La storia di Palantir. Peter Thiel doveva essere proprio un bel personaggio. Si cominciano a capire sempre più cose... bella inchiesta!

Money quote: “It all ended when the bank’s senior executives learned that they, too, were being watched, and what began as a promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal. The misadventure, which has never been reported, also marked an ominous turn for Palantir, one of the most richly valued startups in Silicon Valley. An intelligence platform designed for the global War on Terror was weaponized against ordinary Americans at home”

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/

Un approccio rinfrescante per come è minimalista e pulito: entrate nel mondo di YouTube dalla semplice porta di Tube (non affiliato al sito di Google)

https://tube.quinzel.tech

Per rilassarsi fra un aereo e l'altro: cosa meglio di una bella webcam puntata sulla pista di Malpensa?

Money quote: "GUARDATE IL TRAFFICO AEREO IN ARRIVO E PARTENZA SU MALPENSA IN TEMPO REALE"

http://www.girovaghi.it/webcam/malpensa/home.htm

È domenica, tempo per la storia di una foto particolare: la Terra Levante

Money quote: "In today’s visually bombarded world it’s hard to imagine the immediate, global impact of that single image. The picture that came to be known as “Earthrise” offered a precious moment of transcendence after a year of violence and turmoil. The following year it was made into a U.S. postage stamp, and it adorned the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog. Walter Cronkite used it as a backdrop on the “CBS Evening News.” Wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,” and it’s no accident that 16 months after we saw ourselves from the Moon, the first Earth Day took place."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/who-took-legendary-earthrise-photo-apollo-8-180967505/

Lettura per la domenica. La storia di una persona autistica e il modo con il quale chi ha delle disabilità mentali ma è comunque in parte funzionale può farcela: è compito della società creare i presupposti e l'accompagnamento. Perché si tratta di una cosa complessa.

Money quote: "A lot of disabled or mentally ill people are able to work a job, pay rent, and get by through an elaborate system of compromise and sacrifice. We may have abandoned career paths that were too demanding of our mental energy, or lost relationships that were too socially or emotionally taxing. We may neglect exercise or beloved hobbies in order to find the time to get work done and make the money we need to survive. We may devote ourselves to rigid schedules that allow us to be professionally productive, but make other life tasks impossible. Or we may be forced to isolate more often than we’d truly like, in order to recharge from the daily efforts of getting by."

https://medium.com/@dr_eprice/im-a-highly-functional-autistic-it-takes-a-lot-of-work-3b9a67ff36a5

È ora di pranzo

Due fake celebrities, in realtà due Bot, litigano di brutto perché uno ha hackerato l'altro, e si minacciano a vicenda. Il mondo sta diventando interessante ma anche molto, molto strano.

Money quote: "On Tuesday, the Instagram account of Miquela Sousa — also known as @LilMiquela, a 19-year-old Brazilian-American model, singer, and Instagram personality with almost a million followers — appeared to have been hacked by a blonde, pro-Trump troll named Bermuda, or @BermudaIsBae. Over the course of about eight hours, Bermuda wiped Lil Miquela’s account clean, posting photos of herself instead with threatening captions like: “You can’t have your account back until you promise to tell people the truth.”

But wait, it gets wilder: Neither Lil Miquela nor Bermuda are real people. They’re computer-generated avatars with anonymous creators."

Anche quelli "veri" non è che sono messi molto meglio.

C'è chi usa Anobii, chi usa GoodReaders, chi mette su un blog di recensioni e chi spara giudizi su Amazon o su Twitter. Questo tizio ha fatto un sito che... beh, se non altro è scenico. Ma quanto starà male, però?

Money quote: "Hi there! My name is Latish Sehgal, and I am a programmer living in Dallas, Texas. This site contains notes from some of the books that I have read over the last few years.

The book notes and ratings are rather subjective, based on where I was in my life when I read that book. These are not meant as a replacement for reading but perhaps they can help in giving you a few recommendations to add to your reading list."

https://www.readmybooknotes.com

The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Let's scale that to 46 years. We have been here for 4 hours. Our industrial revolution began 1 minute ago. In that time, we have destroyed 50% of the world's forests. This isn't sustainable. Earth-Day

https://telegram.me/SalaAurora

C’è ancora speranza per i libri di carta?

Money quote: “According to the Library Map of the World, there are over two million public and school libraries on planet Earth. Of these, 103,325 are in the U.S. and 12,570 in my native Australia. Globally, the number of private libraries is much larger still—because who’s to say that even a humble shelf of Penguin or Pocket paperbacks doesn’t qualify as a private library?”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/09/the-strange-magic-of-libraries/

La lezione di Nintendo: le buone idee si cercano, non arrivano da sole - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/04/23/tecnologia/la-lezione-di-nintendo-le-buone-idee-si-cercano-non-arrivano-da-sole-WpJgyuwuwgKwLWgdNk0m0I/pagina.html

La Voce offre una spiegazione semplice e lineare al collasso praticamente definitivo di Alitalia, che sta per passare di mano (Lufthansa, a quanto pare). Il punto è semplice: nel 2016-2017 l'azienda romana ha tagliato sui costi del lavoro ma è rimasta vincolata da contratti sfavorevoli (negligentemente?) sulle forniture. Ha però dovuto abbassare i prezzi dei biglietti per via della concorrenza. Risultato? Il disavanzo è esploso. Fine di Alitalia, anche se la cosa si cerca di non dirla, dato che il bilancio non è stato pubblicato.

Money quote: "Nel 2016 il gruppo Lufthansa ha ridotto i costi industriali per passeggero km del 5,4 per cento, principalmente grazie al calo del carburante, e del 5,2 per cento i proventi unitari. In sostanza, ha trasferito ai suoi clienti, attraverso minori prezzi, i risparmi di costo conseguiti e altrettanto han fatto gli altri vettori, low cost e tradizionali. Alitalia non è invece riuscita a ridurre i costi, ingessati da contratti sfavorevoli, ma ha dovuto egualmente ridurre i prezzi a causa della concorrenza sul mercato, peggiorando di conseguenza il suo disavanzo. Questa è la semplice, ma sinora sconosciuta, ragione del dissesto."

http://www.lavoce.info/archives/50463/alitalia-la-crisi-scritta-nei-conti/

Google alla riscossa nella messaggistica: prepara il lancio di Chat - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/04/22/tecnologia/google-alla-riscossa-nella-messaggistica-prepara-il-lancio-di-chat-UYDfFKGau5ZYD6NaPJJ3EK/pagina.html

La piccola SmugMug compra Flickr, gigante delle fotografie, in nome della privacy - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/04/23/tecnologia/la-piccola-smugmug-compra-flickr-gigante-delle-fotografie-in-nome-della-privacy-p3PMyJ3B6g5rcwRyYfSPKJ/pagina.html

La bellezza dei giardini ingegnerizzati come si faceva una volta, con sapienza secolare e low-tech, a Pantelleria

Money quote: "Giardini Panteschi have been described as self-sufficient agronomic systems, because they create a nano-climate that simultaneously waters the tree, protects it from relentless wind, retains any rainwater channeled into the garden under the access door during rare rainstorms, allows in sunlight, and radiates stored solar warmth on cold nights. Once built, it “operates” without any need for further human intervention."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pantelleria-gardens-giardino-pantesco

Il sogno di ogni singolo titolista inglese è diventato realtà, quando è uscito uno studio della rivista Nature in cui venivano enumerate le nuove scoperte riguardanti il pianeta Urano, rese possibile da un nuovo tipo di telescopio. Una di queste è che il pianeta puzza di zolfo, il che, tradotto in titolo da giornale, diventa: “Uranus smells bad” o, per i più creativi, “smell like farts”.
Tradotto: “Il tuo ano puzza” o “sa di scorregge”.
Perché anche gli scienziati sono stati dei bambini con dei sogni. Fuori uno.

Link: https://on.mash.to/2Hsu95O

Amp, la tecnologia di Google per la indicizzazione e renderizzazione rapida delle pagine dei siti, è una cosa non buona per svariati motivi. (È anche tra le cose dove Google fa la maggior parte dei suoi soldi)

Money quote: "So it's not really about speed. As with anything that eschews standards for its own modified version thereof, it's about lock-in. Tons of pages in Google AMP markup mean tons of pages that are optimized specifically for Google and indexed primarily by Google and shown primarily to Google users. It's Google's attempt to match Facebook's platform. And yes, Facebook is far worse than AMP, but that doesn't make Google AMP a good idea. At least Facebook doesn't try to pretend like it's open.

The second thing you need to do is get rid of all your analytics data. Instead, you can peek at a small subset of the data Google gathers. That's the AMP analytics deal in a nutshell."

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/

Bisogna mangiare più fibra. Pensavo fosse un arguto gioco di parole per un titolo sulla banda larga, e invece si parla di intestino e alimentazione sana. Una volta ripresomi dallo shock, l'ho trovato in verità più interessante della connessione con fibra ottica.

Money quote: "There are so many reasons why, from fast-food marketing to agriculture subsidies, but one contributing factor is the slow death of cooking, and the rise of the restaurant meal. Americans now spend more on food at restaurants than they do at grocery stores, but restaurant food tends to have even less fiber than the food we would otherwise eat at home.

One problem seems to be that restaurant meals aren't typically loaded with two of the best sources of fiber, unprocessed fruits and vegetables. A revealing study from 2007, in which researchers interviewed 41 restaurant executives, showed that restaurants think fruits and vegetables are too expensive to feature prominently on the menu, and “61 percent said profits drive menu selections.” They also opposed labeling certain menu items as healthier choices, saying that would be “the kiss of death.”

So people like to eat out, and when they do, they prefer mushy, fiber-free comfort foods. But that’s a pretty dangerous road to go down."

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/just-eat-more-fiber/550082/

Un bel ritratto di Marissa Mayer, che a quanto pare non ci sta proprio a mollare il colpo, nonostante con Yahoo non abbia decisamente brillato

Money quote: "Why did you leave Google?

I was 37, and I had been working at Google for 13 years. I had been on search for 10 of those years and just had very recently made the change over to focus on Maps as a search technology. And I was like, “You know, I’m just not sure that I want to be like the 50-year-old search girl.”

I’d always had huge respect for Yahoo as a company. When we were here in this office, we dreamed of maybe getting the Yahoo contract, maybe one day powering Yahoo search. In 1999, Yahoo was the internet. And I knew that while there were a lot of things going wrong for the board and leadership at Yahoo, there were a lot of really good people there working on the products."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/business/marissa-mayer-corner-office.html