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/

Sono passati un po' di anni da quando ho scritto per la prima volta delle Progressive Web Apps. Sono arrivate sul Google Play Store. Non finirà bene.

Money quote: "Let me start saying that the publishing process is not straightforward as it should be (such as “enter your URL” in the Play Console and it’s done.) It’s also not a way to use the currently available WebAPK and publish it in the store. It’s a Java API that communicates through services with Chrome and seem to be in the early stages, so there is a lot of manual work to do yet today."

https://medium.com/@firt/google-play-store-now-open-for-progressive-web-apps-ec6f3c6ff3cc

E così, alla fine, il presidente Joe Biden è un appassionato di orologi: ne ha un po' e li tiene "in rotazione". Nonostante debba fare come tutti i presidenti, cioè giocarsela anche con l'opinione pubblica, comunque ha una collezione da normale persona benestante, non da Paperon de' Paperoni.

Money quote: "Knowing now that Biden wears both Omega and Rolex in his day-to-day, we might speculate that he chose the Seiko during his presidential run for its working-man optics. Then again, it was also on his wrist often when he served as Vice President."

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-watches-of-president-biden-collector-in-chief

Un esperto di molestie a minori ha guardato il film su Michael Jackson. Ecco cosa ne pensa.

Money quote: "It is quite natural to think of child molesters as monsters who intimidate and frighten the children they prey on. But while there are various types of offender, many are able to gain access to – and the trust of – children due to their ability to attract children to them and to emotionally and socially connect with them. Such offenders will gravitate towards children who are shy, withdrawn, lonely or rejected by peers. They work to create an emotional bond with the child through becoming their “best friend” and making the child feel “special”."

https://theconversation.com/michael-jackson-as-an-expert-in-child-sexual-abuse-heres-what-i-thought-when-i-watched-leaving-neverland-113160

Tra Cina, Censura e Blockchain...

Money quote: "According to the World Economic Forum, blockchain is among six computing “mega-trends” that are likely to shape the world in the next decade. The Chinese government hopes that blockchain can address the diverse economic and social problems China faces, such as insurance fraud, environmental pollution and food safety.

The Chinese government is against truly decentralized blockchain systems such as bitcoin, which relies on users, also known as “nodes” or “peers,” competing to verify transactions. At least tens of thousands of computers from all over the world are connected at any point of time in the bitcoin network."

https://theconversation.com/chinese-internet-users-turn-to-the-blockchain-to-fight-against-government-censorship-111795

La guerra in Ucraina sta trasformando il modo con il quale comunichiamo:

https://twitter.com/schwarzenegger/status/1504426844199669762?s=28

Il nostro corpo e il nostro cervello si parlano mentre noi letteralmente pensiamo ad altro (a meno che non decidano di inserirci nella conversazione, allora non c'è scampo)

Money quote: "The brain represents, integrates and prioritises interoceptive information from the internal body. These are communicated through a set of distinct neural and humoural (ie, blood-borne) pathways. This sensing of internal states of the body is part of the interplay between body and brain: it maintains homeostasis, the physiological stability necessary for survival; it provides key motivational drivers such as hunger and thirst; it explicitly represents bodily sensations, such as bladder distension. But that is not all, and herein lies the beauty of interoception, as our feelings, thoughts and perceptions are also influenced by the dynamic interaction between body and brain."

https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-body-and-mind-talk-to-one-another-to-understand-the-world

Vent'anni fa andavo a zonzo per la California settentrionale. Ormai d'abitudine. A vederla oggi è un'epoca estremamente ingenua e molto più semplice. Quando avere il Gps in auto ti sembrava semplicemente fantascienza.

Money quote: "Il paesaggio cambia allontanandosi dal centro, dai quartieri cinesi, italiani, dalla city degli affari e ti ritrovi tutto intorno alla città, oltre il grande parco, sulla collina di Twin Peaks e intorno intorno per chilometri e chilometri case di legno una vicina all’altra, una sopra all’altra che viste tutte insieme dalla highway o dall’aereo quando arrivi sembrano punteggiare la notte come le stelle di un finto presepe.
A collegare la città con il vicinato due grandi ponti, le meraviglia architettonica rossa del Golden Gate verso Sausalito e il più metallurgico succedersi di capriate verso Oakland. Aldilà c’e’ la California delle cittadine universitarie, quella dei quartieri con ville di ogni formato distribuite in lotti ordinati e ognuna con quel pizzico di follia personalizzata che vuol far risaltare le proprie origini e diventa lo specchio della contaminazione/integrazione etnica.

Autostrade larghissime con fondo in cemento: ovviamo ai pochi cartelli con una efficiente guida elettronica, un GPS parlante NeverLost anche nella nostra lingua con qualche strana inflessione che ci conduce verso le tappe di un pellegrinaggio di laica fede tecnologica."

https://www.macitynet.it/un-caff-a-cupertino/