L’uscita del film di “Diabolik” ci da l’occasione di parlare di quel cult che è la pellicola degli anni Sessanta diretta da Mario Bava:

https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/12/diabolik-mario-bava-film/

Se uno fonda un'azienda, poi se la porta avanti tutta la vita? L'idea dalle nostre parti è quella, ma in realtà non è così. Anzi, c'è chi si chiede: qual è il momento giusto per cui i fondatori mollino il colpo? Dopotutto, se le aziende sono come i figli, a un certo punto bisogna pure lasciarle andare, no? Per loro e anche per noi.

Money quote: "Specifically, our preliminary results indicate that founder-CEO leadership is associated with an almost 10% higher company valuation at IPO, but that the value of having a founder in the top seat rapidly deteriorates after that. We found that the value added by a founder-CEO essentially dwindles to zero approximately three years after firms go public, and they then start detracting from the value of the company in the longer term. Of course, these are only trends, and there will always be exceptions. But our data provides strong evidence to suggest that there is a shelf life to the founder-CEO — and it’s likely shorter than many might hope."

https://hbr.org/2021/12/research-how-long-should-a-founder-remain-ceo

12 cicli di fantascienza che dovreste leggere assolutamente - i miei consigli per gli acquisti natalizi su Fumettologica. Roba "vecchia" ma buona.

https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/12/cicli-di-fantascienza-libri-da-leggere/

Scrivere come soluzione "lo-social" per chi è introverso

Money quote: "There is a solution: be famous. You lose the ability to filter out who you want to talk to, but at least everyone starts the conversation with some context; you’re outsourcing the extroversion to them.

Fame is hard, and it has other costs. But there’s a second alternative: be microfamous. Microfame is the best kind of fame, because it combines an easier task (be famous to fewer people) with a better outcome (be famous to the right people)."

https://byrnehobart.medium.com/writing-is-networking-for-introverts-5cac14ad4c77

Inclusione e sindrome dell'impostore, sono due cose che forse non vanno d'accordo.

Money quote: "My point is this: if we expect everybody who is a little bit different to think of themselves as an impostor, we’ve totally lost the plot on this whole inclusion thing. Let’s add the notion of healthy self-doubt to the conversation so that we can distinguish between that which propels us forward and that which holds us back."

https://nerdygirl.com/2020/07/02/healthy-self-doubt

Ci sono un sacco di uomini single. Molte relazioni non funzionano, non decollano, semplicemente non c'è la possibilità di aprirne di nuove. Internet e i siti di dating stanno rendendo l'approccio sempre più tossico e disfunzionale. Una serie di scenari che non conoscevo per quanto riguarda gli under 30 (e non solo). Interessante.

Money quote: "Most of the advice you get is borderline abusive. If you have to lower a person’s self-esteem to sleep with you, that’s setting the groundwork for an emotionally abusive, controlling relationship. Moreover, THAT HURTS WOMEN. This makes this advice incompatible with an actual loving relationship."

https://medium.com/@ossiana.tepfenhart/i-work-in-porn-i-know-why-so-many-men-are-single-626810d98b1f

Poster che vorrei e non vorrei in casa

Le metafore ci definiscono. Quelle che derivano dalle macchine e che applichiamo alla nostra mente e al nostro modo di comportarci sono tossiche

Money quote: "The language alone suggests a new way for human beings to function in the digital media environment. Projecting human qualities onto machines — like seeing a car grille as a face or talking to a smartphone A.I. like a person — is called anthropomorphism. But this is the opposite: We are projecting machine qualities onto humans. Seeing a human being as a machine or computer is called mechanomorphism. It’s not just treating machines as living humans; it’s treating humans as machines."

https://medium.com/team-human/the-damage-we-do-to-ourselves-when-we-try-to-function-like-computers-6ef7b85b6277

Cose interessanti da scoprire sui propri padri: erano attori porno.

Money quote: "“I don’t want to talk about your father,” my Mom said.
They had a bitter breakup in the 90s, after I was born. It was probably my fault; I was as much a pain as a toddler as I am as an adult. He took off with a woman my Mom called “The Slut.” I never saw much of my Dad. He spent most of his time climbing mountains. He did K2, Everest, all that shit. Like he was trying to prove something to somebody. I was never much impressed.
But this. Being a porn star. This was impressive. I had to see more. I wondered what his porn name was. I called up my Mom again."

https://medium.com/slackjaw/hazards-of-watching-vintage-porn-36f0df94c397

Se avete bambini piccoli o grandi, una cosa a cui pensare (il post è di dieci anni fa)

Money quote: "Late last night, inspecting Santa’s handiwork, a simple thought occurred to me. A decade or so from now, when, say, I’m waiting for my son to come home from college for his winter break, and, when he does, he wants to spend his time going out with his friends — how much will I be willing to pay then to be able to go back in time, for one day, to now, when he’s eight years old, he wants to go to movies and play games and build Lego kits with me, and he believes in magic?

How much then, for one day with what my family has right now? How much? Everything.

The truth is, I’m the luckiest person in the world today. I hope you are too."

https://daringfireball.net/2011/12/merry

Da Etcd a Kubernetes, il mondo non è necessariamente un miglioramento continuo. Anzi, il software sta diventando sempre più inutilmente complicato e scritto male, oltre ad introdurre layer di approfondimento e relazione anziché di astrazione.

Money quote: "In 2015, an unrelated tool called Kubernetes was released by Google (but, really, by Xooglers). I would go so far as to say that Kubernetes (or, as the "cool kids" say, k8s) is the worst thing to happen to system administration since systemd. It's a comprehensive suite that promises to simplify operating clusters of software and give something like the experience of Google's borg cluster manager. What it really does is:

- Add hundreds of new failure modes to your software
- Move you from writing portable software configuration to writing thousands of lines of k8s-specific YAML
- Ensnare you in a mesh of questionably-good1 patterns like containerization and software defined networking"

Money quote 2: "That's it. That's the story. Popular modern technology is taken over by expats from a megacorp and made worse in the service of a hyper-specialized (and just plain over-hyped) orchestration platform. That's the world today. Anything that has a simple and elegant feature-set ends up coöpted by people who just want to build big ungainly architecture and ends up inheriting features from whatever megacorp the coöpters came from9. The software development world would prefer to use their multi-gigabyte IDEs running on ElectronJS to build thousand-dependency Java applications targeting ungainly APIs on hard-to-operate systems than support something simpler and better. Quality is, alas, a dying art."

https://www.roguelazer.com/2020/07/etcd-or-why-modern-software-makes-me-sad

Era una storia che ci tenevo a raccontare: il figlio illegittimo di una fugace notte d'amore tra un Casio e un Patek Philippe, tra un G-Shock e un Royal Oak

Money quote: "L’orologio, soprattutto questo tipo di modelli che sono di grosse dimensioni e tendenzialmente portati da uomini più che da donne, sono gli unici gioielli che storicamente vengono portati dai maschi oltre alla vera nuziale. Certo, c’è chi ha anelli, catenine e braccialetti, persino orecchini e piercing (siamo pur sempre nel XXI secolo, signora mia) ma l’orologio è sempre stato l’accessorio che definisce l’uomo e che mostra la sua vanità."

https://www.macitynet.it/casioak-il-regalo-piu-analogico-del-2021/

Una bella ripulita al MacBook dopo quasi un decennio d'uso. Mamma mia cosa c'era dentro!

Money quote: "I estimated that I had used my mac for approximately 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year, for 7 years straight, for a total for whopping 16800 hours. I have written the first versions of most of the software components of my startup using this computer. And all this time, this machine worked without a hiccup. It was never repaired, and I never opened the back cover. However, its battery is getting swollen, so it is a good time to upgrade to a newer machine. Before recycling the machine, I decided to open it for once and vacuum the fans to see if it makes a difference. Oh boy, did it make a difference! You can find the fan test in the video if you want to check it out."

https://quanticdev.com/articles/cleaning-macbook-after-16800-hours-of-use

Letture per le vacanze. A Milano c'è Gigi Carminati, un vecchio riparatore di apparecchi fotografici che ancora sa come si fa a mettere le mani in cose di un secolo e mezzo. E farle funzionare ancora.

https://antoniodini.com/il-meccanico-della-fotografia/

La storia che Tolkien avrebbe voluto raccontare, ma che ha solo abbozzato

Money quote: "Like much of Tolkien’s fiction, Roverandom was not published during his lifetime, finally appearing in print in the 1990s. It is little-known, except among serious devotees. But it does help to show the way in which Tolkien’s imagination tended to work, and how his ideas developed. Roverandom blends the mundane with the magical, taking familiar places or people and making them part of a much larger and stranger canvas."

https://unherd.com/2020/06/is-this-tolkiens-vision-of-england

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!