un giorno mi rifaccio il sito e lo faccio tutto con questa grafica, che ne dite? Perché partendo dai font di una volta non ci vuole niente ad arrivare alle "interfacce pseudo-grafiche a riga di comando" stile Ms-Dos e Apple II (in alto a destra potete provare sei vecchi font quasi originali: in totale ce ne sono più di 200).

Money quote: "The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack started out with the idea of paying tribute to ancient PCs and their bitmapped, pre-GUI typography (if you can call it that). It was inspired by similar efforts that cover other vintage machines: classic system fonts from the Amiga, C64, Apple II, Mac, ZX Spectrum, Atari 8-bit/ST etc. are all celebrated. On the other hand, the IBM PC and its clones seem to get little love... except for that one VGA text mode font (which has been remade numerous times, to varying degrees of success).

This collection is here to remedy that, and to bring you pixel-perfect remakes of various type styles from text-mode era PCs - in modern, multi-platform, Unicode-compatible TrueType form (plus straight bitmap versions)."

https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/

Siete topolini da batteria? State scalando la gerarchia della fabbrica del formaggio? Qualche consiglio utile per capire come mai è più facile essere il capo di 4 persone che di una persona sola.

Money quote: "It’s easier to manage 4 people than it is to manage one person. The primary reason for this is the inherent over-reliance in the relationship between a manager and a single report. Let’s dive deeper."

https://staysaasy.com/management/2020/07/24/Managing-One-Person.html

Video di una conferenza a Stanford in cui si ripensa il computer. Cose facili oggi, insomma.

Money quote: "While our software systems have become increasingly elastic, the physical substrate available to run that software (that is, the computer!) has remained stuck in a bygone era of PC architecture. Hyperscale infrastructure providers have long since figured this out, building machines that are fit to purpose -- but those advances have been denied to the mass market. In this talk, we will talk about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side machine -- and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc&list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkiseTHzWj6vu

Mamma, ho perso la scorciatoia di tastiera, il mio articolo per Macity

Money quote: "Stamattina chi scrive si è seriamente innervosito: lavorando alla prova del nuovo MacBook Pro 14, che sarà pubblicata tra qualche giorno, siamo per l’ennesima volta incappati nel problema che abbiamo da due settimane: la nostra scorciatoia di tastiera preferita non funziona più. Il nuovo Mac usa Monterey, ci sta che cambino le scorciatoie di tastiera da una versione all’altra del sistema operativo, la cosa però è molto fastidiosa"

https://www.macitynet.it/mamma-ho-perso-la-scorciatoia-di-tastiera/

Sta emergendo un lato da Grande Fratello di Microsoft che prima non era così. Invece, adesso non solo fanno software tremendo, mal programmato e con pessime logiche e interfacce. Adesso stanno diventando anche quelli che controllano tutto

Money quote: "Teams that don’t communicate. Market disruption. Unidentified logjams. Employee burnout. Lost efficiency. As part of a group of data scientists, management consultants, and engineers at Microsoft, we help companies harness behavioral data to measure and solve these kinds of challenges — the kinds that firms feel but usually cannot see.

Four months ago we realized that our company, like so many others, was undergoing an immediate and unplanned shift to remote work. We all scrambled to set up home offices, situate newly homeschooled kids, juggle customer calls and cat antics, and, in many ways, rethink how to do our jobs."

https://hbr.org/2020/07/microsoft-analyzed-data-on-its-newly-remote-workforce

Le generazioni a un certo punto scoprono di essere invecchiate. I videogiochi sono un punto di riferimento perché dagli anni Ottanta sono una costante per molti contesti diversi. Anche il terrorismo in Irlanda del Nord.

Money 1uote: "Street Fighter II (1991) was just a game, in the sense that it was designed to eat as many coins as any other, yet it was so much more. It constituted an intense competitive arena in which the young people of the neighbourhood, and a multitude of others around the world, could test their skills and assert themselves. It also provided a sanctuary when you walked in and found you had the game all to yourself for as long as you could afford to play it. Play is a form of engagement with the world and a way of finding your place in it, a means of establishing community but also sovereignty; it offers you the ability to escape, be alone and enjoy it. "

https://frieze.com/article/street-fighter-ii-wasnt-just-game-it-was-portal