Intelligenza artificiale e intelligenza tradizionale. Un articolo spettacolare. Inizia con una storia da brivido - che serve anche per accreditare l'autore come uno tosto - e poi diventa una ricostruzione notevole e molto comprensibile di quel che ci aspetta.

Money quote: "There is a different narrative that one can tell about the current era. Consider the following story, which involves humans, computers, data and life-or-death decisions, but where the focus is something other than intelligence-in-silicon fantasies. When my spouse was pregnant 14 years ago, we had an ultrasound. There was a geneticist in the room, and she pointed out some white spots around the heart of the fetus. “Those are markers for Down syndrome,” she noted, “and your risk has now gone up to 1 in 20.” She further let us know that we could learn whether the fetus in fact had the genetic modification underlying Down syndrome via an amniocentesis. But amniocentesis was risky — the risk of killing the fetus during the procedure was roughly 1 in 300. Being a statistician, I determined to find out where these numbers were coming from. To cut a long story short, I discovered that a statistical analysis had been done a decade previously in the UK, where these white spots, which reflect calcium buildup, were indeed established as a predictor of Down syndrome. But I also noticed that the imaging machine used in our test had a few hundred more pixels per square inch than the machine used in the UK study. I went back to tell the geneticist that I believed that the white spots were likely false positives — that they were literally “white noise.” She said “Ah, that explains why we started seeing an uptick in Down syndrome diagnoses a few years ago; it’s when the new machine arrived.”"

https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet-5e1d5812e1e7

Isola di San Giulio, al centro del lago d'Orta. Una meraviglia. La conosciamo poco in Italia, figuriamoci fuori. Eppure...

Money quote: "n the 12th century, the little island became the grounds for a basilica. Even today, centuries later, the basilica is the crown jewel of the picturesque patch of land. A new seminary was built in the 19th century, which unfortunately saw some of the island’s older buildings demolished in its wake. It’s now a Benedictine monastery, which is still in use today. A smattering of quaint houses dot the island, which were once home to members of the clergy."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/isola-san-giulio

Nell'affascinante caso del conflitto interno (fino a un certo punto) del Poeta residente di questo canale, anche il sottoscritto ha immodestamente avuto il suo piccolo ruolo

Money quote: "C’è un conflitto, e se ne è mirabilmente accorto un amico storico, che ogni tanto — bontà sua — mi usa, sul piano esistenziale, come “ragazza brutta con cui la ragazza bella va a passeggio”… Ma che non manca di lesinarmi benevolmente il suo punto di vista, che in questo caso mi ha aperto la mente. "

https://medium.com/@rrcorsi/narciso-e-pennadoro-aspettando-di-risolvere-il-conflitto-psicologico-del-poeta-277e29c8500f

Quando sei un ingegnere del software e pensi che un messaggio di errore più “dolce” sia una scelta migliore, ma non potevi prevedere tutte le possibilità

Design italiano per le poltrone verticali. Per fortuna dei designer non andranno mai in produzione...

Money quote: “It seems well thought out, it’s reportedly very functional, and it even looks good. But I’ll still never sit on one”

https://www.fastcodesign.com/90168628/the-airplane-saddle-is-a-standing-seat-for-super-economy-flight

Bill Harris, l'ex co-fondatore e Ceo di PayPal, che due cose sui pagamenti forse le sa, non si tira indietro. I BitCoin e le altre criptovalute sono uno scam.

Money quote: "I’m tired of saying, “Be careful, it’s speculative.” Then, “Be careful, it’s gambling.” Then, “Be careful, it’s a bubble.” Okay, I’ll say it: Bitcoin is a scam."

https://www.recode.net/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocurrency-mining-pump-dump-fraud-ico-value

Altro che Matteo Salvini: la Gran Bretagna ci ha donato gente come Enoch Powell e discorsi famosi come "Rivers of Blood".

Money quote: ““As I look ahead,” Powell said, “I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood,’” an allusion to a line in Virgil’s Aeneid. He maintained that it would not be enough to close Britain’s borders—some of the immigrants already settled in the country would need to be sent “home.” If not, he declared, attributing a quote to one of his constituents, “in this country, in 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.””

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/558344/

Slacktyping è un utile noscript in Ruby che, quando il vostro interlocutore scrive, simula che state scrivendo anche voi nello stesso momento. Ovviamente poi non postste niente. Genio.

https://github.com/will/slacktyping?files=1

Arriva Venom, e potrebbe essere un film Marvel da paura veramente, di quelli vietati ai minori ma non per le parolacce e le sparatorie. No-no

Money quote: "There are some other things going for Venom, in no particular order: beloved thespian Michelle Williams plays Hardy’s girlfriend; Riz Ahmed is the creepy corporate villain experimenting with the symbiote, an oddly perfect role for him; a bespectacled Jenny Slate shows up at a bodega; Brock is a seasoned reporter who opens interviews with questions like “DO YOU CONDUCT SECRET EVIL EXPERIMENTS THAT KILL PEOPLE, RIZ AHMED?” and expects a response; Woody Harrelson is rumored to show up as Carnage, and I can’t stop thinking about it; the film is R-rated."

https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/4/24/17275006/venom-trailer-new-tom-hardy-michelle-williams-jenny-slate-ruben-fleischer

Mentre il mondo esplode attorno a Facebook, Google zitta zitta sta facendo altre cose. Non solo la traccia delle licenze open source per utilizzare il codice e i servizi dell'azienda, ma anche un nuovo servizio a pagamento per le aziende che consente di gestire le identità di più servizi non di Google.

È un antico obiettivo: il sistema di gestione di tutte le identità digitali. Chi conquista questo, vince tutto. Ci ha già provato Microsoft, ci hanno provato alcuni dei big del B2B (Oracle, SAP), adesso ci riprova Google, che finora aveva giocato la carta del B2C

Money quote: "Enable employees to work from anywhere, on any device, with one-click access to all the apps they need. Employees can focus on their work, and you can more easily manage thousands of identities as people join, move, and leave the organization. Our single sign-on supports SAML 2.0 and OpenID and works with hundreds of applications out of the box, including SAP SuccessFactors, Salesforce, as well as GCP and G Suite apps like Docs and Sheets."

https://cloud.google.com/identity/

L’idea che alla base di un rapporto di coppia ci sia l’altruismo anziché diventare dipendenti dal proprio partner è intrigante.

Money quote: “And what happens when shit goes down? Because other people are outside of our control, and dumping a huge chunk of our emotional wellbeing into external things — like another human being’s decisions and behavior — is reckless at best. The only person you have full control over is yourself.

Dependency is not love.”

https://medium.com/@krisgage/the-purpose-of-a-relationship-8a32a6b0afbc

Addio al 3D Touch: ne sentiremo la mancanza. O forse no - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/addio-al-3d-touch-ne-sentiremo-la-mancanza-o-forse-no/

Money quote (only): "Recently invited to speak at a conference and was asked which of my two affiliations I preferred to go on my name tag. Probably University of Central Lancashire, I replied. So that's what they put."

Ok, mi rendo conto che forse questo è un insieme di informazioni delle quali non c'è bisogno, sono cose che sappiamo tutti etc. Ma almeno per me questa sorta di ricetta su come si comincia in un posto di lavoro nuovo è veramente una cosa fenomenale. Sul serio, lo dico con tutta l'umiltà di cui sono capace.

Money quote: "The first step is to find someone on the team and ask for 30 minutes with them. In that meeting you have a simple agenda"

http://boz.com/articles/career-cold-start.html

Cinque domande sulla poesia al poeta residente di Mostly, I Write

Money quote: "4. Oralità, scrittura, virtualità: come interagiscono i differenti canali nella realizzazione del testo poetico?

Dal punto di vista comunitario, più che integrazione e dialogo, scorgo fazioni inasprite: i propugnatori della poesia orale-performata fronteggiano quelli della poesia lineare-scritta. Mesi fa si è tenuto un convegno sulla poesia che – mi riferiscono – ha avuto il suo culmine emotivo nell'epiteto «filologo del cazzo!» rivolto da poeta performativo a poeta lineare; la parte avversa risponde di solito dando del “rapper” al poeta performativo. "

http://www.emt.it/broca/broca107/questio/corsi.html

Smartphone Asus Zenfone 5, la prova interattiva - il mio test per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/04/29/tecnologia/smartphone-asus-zenfone-la-prova-interattiva-v23Fq8AHGIMXeQBQo8bmnO/pagina.html

A me da ragazzo piacevano modellini di plastica da montare e soldatini di plastica tipo Atlantic. Entrambi erano accumunati da una idea: li puoi colorare oppure no. A me piacevano "lisci", senza colore, ma non era l'uso per cui erano stati pensati e progettati. È così anche per l'arte antica: statute e templi al loro tempo erano colorati, invece adesso li viviamo in "marmo e nero". Proviamo a fare un salto nel passato, in un'estetica diversa. Insomma, un giro tra le sculture dell'antichità a colori

Money quote: "“We’re so used to seeing—because of museums, because of plaster casts, because of the way sculpture has come down to us—[classical sculptures] denuded of any color,” says Renée Dreyfus, Curator of Ancient Art and Interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where she curated the recent exhibition Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World. Variations of this exhibition have been on display at a number of museums since 2003, and all of them are based on vibrant reconstructions of how the ancient world would have actually looked. Now, there is also a book, edited by Dreyfus, Brinkmann and Koch-Brinkmann, of the same name."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-sculpture-color-polychromy

Susa Kare ha 64 anni e il suo contributo alla storia dell'informatico è stato il meno tecnico di tutti, eppure uno dei più influenti di sempre. Anni fa l'avevo definita, con poca originalità, la "mamma delle icone". In realtà è una designer di grande valore e il suo lavoro è davvero sensazionale e seminale al tempo stesso. Il New Yorker la racconta, molto meglio del sottoscritto.

Money quote: "Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, was the first to physically show Kare’s original icon sketches, in the 2015 exhibit “This is for Everyone.” “If the Mac turned out to be such a revolutionary object––a pet instead of a home appliance, a spark for the imagination instead of a mere work tool––it is thanks to Susan’s fonts and icons, which gave it voice, personality, style, and even a sense of humor. Cherry bomb, anyone?” she joked, referring to the icon which greeted crashes in the original operating system. After working for Apple, Kare designed icons for Microsoft, Facebook, and, now, Pinterest, where she is a creative director. The mainstream presence of Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, emoji, and gifs is a sign that the visual revolutionaries have won: online, we all communicate visually, piecing together sentences from tiny-icon languages."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-woman-who-gave-the-macintosh-a-smile

Letture nerd del fine settimana. Una cosa utile per chi sviluppa front-end di siti web

Money quote "This is a guide that anyone could use to learn about the practice of front-end development. It broadly outlines and discusses the practice of front-end engineering: how to learn it and what tools are used when practicing it in 2018.

It is specifically written with the intention of being a professional resource for potential and currently practicing front-end developers to equip themselves with learning materials and development tools. Secondarily, it can be used by managers, CTOs, instructors, and head hunters to gain insights into the practice of front-end development.

The content of the handbook favors web technologies (HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript) and those solutions that are directly built on top of these open technologies. The materials referenced and discussed in the book are either best in class or the current offering to a problem."

https://frontendmasters.com/books/front-end-handbook/2018/

A questo punto dovremmo tutti aver capito tutto dei Bitcoin, delle criptovalute e delle Blockchain. E invece, no. Però questo fenomenale articolo un po' di punti fermi li mette, perché la prende dal punto di vista storico-politico, anzichè da quello tecnologico

Money quote: "Bitcoin was the first decentralized cryptocurrency ever created. It was released in 2009 as the culmination of nearly two decades of discourse on the key concepts within the cypherpunk community. It was cited by the anonymous founder(s) Satoshi Nakamoto to be inspired by Bitgold by Nick Szabo and B-Money by Wei Dai, two earlier attempts by well-known members at creating functional electronic currency.

Most individuals within the Bitcoin community envision an endgame where an implementation of Bitcoin will be a massively adopted cryptocurrency that is both a store of value and a medium of exchange. They see bitcoin eventually being the predominant global currency. However, the ideology then diverges sharply on on how this can be accomplished, and which priorities should take precedence along the way."

https://medium.com/@muradmahmudov/the-many-faces-of-bitcoin-d144601050c6