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/

Opera struggente di un solitario genio ritensivo anale: tutto quel che serve agli smanettoni, o quasi.

Money quote: "This list is a collection of various materials that I use every day in my work. It contains a lot of useful information gathered in one piece.

For whom?

This collection is suitable for everyone. It is aimed towards System and Network administrators, DevOps, Pentesters and Security Researchers."

https://github.com/trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge

Passeggiare per Tokyo sui Navigli di Milano - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://www.fumettologica.it/2022/03/botteghe-tokyo-mostra-milano/

Il mistero (buffo?) della nostra risata

Money quote: "Something that sets us apart from these ancestors and primate relatives, and should be of special interest to anthropology, is our unique propensity to laugh. Laughter is a paradox. We all know it’s good for us; we experience it as one of life’s pleasures and a form of emotional release. Yet to be able to laugh, we must somehow cut ourselves off from feelings of love, hate, fear or any other powerful emotion. The fall of a pompous fool slipping on a banana skin is the cliché of comic routines; we laugh at his misfortune because we don’t really care."

https://aeon.co/essays/does-laughter-hold-the-key-to-human-consciousness

Il cinese, grande mistero. Impararlo? Evitarlo? Soffrirlo? Temerlo? È un fascio di lingue molto ricco e articolato, estremamente espressivo (di quella espressività ruspante caratteristica delle lingue antiche, strutturalmente semplici e immediate ma anche molto colorate)

Money quote: " this article I write about how Chinese is different from Indian or European languages {Hindi, English, Kannada, Tamil, German....}, and some interesting factoids that I found out. Note that this article is for those who do not know any Chinese. If you know Chinese you will likely find many flaws in this article, which you can let me know and then I can improve."

http://thevivekpandey.github.io/posts/2019-02-02-way-of-chinese-language.html

Un po' di motivi per cui il software pagato dalle pubbliche amministrazioni - cioè con soldi pubblici - dovrebbe essere open source. Ogni tanto leggere questo tipo di cose è rinfrescante.

Money quote: "The use of open standards is not the only big benefit of moving to open source. Another is transparency. Recently it emerged that Microsoft has been gathering personal information from 300,000 government users of Microsoft Office ProPlus in the Netherlands, without permission and without documentation"

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/if-software-funded-public-source-its-code-should-be-open-source

Ascii art come se non ci fosse mai stato un domani

Money quote: "I've been experimenting with various ways to print graphics on the Teletype ASR33 terminal.

Teletype printed art is more constrained than ANSI- or ASCII-Art on modern machines, since there's no color, no block-graphic or line-graphic characters, no lowercase, and quite a limited set of punctuation (missing the underscore, vertical-bar, curly braces, etc.) On the other hand, as a hardcopy printer, we can overtype multiple characters at the same location."

https://github.com/hughpyle/ASR33/blob/master/asciiart/README.md


Tra l'altro, vale anche solo per i link a serbatoio di vecchie cose anni Ottanta. Questa è mitica:

http://www.textfiles.com/art/

Invece questa è la radice da cui partono anche altre esplorazioni testuali:

https://github.com/hughpyle/ASR33

Divertitevi!

Alla fine diventano un po' noiose, soprattutto quando dovrebbero essere esperienze e considerazioni universali ma non possono esserlo perché il lavoro del giornalista è atipico. Comunque, ecco l'ultima puntata della lunga e articolata inchiesta di gonzo-journalism: un gggiovane ha fatto a meno dei big 5 della tecnologia (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Goole e Microsoft) e di tutti quelli che si appoggiano ai loro cloud. Risultati deprimenti.

Money quote: "So in preparation for the week, I export all my contacts from Google, which amounts to a shocking 8,000 people. I have also whittled down the over 1,500 contacts in my iPhone to 143 people for my Nokia, or the number of people I actually talk to on a regular basis, which is incredibly close to Dunbar’s number.

I wind up placing a lot of phone calls this week, because texting is so annoying on the Nokia’s numbers-based keyboard. I find people often pick up on the first ring out of concern; they’re not used to getting calls from me."

https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194

Se diamo un po' di prospettiva alla storia del nostro pianeta, religioni e tutto il resto, molte cose diventano estremamente relative. Una lettura rinfrescante sul monoteismo

Money quote: "More than 3,000 years ago, ancient Egypt, with its myriad gods and goddesses, saw the founding of two monotheistic religions within a century of each other. One is associated with Moses, the Bible and ancient Israel’s faith, which is the foundation of Judaism and Christianity. The other burst on to the scene around 1350 BCE, flourished for a moment, and was then eclipsed when its founder died in 1336 BCE. We call the religion Atenism. Where did it come from? And why didn’t the world’s first monotheism last?"

https://aeon.co/essays/why-did-an-ancient-egyptian-king-erase-all-gods-but-aten

Un po' di storia, che tendiamo a dimenticarci con troppa facilità. Quella volta che sono saltati fuori gli altri database (da due a cinque) di credenziali rubate e disponibili in rete. Collection #2-5. Sono 25 miliardi di record contro i 775 milioni del primo db. Ma in realtà, deduplicati i dati, sono molti meno. Vuol dire che gli hacker cattivi non sono buoni data scientist, e a loro data scraping e modellazione non gli viene molto bene

Money quote: "Now other researchers have obtained and analyzed an additional vast database called Collections #2–5, which amounts to 845 gigabytes of stolen data and 25 billion records in all. After accounting for duplicates, analysts at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, found that the total haul represents close to three times the Collection #1 batch."

https://www.wired.com/story/collection-leak-usernames-passwords-billions/