Alla fine, era meglio se eravamo tutti filosofi. Potevamo pensare l'impensabile.

Money quote: "Ethicists, at least within their academic work, are encouraged to be skeptical of intuition and the naturalistic fallacy (the idea that values can be derived simply from facts). Philosophers are also familiar with tools such as thought experiments: hypothetical and contrived descriptions of events that can be useful for clarifying particular intuitions or the implications of a philosophical claim. These two factors make it unsurprising that philosophers often publicly adopt positions that are unintuitive and outside mainstream thought, and that they might not personally endorse."

https://aeon.co/ideas/philosophy-can-make-the-previously-unthinkable-thinkable

Secondo me era tutta una scusa o ha scritto l'articolo perché in realtà non lo chiamava mai nessuno...

Money quote: "Nearly 4 months ago — after my relationship of 3 years ended — I decided to create a Tinder profile. The following is the story of that profile (in data). If you’re lazy and don’t care about the details, skip to the bottom and there is a Sankey diagram that sums up a lot."

https://towardsdatascience.com/117-days-of-tinder-in-data-755fe9ed853e

Un po' di previsioni tecnologiche per il 2019, tanto per farsi un'idea di come sia poi andata veramente (visto che siano a fare quelle del 2022)

Money quote: "As George Saville, the 17th-century English statesman and essayist, once wrote, “The best qualification of a prophet is to have a good memory.” It’s a fancy way of saying the past is prologue, and no vision for the near-future is possible without analyzing past trends. That’s what I’ve done to concoct these informed guesses about the state of tech in 2019.

https://medium.com/s/the-upgrade/the-technology-that-will-define-2019-48c041e98532

A partire dal 2 febbraio sarà distribuita in edicola in allegato a Corriere della Sera e Gazzetta dello Sport, e in collaborazione con Mondadori, una nuova collana settimanale dedicata ai romanzi di fantascienza intitolata Urania: 70 anni di futuro.

👉https://www.fumettologica.it/2022/01/uscite-collana-urania-corriere-gazzetta/

Siamo tutti digitali, sort of. E le immagini si moltiplicano. Serve ordinarle per poterle trovare. E qui entrano in campo un po' di scelte di campo e alcune finezze. Vediamo la prospettiva del professionista.

Money quote: "All that data is easy to generate and it’s quite common for photographers to share their results every single day online. But there’s one thing that still require some effort, something that many photographers overlook.
Archiving"

https://medium.com/@zellersamuel/ten-good-reasons-why-you-need-an-archive-if-youre-a-photographer-6f3117113f76

Rimanda, ma con criterio 🍪 https://www.internazionale.it/opinione/arthur-c-brooks/2022/01/01/strategia-rimandare

Possiamo abbandonare la nostra preziosa e costosa macchina fotografica e usare solo il nostro prezioso e costoso telefonino? Nel 99% dei casi sì, sostiene quest'uomo.

Money quote "Getting ready for this trip I was seriously nervous. I’d never traveled without at least one dedicated camera and yet here I was, making the decision to leave my beloved FujiFilm X-T20 home. Trusting that all of my precious photos would only be shot on my smartphone was a serious leap of faith. Ireland was shot on Nikon, Norway on Olympus, and Canon was my wing-man through Mexico and a large chunk of mainland Europe. Dumping all of that gear and going solo on my iPhone was going to take more than nerves of steel, it was going to take some serious testing. I needed to build up some faith that the phone would perform up to a reasonable standard before I was willing to give it a go. So, as a test, I decided to use a family vacation to Walt Disney World in Florida to figure out if this was going to work long term."

https://medium.com/@robert.rittmuller/walt-disney-world-and-the-end-of-dedicated-cameras-89289a91aceb

Si parla sempre della censura cinese, che io trovo affascinante soprattutto dal punto di vista di come si ottiene. Se ci pensate, il censore è una persona ed è esposto proprio al tipo di "male" da cui vuole curare la società. Ecco, questo è uno dei pochissimi articoli che racconta la storia da questo punto di vista. Cioè, è l'unico articolo che in effetti racconta una storia.

Money quote: "Mr. Li works for Beyondsoft, a Beijing-based tech services company that, among other businesses, takes on the censorship burden for other companies. He works in its office in the city of Chengdu. In the heart of a high-tech industrial area, the space is bright and new enough that it resembles the offices of well-funded start-ups in tech centers like Beijing and Shenzhen. It recently moved to the space because customers complained that its previous office was too cramped to allow employees to do their best work.

“Missing one beat could cause a serious political mistake,” said Yang Xiao, head of Beyondsoft’s internet service business, including content reviewing. (Beyondsoft declined to disclose which Chinese media or online companies it works for, citing confidentiality.)"

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/business/china-internet-censor.html

Cari i miei paranoici digitali: ripulite casa vostra da tutte le cimici digitali e le videocamere nascoste. Su su...

Money quote: "The simple strategies that we are going to show you will effectively clear most rooms for hidden cameras and bugs without having to use super expensive countersurveillance gear or an outside company."

https://www.senteltechsecurity.com/blog/post/how-to-find-hidden-cameras/

È un tema quasi metafisico ma potrebbe avere delle conseguenze enormi. Si sta spaccando in due il mondo degli sviluppatori front-end.

Money quote: "Let’s say there is a divide happening in front-end development. I feel it, but it's not just in my bones. Based on an awful lot of written developer sentiment, interviews Dave Rupert and I have done on ShopTalk, and in-person discussion, it’s, as they say... a thing.

The divide is between people who self-identify as a (or have the job title of) front-end developer, yet have divergent skill sets."

https://css-tricks.com/the-great-divide/

La mia recensione per Fumettologica: bellissimo fumetto!

https://www.fumettologica.it/2022/01/kowloon-generic-romance-jun-mayuzuki-manga/

Contrordine compagni: basta assoluti, cercate tutti la via di mezzo (il revival di Tony Blair, praticamente)

Money quote: "Many of us ask ourselves such questions. Work is a conundrum. We cannot measure the consequences of our choices against the alternatives that have passed us by. We can only try to be thoughtful and humble, empathise, observe others – sometimes a painful exercise – and speculate about what might have been."

https://aeon.co/essays/dont-quit-your-day-job-the-benefits-of-being-a-bifurcator

Portate gli occhiali? (io no). Sappiate che vi stanno derubando. Tipo, davvero.

Money quote: "It’s a question I get asked frequently, most recently by a colleague who was shocked to find that his new pair of prescription eyeglasses cost about $800.
Why are these things so damn expensive?

The answer: Because no one is doing anything to prevent a near-monopolistic, $100-billion industry from shamelessly abusing its market power.

Prescription eyewear represents perhaps the single biggest mass-market consumer ripoff to be found."

https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-why-are-eyeglasses-so-expensive-20190122-story.html

Posso testimoniare, se non altro perché sono passato un po' di volte da delle età con il 9, che in effetti qualcosa di vero c'è.

Money quote: "I first came across the concept of the “nine-ender” in Daniel Pink’s recent book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. The term was coined by marketing psychologists Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield, who in 2015 published a paper arguing that people who are staring down the end of a decade engage in “meaning-seeking behaviors” — both positive and self-destructive — more frequently than they do at other ages.
It started with greeting cards. The researchers wondered: Why is the supermarket greeting-card rack dominated by cards commemorating big milestone birthdays?"

https://medium.com/s/reasonable-doubt/the-mysterious-impact-of-being-an-age-that-ends-in-9-dcb7e8ec3602

Addio Ron Goulart, grande della fantascienza passato anche per il fumetto - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://www.fumettologica.it/2022/01/ron-goulart-morto-fantascienza/

Ritorniamo ai fondamentali: altro che robot intelligenti, perdi il lavoro se sei senza una laurea

Money quote: "The forecast of an America where robots do all the work while humans live off some yet-to-be-invented welfare program may be a Silicon Valley pipe dream. But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/business/economy/productivity-inequality-wages.html

Una regina africana tremenda, potentissima, solida, temuta. Capace di tenere a bada i portoghesi nell'epoca della massima schiavitù. La sua storia è uno spaccato del mondo alla fine del Cinquecento visto da un'altra prospettiva. Che storia enorme.

Money quote: "Njinga was her father’s clear favorite throughout her childhood. She was 10 when Mbande became the ngola, or king, of Ngondo (“Angola” comes from the Portuguese misunderstanding the meaning of ngola and thinking it was the name of the kingdom). He often involved her in his official duties: she attended many of the legal councils that her father oversaw, received military training, and participated in the ritual activities that were so vital to their culture. The fact that she was a girl and not even the child of his principal wife made all of this very unusual, but then again maybe this explains why Mbande a Ngola felt comfortable to display his preference so publicly. It would have been unheard of to lavish that kind of individual attention on any of his sons; to do so meant risking jealousy not only among them, but also among their mothers, many of whom came from powerful families. A daughter, though, was different — for one thing, no one really viewed her as direct competition. Besides, everyone agreed that Njinga was special. She outperformed her brothers in every capacity, including with the battle axe, which was the royal weapon of choice."

https://longreads.com/2019/10/03/queens-of-infamy-njinga/

Un sistema per interrogare direttamente il database di Foto sui dispositivi Apple. Perché in realtà c'è parecchio, ben nascosto.

Money quote: "As with most Apple software, Photos uses SQLite under the hood. The underlying database is undocumented and clearly not intended as a public API, but it exists. And I’ve wanted to gain access to what’s in it for years."

https://simonwillison.net/2020/May/21/dogsheep-photos/

Le emozioni sono virus e possono far ammalare le persone, soprattutto quelle giovani

Money quote: "When we hear the word ‘contagion’, our minds are immediately drawn to the viruses and bacteria spread through coughing and sneezing. This narrow view prioritises the biological, yet contagion is not unique to the spread of microorganisms. There is a growing body of scientific evidence showing that our internal mental states, including our emotions, might also be socially transmissible. Understanding the nature and dynamics of this emotional contagion is crucial in highlighting how social interactions might impact on our wellbeing. Within my field of research – adolescent development – this is a particular concern: approximately 75 per cent of all mental health conditions start before the age of 24, and adolescents are especially sensitive to peer influence. Exploring how mood spreads from person to person could help us better understand how mental illness develops."

https://psyche.co/ideas/for-young-people-emotions-are-highly-contagious-social-viruses

Urania con Corriere e Gazzetta: ne vale la pena? - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://www.fumettologica.it/2022/02/urania-70-anni-gazzetta-corriere/

Quanto candore: questa giovane ragazza prende appunti strutturati come una cavia corre sulla ruota e si sente meglio: le gioie di un universo procedurale. Vallo a capire.

Money quote: "It’s that straightforward. Acquiring intelligence doesn’t require an Einstein-level IQ. You only need a desire to learn and a system. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be the one to solve the latest problem at work or comes up with a fresh idea when everyone else is feeling stuck. If anything, you’ll certainly look like the smartest person at the next party."

https://forge.medium.com/how-this-note-taking-system-can-elevate-your-intelligence-897aee747b17