La vita d'ufficio io l'ho evitata finora quasi sempre. Ma vale la pena ancora qualche riflessione al riguardo.

Money quote: "The film’s message – summed up near the end by Peter’s girlfriend, Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), who also hates her waitressing job – is clear: “Peter, most people don’t like their jobs. But you go out there and you find something that makes you happy.”

Since Office Space was released in 1999, we’ve grown more aware of the absurd and dreaded aspects of office life. But how successful have we actually been in stamping them out? And do we have Office Space to thank?"

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190205-office-space-turns-20-how-the-film-changed-work

Scrivere script in Common Lisp. Perché no? Ci sono vari vantaggi.

Money quote: "A script is only as powerful as the language and tools would allow. Bash and friends, for example, are great for expressing ideas, as if you are typing them on the command line itself. It emulates that behavior inside a script. You can define functions to do subroutines, but they’re just that. Functions in Bash are nowhere near functions in languages like CL. As an interactive user shell, it works fine; other than that, no."

https://ebzzry.io/en/script-lisp/

Buon vecchio Donald Trump. Intanto che aspettiamo che si ricandidi, saltano fuori sempre nuovi ed affascinanti dettagli sulla sua vita presidenziale. Come questo sul materiale classificato che si era portato a casa.

Money quote: "The discovery, which occurred after Mr. Trump returned 15 boxes of documents to the government last month, prompted the National Archives to reach out to the Justice Department for guidance, the person said. The department told the National Archives to have its inspector general examine the matter, the person said. It is unclear what the inspector general has done since then, in particular, whether the inspector general has referred the matter to the Justice Department."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/us/politics/national-archives-trump-classified-material.html

Censori al lavoro. Ecco come funziona in Russia

Money quote: "When policing online behavior in Russia, law enforcement agencies enjoy total compliance from the country’s most popular social network, Vkontakte, which coughs up users’ personal data whenever requested. This information — account registration times, linked email addresses and phone numbers, and IP addresses — constitutes sufficient evidence in court to prove that an individual is responsible for the content posted on their account. When it comes to Internet services based abroad, however, there’s no such cooperation, and Russia’s police have to get creative. In a new report for the website Mediazona, journalist Alexander Borodikhin summarizes 10 cases brought against individuals who allegedly violated Russia’s Internet laws by sharing illegal materials on foreign-operated social networks. Meduza summarizes this report."

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/03/08/creative-police-work

C'è un canale americano su YouTube, che parla di auto qualunque. E vale più di un trattato di sociologia che cerchi di fotografare gli Stati Uniti nel XXI secolo.

Money quote: "The channel is Regular Car Reviews, which I discovered after moving to South Korea in 2015. I’d come from Los Angeles, a city reflexively associated with a car culture of which I never partook. The same transportation-dissident impulse that kept me from driving in Southern California now compels me, in Seoul—a city whose subway system is as good as its car spotting is bad—to watch videos about the Chevrolet Camaro, the Dodge Neon, and even the Ford Pinto. It could simply be a way of securing one hoped-for benefit of expatriation: a fresh perspective on my homeland, the United States of America. Each of the more than five hundred episodes of Regular Car Reviews evaluates an automobile’s design and performance, but also reflects on that automobile’s sociological significance, goes off on non-sequitur comedic riffs ranging in vulgarity from mild to bestial, and unfailingly delivers a shot of pure twenty-first-century America."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-semiotics-of-a-1999-toyota-corolla

Alex Bertani dal 2017 è il direttore di Topolino e lo sta cambiando alla grande. Se volete rimettervi in pari (e dovete farlo) quest'articolo scritto da Alberto Brambilla su Fumettologica è semplicemente fondamentale. Topolino sta tornando il giornale a fumetti da leggere.

Money quote: "L’intervento più importante, e riuscito, sui personaggi classici di Topolino durante i primi anni di direzione Bertani riguarda i nipotini di Paperino. Qui, Quo e Qua sono sempre stati, se non indistinguibili, almeno intercambiabili. Nelle storie d’epoca parlavano addirittura all’unisono; in quelle più moderne non più, ma, a parte rarissimi casi, facevano sempre tutto in tre. La maggior parte dei lettori (ma anche degli autori) fino a pochi anni fa non avrebbe nemmeno saputo abbinare i nomi ai colori dei cappelli. Dopo che l’avevano fatto gli sceneggiatori della nuova serie delle Ducktales nel 2017, era tempo di differenziare i nipotini anche nei fumetti, anche se in modo indipendente e diverso."

https://www.fumettologica.it/2022/02/topolino-alex-bertani/

Un economista sostiene che sia possibile tornare a un’analisi di quello che succede senza usare la matematica. Perché a guidare gli eventi è l’economia della comunicazione (gossip, fake news, siti di autoaiuto). L’unico problema è che a dirlo è il premio Nobel Robert Shiller.

Money quote: “Now, Shiller is upsetting the ceasefire with his new thesis. “We are developing a new side of economics,” says Dennis Snower, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany, who collaborates with Shiller. “The standard statistical analyses are no longer valid. They assume that we know the probabilities with which everything will occur. In reality, we are almost never in that position.””

https://marker.medium.com/robert-shiller-says-economics-needs-to-go-viral-to-save-itself-f157eceb4c7d

Il sesso, se fatto bene e con una certa lenta sicurezza, fa molto bene. Così sostengono almeno gli antichi.

Money quote: " A poem in those texts, The Union of Yin and Yang, may be the first sex manual the world has preserved. Throughout these works, colourful metaphors describe the unhurried and careful approach to the joys of sexual intercourse. The emphasis was on exceedingly slow and gentle movements, beginning with caressing what seem to be the mysterious energy meridians within the body."

https://aeon.co/essays/lovemaking-for-longevity-a-recipe-from-tokyos-imperial-archives

Il metaverso di Meta/Facebook/Oculus/Quest parte subito con il piede sbagliato.

Money quote: "Some apps in the virtual-reality metaverse are "dangerous by design", the NSPCC has warned in response to a BBC News investigation.

A researcher posing as a 13-year-old girl witnessed grooming, sexual material, racist insults and a rape threat in the virtual-reality world.

The children's charity said it was "shocked and angry" at the findings."

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60415317

È consolante sapere che c'è gente che sta messa molto peggio di te. Ti fa sentire normale.

Money quote: "These days, each time Gaudet makes her weekly rounds, she returns with more than 2,000 books but now she has "no place to put them." In late December, she posted on her store's Facebook page searching for a solution. She has a tentative plan to build a small storage building, but there are limits to what she can afford. "Nobody gets rich running a bookstore," she said. "You do it because you love books.""

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/cornwall-200-000-books-barn-red-cart-books-1.6314275

Nella guerra economica con la Cina gli Usa stanno facendo un grosso errore. Hanno perso di vista l'obiettivo finale.

Money quote: "Unfortunately, in its competition with China, the U.S. is protecting its pots and recipes while putting legal pressure on the cheesecake experts within its own borders—thereby limiting the country’s ability to create new intellectual property. This is a worrisome sign that U.S. authorities are failing to understand something important: The most useful technology is not intellectual property in the form of written documents, but the unwritten knowledge in people’s heads."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/china-initiative-intellectual-property-theft/621058/

Stevie Nicks è viva e lotta assieme a noi. La musicista, una delle anime dei Fleetwood Mac (che è uno dei miei gruppi preferiti, tra parentesi) è attiva più che mai: è diventata un simbolo per molte giovani donne. E non solo. Bella intervista.

Money quote: "In the years since, Nicks’s appeal among younger generations has only grown. On TikTok, her songs provide a soundtrack to viral videos and fans pay tribute to her witchy aesthetic. Artists such as Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, and Lana Del Rey have asked her to lend her voice to their songs, and she’s become “fairy godmother” to a wide circle of younger artists. For listeners, too, she has always acted as a kind of spiritual guide. In her music, loss is simultaneously earth-shattering and ordinary. Heartbreak is survivable, and possibly a key to self-knowledge. Many of her songs take place at night, in dreams or visions, “somewhere out in the back of your mind.” Her narrator frequently asks questions of herself and of some higher power, as if in constant conversation with her own intuition. When I said “Just be Stevie Nicks,” I was thinking of how her work had taught me to see such sensitivity as a source of strength. Nicks’s music is what you listen to when you need help listening to yourself."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/stevie-nicks-tavi-gevinson-conversation

La guerra, la disinformazione e i social marci.

Money quote: "Richards said the ease with which these videos can be created is an issue.

“I think that their infrastructure — the literal design of the platform — is part of the problem. It is amplifying fear and misinformation,” Richards said. “TikTok’s infrastructure is structurally incompatible with the moment.”"

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/war-ukraine-sparks-new-wave-misinformation-rcna17779

Il grande scandalo dell'abbigliamento: ecco cosa succede ai vestiti che compriamo online e poi restituiamo. E tra parentesi, sono tantissimi. Sempre di più.

Money quote: "“The fashion industry, for a long time, has been able to hide from the right hand what the left hand is doing,” said Elizabeth Shobert, vice president of marketing and digital strategy at e-commerce analytics firm StyleSage, referring to the asynchronous processes of sales and returns. “The pileup in the supply chain in the last six months or so has really brought this to light.”"

https://restofworld.org/2022/shein-online-shopping-returns-what-happens/

Arriva la primavera. Stagione in cui si preparano le tasse. Per i freelance, negli Usa (paese fiscalmente civile visto che uno può prepararsi le tasse da solo a casa sua, basta leggere le istruzioni, non serve una laurea in economia e commercio e un esame di stato), c'è questo nuovo software con AI che lo attacchi ai tuoi conti correnti e carte di credito, lui ravana dentro tutto e poi ti tira fuori tutte le spese che puoi scaricare. Meglio di quanto tu non sapessi fare. Dal cloud.

Quando la versione italiana?

Money quote: "Truffle finds business deductions in your personal spending history. The average freelancer finds $12,931 of business deductions on Truffle."

https://www.gotruffle.com

"The Batman" è un filmone - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

https://www.fumettologica.it/2022/03/the-batman-recensione-film/

Ancora non c'era la pandemia ma già c'era la grande fuga da Facebook (negli Usa: poi arriverà anche da noi, ricordatevelo)

Money quote: "All the bad press about Facebook might be catching up to the company. New numbers from Edison Research show an an estimated 15 million fewer users in the United States compared to 2017. The biggest drop is in the very desirable 12- to 34-year-old group. Marketplace Tech got a first look at Edison's latest social media research. It revealed almost 80 percent of people in the U.S. are posting, tweeting or snapping, but fewer are going to Facebook."

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-numbers-showing-users-leaving-facebook-by-the-millions

Un giochino in 3D fatto con la grafica Ascii

https://yeahpython.github.io/game/game.html

Ci sono cose da sapere sulle batterie. Molte cose. Soprattutto da un punto di vista industriale. Perché, senza batterie, niente auto elettriche...

Money quote: "Automakers and policy makers are increasingly voicing their belief that the passenger vehicle of the future will be powered (partially or fully) by electricity. There remains, however, a lack of consensus on the timing and speed of the transition, in large part due to differing opinions on current and future lithium-ion battery costs and performance. The rise of the electric vehicle is also forcing automakers to reconsider their role in the automotive supply chain, for example by bringing more battery expertise in-house. This is counter to one of the big trends over the last 30 years whereby automakers divested their supply chain arms. Removing misconceptions around lithium-ion batteries is becoming more important than ever."

https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-battery-prices/

In lingua inglese c'è gente che sta cercando di rivoluzionare le notizie, sia sul versante della produzione che del consumo. Da quest'ultimo punto di vista, questo lavoro è parecchio interessante. E temibile.

Una delle cose che mi chiedo da tempo è: ma perché la gente semplicemente non legge gli articoli e i giornalisti li scrivono, senza tante complicazioni? Magari pagandoli anche, eh

Money quote: "Instead of deploying considerable efforts to go beyond an accuracy rate of 80 or 85 percent by optimizing the Deepnews Scoring Model, we decided to build another algorithm based on an entirely different approach."

https://mondaynote.com/deepnews-ai-report-4-building-an-angle-detector-for-journalism-70874d93cfe3

Sapete una cosa? L'idea che siano i ragazzini in casa a sapere come funziona la tecnologia, mentre i genitori sono dei tecno-scemi utonti, non è mica più tanto vera.

Money quote: "It’s a common stereotype: if you need to figure out a new piece of technology, you hand it to the youngest member of the family. The media has been publishing articles about adults’ apparent tech ignorance for nearly two decades. In 2000, The Economist claimed the “family tech guru” was “far more likely to be a teenager than the father of the house.” Perhaps they should have checked with the mother, because that’s never been true in my house, where I live with my husband and sixteen-year-old kid."

https://thewalrus.ca/the-rise-of-the-tech-savvy-parent/