Un progetto per digitalizzare i video di famiglia, 45 cassette Vhs. Sembra facile, vero? Invece, è durato otto anni ed è finito in maniera molto diversa da come è cominciato.

Money quote: "If you’re wondering why this took me eight years and hundreds of hours, I don’t blame you. I thought it would be an easy project too."

https://mtlynch.io/digitizing-1

Qui la seconda parte

https://mtlynch.io/digitizing-2/

Un problema a quanto pare importante all'infrastruttura di AWS ha messo in ginocchio Twitter più o meno in tutto il mondo

https://istheservicedown.com/problems/twitter

Non esistono bug, esistono solo liste di cose da fare (si può applicare anche in altri campi che non siano l'ingegneria del software, se ci pensate).

Money quote: "I think there are relatively few properties that are needed in an issue and relatively few rules to make the handling efficient."

https://almad.blog/essays/no-bugs-just-todos/

Una tonnellata di immagini di pubblico dominio per illustrazione e altri usi. Buona domenica!

Money quote: "Explore Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations from some of the best artists the world has ever known."

https://artvee.com

Effetti della pandemia sulle compagnie aeree americane? Forse. Intanto, Frontier e Spirit Airlines stanno pensando di fondersi. Il che farebbe risparmiare dei soldi ai passeggeri oltre a creare nuovi posti di lavoro, e questo è quello che piace all'antitrust americano.

Money quote: "The U.S. airline industry has undergone a tremendous amount of consolidation over the past two decades, with the nation’s four largest airlines controlling about 80 percent of the domestic market. Spirit and Frontier argue that the merger would allow them to better challenge those large carriers. But a deal would also create a giant budget airline that could smother smaller companies, including two recent entrants, Breeze and Avelo."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/business/frontier-spirit-airlines-merger.html

Sono esplose le newsletter. Io qui resisto con il canale, ma mi sono fatto contagiare, come sapete, con la mia Mostly Weekly. Anche se - devo dire la verità - a me pare che le newsletter abbiano già abbondantemente saltato lo squalo.

Ecco la mia newsletter

https://antoniodini.com/newsletter/


Ecco anche un cimelio del passato.

Money quote: "Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair, is starting Air Mail, an all-digital international news platform intended for worldly cosmopolitans, with Alessandra Stanley, who was a longtime critic and reporter for The New York Times.

Beginning this summer, Air Mail will be packaged as a weekly newsletter, featuring magazine-length original articles sent to subscribers on Saturday at 6 a.m. Stories and original podcasts will also be available on a website: AirMail.news.

According to Mr. Carter, the idea is to keep well-heeled globalists up to speed on the latest fads, fashions, arts, riots, scandals, and political upheavals in Europe and Asia. Think of it a bit like The Economist with attitude, or maybe “the weekend edition of a nonexistent international daily,” he said, slouching in an office chair in his garden-level West Village office on a recent, chilly Monday. He was wearing gray flannel trousers, a blue fleece vest and his trademark curvilinear hairstyle."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/style/what-is-graydon-carter-doing-now.html

La storia d’amore più “scandalosa” mai apparsa su “Topolino”. E mai più ristampata. Scatenò un putiferio mediatico e costò quasi il posto al direttore di Topolino di allora.
👉 https://bit.ly/3oLWYBL

E se contrapponessimo all'idea di un deumanizzante culto della startup o del bisogno di aziende gigantesche, l'idea di una impresa su misura, ritagliata su una persona sola, perlomeno in alcuni ambiti particolari? Potrebbe essere un'idea geniale od orrenda: bisogna leggere il libro.

Money quote: "Company of One is your official guide to building around the idea that staying small and avoiding growth can be more durable and even more enjoyable than business as usual from author Paul Jarvis.

The real key to richer and more fulfilling work could be to not create and scale something into a massive corporation, but rather, to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one. This book explains how to do just that."

https://ofone.co/

Quell'indefinibile odore dei libri, definito meglio.

Money quote: "As far as the smell of new books goes, it’s actually quite difficult to pinpoint specific compounds, for a number of reasons. Firstly, there seems to be a scarcity of scientific research that’s been carried out on the subject – to be fair, it’s understandable why it might not exactly be high up on the priority list. Secondly, the variation in the chemicals used to manufacture books also means that it’s an aroma that will vary from book to book. Add to this the fact that there are literally hundreds of compounds involved, and it becomes clearer why it evades attribution to a small selection of chemicals."

https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/06/01/newoldbooksmell/

Se volete salvare come futura referenza un esempio di pagina pseudo-giornalistica, costruita apposta per fare acchiappa click, ecco a voi un piccolo capolavoro del male. Le ultime parole rispondono alla cosa evocata nel titolo ma mai detta prima (un po' come se il Corriere facesse un titolo "Cambia l'età della pensione per tutti" ma dicesse solo all'ultima riga qual è questa età).

Beh, bando alle ciance: siete pronti a scoprire qual è l'errore di David Gilmour e come una cambiato la sua vita per sempre? Beh, auguri. E benvenuti nel giornalismo paccottiglia...

https://www.virginradio.it/news/rock-news/1312034/pink-floyd-quell-errore-nella-registrazione-di-wish-you-were-here-che-cambio-per-sempre-la-vita-di-david-gilmour.amp

C'è un angolo di San Francisco che ho visitato anni fa e che è portatore di un frammento di storia affascinante. È la "colonizzazione" del pezzo finale dopo il parco che dà sull'Oceano, poco più a sud dei Buthro Baths. Fatta con carrozze di omnibus vendute dal servizio pubblico di trasporti e riciclate come casette prefabbricate. La storia di Carville. Perché ne è rimasta una...

Money quote: "The bar became very popular, particularly among the bohemian crowd, and more people followed Dailey out to the end of the Park and Ocean railway line (at what is now 47th Avenue and Lincoln Way), buying their own various cars to live, work, or play in. The neighborhood that sprang up became known as “Carville” (or “Carville-by-the-Sea”), and was described by one historian as the “the oddest village in the world.”"

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/last-known-carville-house

Una cosa (e molto bella) di Margaret Atwood

Money quote: "The manuscript of “Frogless,” a poem that appears in this issue, by Margaret Atwood. Ms. Atwood wrote the poem on an SAS Hotel’s bedside notepad while she was in Gothenburg, Sweden last September for the Nordic Book Fair. “I’ve written quite a lot under those circumstances. Perhaps it’s being in a hotel room or a plane with no ringing phone and no supervision. Also, there’s something about jet lag that breaks down the barriers.”"

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2262/margaret-atwood-the-art-of-fiction-no-121-margaret-atwood

Ogni tanto pubblico dei miei vecchi articoli, cose scritte tanto tempo fa. Anche perché i temi ritornano: come questo in cui raccontavo dei ricchi e potenti che si servono di agenzie specializzate per farsi cancellare da internet. Lo raccontavo quindici anni f,la, se ne parla ancora oggi.

Money quote: «Non è un caso che manchino i vertici, perché chi sta in cima non vuole comparire. La ricetta per il successo di oggi è essere invisibili. Se appari, vuol dire che sei solo uno che simula».

https://antoniodini.com/fantasmi-internet/

La Nasa ha trasformato il suo gigantesco database non strutturato di informazioni e documenti relativi a tutte le sue missioni, andate bene o male o mai partite, in un grafo. E se non sapete cosa sia un grafo, ecco l'articolo da leggere. (Poi, vabbé: c'è la pubblicità di Nuclino, ma quella è alla fine e uno la può anche saltare).

Money quote: "The new approach immediately yielded positive results. In 2014, when a team of NASA engineers was working on Exploration Flight Test-1, an unmanned mission to send the Orion spacecraft into orbit, they discovered that Orion's uprighting system wasn't working correctly. Knowing that Apollo used a similar uprighting system to Orion, the team turned to the NASA lessons learned database. An 8-day search turned up only 3 relevant documents, none of which helped them solve the problem. In desperation, the team reportedly even visited retired Apollo astronauts at their homes to see if they had any useful documents stashed away in their attics.

Meza and his team came to the rescue, discovering over 30 relevant files in the database, which ultimately helped NASA find a solution to Orion's uprighting system problems. Without that information, the team would have had to spend years and millions of dollars testing different designs, delaying Orion's 2023 launch even further."

https://blog.nuclino.com/why-nasa-converted-its-lessons-learned-database-into-a-knowledge-graph

Gran gioco sull'intelligenza artificiale di The Verge

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/31/18140796/wake-word-algorithm-text-game-ai-artificial-intelligence

"Uncharted" sembra più un videogioco che non un film - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

https://www.fumettologica.it/2022/02/uncharted-recensione-film/

Un programmatore diventato criminale. E che criminale.

Money quote: "They discuss shipment methods, and how many kilos of each drug the other could move in a month. Paul owns ships already picking up loads in South America and traveling to Asia, but he much prefers to work in Africa, territory he knows well. His customers are in Australia, Thailand, China. “We are not touching the US right now,” he says.

“Why not?”"

https://www.wired.com/story/mastermind-excerpt/

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