La Microsoft House dietro casa mia è una specie di cattedrale del lavoro senza più un posto. Lo pensavo prima della pandemia e a maggior ragione anche adesso. Il parallelo tra il lavoro straniante delle archistar e i processi produttivi delle multinazionali non mi è venuto benissimo, questo è uno di quegli articoli con un po' troppe cose dentro che avrei dovuto "lavorare" di più. Però, ehi: è tutto gratuito, quindi di cosa ci lamentiamo?

https://antoniodini.com/microsoft-house/

Non amo particolarmente Londra e non mi piacciono le cose troppo "meccanicose", ma questa mappa illuminata delle linee della metro di Londra fatta con lucette sulla basetta di un circuito stampato è una delizia

Money quote: "Fancy a tube map with a difference? How about one made from a circuit board – with lights that show live train movements?

I can hear the geeky squeals of delight already."

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2020/06/23/check-out-this-london-tube-map-made-from-a-working-circuit-board

La tesi di dottorato perduta di Dennis Ritchie, ritrovata

Money quote: "It may come as some surprise to learn that until just this moment, despite Ritchie’s much-deserved computing fame, his dissertation—the intellectual and biographical fork-in-the-road separating an academic career in computer science from the one at Bell Labs leading to C and Unix—was lost. Lost? Yes, very much so in being both unpublished and absent from any public collection; not even an entry for it can be found in Harvard’s library catalog nor in dissertation databases."

https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies-lost-dissertation

Concordo sulla tesi di quest'articolo: dovremmo rileggere il Paradiso Perduto di John Milton

Money quote: "Milton gained a reputation in Europe for his erudition and rhetorical prowess in defence of England’s radical new regime; at home he came to be regarded as a prolific advocate for the Commonwealth cause. But his deteriorating eyesight limited his diplomatic travels. By 1654, Milton was completely blind. For the final 20 years of his life, he would dictate his poetry, letters and polemical tracts to a series of amanuenses – his daughters, friends and fellow poets."

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170419-why-paradise-lost-is-one-of-the-worlds-most-important-poems

Auguri di un sereno 2022 a tutti!

A qualcuno servono delle mappe?

Money quote: "Dungeon Scrawl is a mapping tool developed by Keir, aka @ProbableTrain. It aims to be an easy-to-grasp tool with a high skill ceiling, empowering artists by automatically taking care of the most time-consuming stuff. Thanks to overwhelming support from Patreon and elsewhere, he is able to release it for free for everyone. Enjoy scrawling!"

https://dungeonscrawl.com

Un corso base per imparare a usare le espressioni regolari, aka regex. Utilissimo

Money quote: "Regular expressions are extremely useful in extracting information from text such as code, log files, spreadsheets, or even documents. And while there is a lot of theory behind formal languages, the following lessons and examples will explore the more practical uses of regular expressions so that you can use them as quickly as possible."

https://regexone.com

Una bella riflessione sulla consapevolezza e sulla capacità di occuparsi veramente di quello che vorremmo: della cosa vera

Money quote: "When you examine case studies of people who have had major accomplishments, you expect there to be some trick or shortcut. Some amazing technique they used that others weren’t clever enough to recognize.

More often, however, the strategy used is dead simple: doing the real thing."

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/05/04/do-the-real-thing/

Siamo solo al 3 gennaio ma The Language Nerds ha già vinto tutto

Si finisce per parlare spesso di qualità del software, da queste parti. Quasi sempre in maniera critica. Per fortuna c'è ancora chi ha dell'entusiasmo.

Money quote: "No, seriously. It’s so simple I thought I missed something. But no. After you run that binary, you have a fully operational node of Syncthing. It’s ready to sync with any other Syncthing node, no other setup necessary. There’s no installers, no package management (but there are packages if you want to), no registration, no email, no logins, no password creation, no 2FA, no consents, no user agreements. Just download and run. Heck, setting up autostart on Linux server was more complex than just running the app itself!"

https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing

Cosa significa hackerare qualcosa? Significa trovare nuovi modi per usarlo, oppure raggiungere lo scopo che ci si è prefissi in maniera più diretta. Ad esempio, l'uso di "vs" nelle ricerche con Google...

Money quote: "This got me thinking — if you passed the autocompleted terms from a Google ‘vs’ search back into another ‘vs’ search and kept going, you’d end up with a pretty graph network of terms that are linked."

https://medium.com/applied-data-science/the-google-vs-trick-618c8fd5359f

Personalmente identifico il cambiamento con "la fine della famiglia". Mi riferisco alla mia famiglia di origine, borghese urbana e laureata, innestata in una serie di gerarchie sociali fatte da funzioni e altre famiglie. Tutti i ruoli, le combinazioni e soprattutto i giudizi su questo venivano di conseguenza. Adesso, non è più così. L'eccentrico è diventato il nuovo centro.

Money quote: "My real education as a teenager was:

1. Books I chose to read myself
2. Learning to program computers (taught myself)
3. Video games (found them myself)
4. Maths (school)"

https://nabeelqu.co/education

Sui negozi fisici della Apple ho anche scritto un libro. Ma su quelli di Microsoft non ho mai avuto l'ispirazione. Adesso che è annunciata la chiusura di tutta la catena (un centinaio di punti vendita nel mondo) capisco anche perché

Money quote: "L’annuncio della multinazionale di Windows spiega le motivazione di questa scelta indicando alcune ragioni principali: la continua espansione e successo dei negozi online e digitali e lo stop forzato per Coronavirus che ha comunque spinto dipendenti ed esperti di prodotto e tecnologie Microsoft a svolgere il proprio lavoro di assistenza e supporto ai clienti direttamente online e da remoto, attività che continueranno ad eseguire dagli uffici delle varie sedi Microsoft."

https://www.macitynet.it/microsoft-chiude-tutti-i-suoi-negozi-nel-mondo/

L'identità, l'anonimato, la rete, il giornalismo

Money quote: "I have a lot of reasons for staying pseudonymous. First, I’m a psychiatrist, and psychiatrists are kind of obsessive about preventing their patients from knowing anything about who they are outside of work. You can read more about this in this Scientific American article – and remember that the last psychiatrist blogger to get doxxed abandoned his blog too. I am not one of the big sticklers on this, but I’m more of a stickler than “let the New York Times tell my patients where they can find my personal blog”. I think it’s plausible that if I became a national news figure under my real name, my patients – who run the gamut from far-left to far-right – wouldn’t be able to engage with me in a normal therapeutic way. I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog

Woody Allen è famoso per voler dormire da solo, e non condividere neanche il gabinetto con altre persone (neanche a fasi alterne). In passato però, il sonno e la gestione della propria intimità erano molto diversi

Money quote: "It was not uncommon for strangers and traveling companions to share a bed while on the road. Etiquette dictated that to ensure relative tranquility when sharing a bed with strangers, a bedmate was to lie still, not hog the blankets, and generally keep to one’s self. But that didn’t always work. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams spent a night sharing a bed at a New Jersey inn which was largely passed bickering over whether to keep the window open or closed."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/communal-sleeping-history-sharing-bed

Un altro sciroppato che si ipnotizza e lavora come una specie di rullo compressore.

Money quote: "We also know and have experienced the feeling of flow. The moment when you’re fully focused on a task. You lose all sense of time, and everything seems to flow effortlessly; you forget everything around you and have a feeling of control over the task. This rewarding feeling of flow is best described by Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”"

https://azeria-labs.com/the-importance-of-deep-work-the-30-hour-method-for-learning-a-new-skill/

C'è un'azienda americana che sta lavorando per diventare la piattaforma che gestisce l'autenticazione delle identità digitali. E vuole espandersi fuori dagli aeroporti.

Money quote: "At its core, Clear monetizes trust. When the company verifies a person’s identity, whether that be to enter an airport, a stadium, or buy a beer at a concession stand, Clear is affirming that they are who they say they are. Right now, this verification process means priority access to an airport or stadium security line as a trusted Clear member. But in the future, documents and slideshows reviewed by OneZero suggest Clear plans to be the company that verifies your identity every time you would have swiped a credit card, shown your ID at a door, or handed over a health insurance card."

https://onezero.medium.com/clear-conquered-u-s-airports-now-it-wants-to-own-your-entire-digital-identity-15d61076e44d

Se nasceva adesso Dario Argento la figlia l’avrebbe chiamata Luna Vittoria Rossa

Money quote: "We report analysis results of the reflectance spectra (0.48 to 3.2 μm) acquired by the Chang’E-5 lander, which provides vital context of the returned samples from the Northern Oceanus Procellarum of the Moon. We estimate up to 120 parts per million (ppm) of water (OH + H2O) in the lunar regolith, which is mostly attributed to solar wind implantation."

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl9174

Siccome "Mostly, I Write", il saggio di questa tipa rende ahimè abbastanza bene come mi sento e come opero più spesso che no.

Money Quote: "I want to go do something else, I want to water the plants, I want to sit next to the plants and write my essay in a notebook with a fountain pen. But first I have to see if someone is angry, if someone has misunderstood me, if something needs clarifying. Things might explode at any moment. I pour out the last half cup of coffee in the pot and drink it black and cold. I need to stay focused. Something may happen."

https://lithub.com/someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet-a-study-in-pandemic-distraction

Spazzatura, musei della spazzatura, mostre della spazzatura, ricerche sulla spazzatura, archeologia con la spazzatura, isole piene di spazzatura, gente che seppellisce la spazzatura, gente che la tira dal finestrino. Cosa ci sta succedendo?

Money quote: "Garbage is a snapshot of what people chose to consume in a particular place and time, and archaeologists often lean on rusted, smashed-up odds and ends to narrate stories about how people lived. Along the remains of old Route 66 that slice through Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, for example, archaeologists have combed through mounds of trash that built up 10 to 15 feet from the road—roughly the distance that someone could lob a bottle out of the window of a zipping car. This boundary earned the name the “throw zone,” and its cracked contents revealed travelers’ preferred brands of soda and beer."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mackinac-island-trash-dump

In questo articolo del buon Alberto Brambilla su Fumettologica si fa un percorso storico fondamentale per chiarire cosa siano e come funzionino le comic strips americane. Imprescindibile, ben scritto e molto interessante.

Money quote: "È quasi impossibile per chi frequenta i fumetti non avere in mente questo formato, semplicissimo e versatile, che ha costituito la colonna portante dell’industria statunitense per quasi un secolo. Eppure, forse proprio per la loro ricchezza, non è facile destreggiarsi al loro interno. Le strip hanno una serie di tecnicismi, di formati propri, di regole di narrazione e impaginazione che rischiano di disorientare il neofita.

Questa guida è stata pensata proprio per fornire ai lettori di Fumettologica qualche punto cardinale, in modo da poter apprezzare al meglio una raccolta di Krazy Kat, dei Peanuts, di Prince Valliant o di Little Nemo."

https://www.fumettologica.it/2020/05/strisce-fumetti-cosa-sono/