Hanno tutti - giornalisti, guru, profeti, testimoni, apostoli e angeli delle tecnologie digitali - parlato, straparlato e predicato di quanto sia bella e utile l'intelligenza artificiale nelle sue numerose e sempre sorprendenti manifestazioni. Ecco, adesso pare che tanto seminare stia pagando

Money quote: "One of AI’s main effects will be a dramatic drop in the cost of making predictions, says Ajay Agrawal of the University of Toronto and co-author of a new book, “Prediction Machines”. Just as electricity made lighting much more affordable—a given level of lighting now costs around 400 times less than it did in 1800—so AI will make forecasting more affordable, reliable and widely available."

https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21739431-artificial-intelligence-spreading-beyond-technology-sector-big-consequences

Sono in Giappone sino alla fine della settimana. Il canale va avanti ma con calma...

Quest'uomo è un genio

Money quote: "When I was on MySpace I had 20 friends. And I liked it.

Then Facebook happened.

Then Twitter happened.

Then Instagram happened.

And we all lost our fucking minds."

https://medium.com/redoubtable/why-you-should-be-a-curator-not-a-collector-22c959bb2073

Sta iniziando l'era delle PWA, Progressive Web Applications. Anche nel giardino militarizzato di Apple: ne sentiremo parlare alla WWDC a giugno.

Money quote: "If you came here and you still don’t know what a PWA is, let’s start saying there is no unique or precise definition. But it’s an app created with Web technologies that −without packaging or signing− can work offline and can optionally be installed in the operating system where it will look and act like any other app."

https://medium.com/@firt/progressive-web-apps-on-ios-are-here-d00430dee3a7

Storia di uno hippie che si credeva Gesù Cristo (e ha fatto la storia del rock, letteralmente). Con un finale amaro e la sensazione che certe volte, per carità mica lo auguro a nessuno, ma morire da giovani come James Dean sia meglio, almeno ai fini della propria leggenda.

Money quote: "It was probably the following June, the day after Jellett’s twenty first birthday, at a Blind Faith gig in Hyde Park, that Jeff Dexter, the DJ from Middle Earth, looked out from the stage and saw Jellett dancing, spotting his long, flowing, white shirt. A cameraman filming the gig noticed him too. Photographs show Jellett’s head bowed, having removed his shirt, with thousands seated around him, some on deck chairs. Blind Faith played “Presence of the Lord”. Eric Clapton, who had been nicknamed “God”, sang and played guitar. Through the microphone, possibly for the first time and certainly the most publicly, Dexter called Jellett “Jesus”."

https://medium.com/@JPRobinson/the-mystery-of-jesus-the-naked-hippie-dancer-9822c0da8765

Praticamente ci stanno spiegando che è come se fosse già morto. E lo trasformano in un monumento nazionale: benvenuti al videomuseo di Warren Buffett, gestito dalla CNBC

Money quote: "CNBC, First in Business Worldwide, today announced the launch of the Warren Buffett Archive, the digital home to the world's largest video collection of Warren Buffett speaking about business, investing, money and life. The exclusive content from the site, which is built around 24 years of Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meeting footage as well as CNBC interviews, curated short-form videos and more, is being made available to the public for the first time ever."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/05/cnbc-launches-the-warren-buffett-archive.html

Se volete condividere questa storia o altre qui su Telegram o sui social, ricordate che l'indirizzo di Mostly, I Write è https://news.1rj.ru/str/mostlyiwrite

Un giallo americano su un biglietto milionario della lotteria: lungo e gustoso.

Money quote: "The file landed on Rob Sand’s desk with something less than a thud. Despite holding the contents of an investigation still open after more than two years, the file was barely half an inch thick. “Happy birthday,” his boss said."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/03/magazine/money-issue-iowa-lottery-fraud-mystery.html

Se volete condividere questa storia o altre qui su Telegram o sui social, ricordate che l'indirizzo di Mostly, I Write è https://news.1rj.ru/str/mostlyiwrite

Ci sono soprattutto due cose, tra quelle messe online da Netflix recentemente, che non dovresti perdere, e sono entrambe prodotte dai fratelli Duplass. Una è “Evil Genius”: per chi è appassionato di crime, una storia che sembra un romanzo partorito da uno scrittore che ha un filo esagerato con la complessità e l’assurdità del piano di una rapina in banca, e invece è tutto vero. Della seconda avrai sentito parlare: “Wild Wild Country”, il documentario che narra la storia di Osho e di quel che succede quando una comunità di arancioni dexide di trasferirsi armi e bagagli dall’India nel poco ospitale Oregon. A chi lo ha già visto ed è rimasto incuriosito dalla storia Roberta Lippi ha dedicato un e-book intitolato “Wild Wild Sheela”, e per descriverlo è sufficiente il sottotitolo: “Le 100 cose che Wild Wild Country non ha vi detto e che state cercando su Google”.

Link: http://bit.ly/2IpiZiy

Salone del libro anche da noi. Ma una riflessione sulla materia oscura dell'editoria, anzi la materia laterale, ci sta sempre bene. Quando viene dall'argentina, poi, è deliziosa.

Money quote: "La Biblioteca Vigil, desde 2015 cuando se relanzó la editorial con El fusilamiento de Penina de Aldo Oliva, lanzó 7 títulos. “Esta Feria nos sirve para hacernos algunas preguntas sobre qué significa editar libros. Como editora de poesía, no me gusta hablar en términos de resistencia porque es ponerte en un lugar de víctima, un lugar pasivo o débil. Nosotros hacemos libros donde lo primero es la literatura; nuestros libros son objetos muy cuidados. Nos gusta pensar el catálogo, los textos, como integrados en una conversación sobre literatura contemporánea -plantea Henderson-. Nos gusta pensar que cada texto tiene un sentido. Publicar poesía en este contexto es algo muchas veces irracional, sumamente intuitivo y muy necesario. Editar libros de poesía es casi una vocación. No podríamos no hacerlo”."

https://www.pagina12.com.ar/112374-nosotros-trabajamos-desde-la-periferia-del-mundo-del-libro

Insomma, possiamo anche ripensare la vecchiaia, adesso

Money quote: "It is not ageing that causes a decline in fitness; rather, that a decline in fitness causes ageing. This is the simple thesis of Play On: How to Get Better with Age by the American journalist and sports fan Jeff Bercovici."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/29/extra-time-how-smart-exercise-can-keep-you-younger-for-longer

Visto che sono in Giappone... Com'è per un programmatore occidentale andare a lavorare in Giappone? Brevi note di un Gaijin

Money quote: "You will often find that many engineers have no Computer Science degree, which on its face is not so unusual even in Silicon Valley companies, but you may find people who had virtually no experience programming before joining a company. This is most likely a result of the Japanese university system, whereby your major and your future job often have little correlation. Typically one year before graduation, you apply for jobs and run around the city in a suit trying to convince a company that does virtually anything to hire you. If you’re lucky, you get in, and in the best of cases, you get training before starting whatever job you now find yourself in. Sometimes, this doesn’t happen.

As a result, you will find many people who are self-taught (impressive!), but often self-teaching yields less than ideal programming practices: copy+paste over refactoring, happy-path coding, odd variable naming, strong coupling, etc. This will often reflect itself in the code you will be working with, and the discussions you will have, so brace yourself.

Typically engineering organizations will survive thanks to a few great engineers who are often self-taught, but who are also overworked. "

https://medium.com/@xevix/gaijin-engineer-in-tokyo-aaa9be8919b2

Se volete condividere questa storia o altre qui su Telegram o sui social, ricordate che l'indirizzo di Mostly, I Write è:

https://news.1rj.ru/str/mostlyiwrite

Era un po’ l’altra metà letteraria di Freud. Il medico e scrittore viennese Arthur Schnitzler, relativamente poco conosciuto anche da noi, ha qualcosa da dire con questo racconto lungo e divertente del 1895 sulla vacuità della fama del poeta. Consigliato anche dal poeta residente di questo canale, che con la fama dialoga (a distanza) da tempo.

Money quote: “Finished in 1895, the brilliant “Late Fame” concerns an aging Viennese civil servant who, virtually out of nowhere, is crowned a master poet by an eccentric coffeehouse group of striving writers and actors. The tale consists of little more than the man’s ascension and the orchestration of a public reading, yet in Schnitzler’s hands it becomes a distorted mirror onto the less-talked-about side of literary life—from workshopping to self-promotion, favor trading, and reviews.”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/brilliant-1895-novel-on-the-emptiness-of-literary-fame

(Qui già tre anni fa ne parlava, il buon R.R.C. https://robertocorsi.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/schnitzler-ft/)

Sulla difficoltà di fotografare un oggetto di vetro e sul modo per farlo con buoni risultati.

Money quote: “Most photographers, especially in museum settings, are trained to photograph objects on flat, neutral backgrounds, and yet that approach creates incredible challenges when trying to capture subtle details—like engraving, tooling marks, optic ribbing, etc.—in transparent glasses. Often, it appears as if all detail disappears once the object is placed on the background.”

https://blog.cmog.org/2018/04/25/photographing-glass-lighting-techniques-for-transparent-glass-objects/

💿 La storia di come la prima canzone mai compressa in mp3 sia stata Tom’s Diner (grazie a un chiaro riferimento a Seinfeld) di Suzanne Vega e di come l’autrice stessa (ribattezzata “The Mother of MP3”), interrogata davanti a una platea di giornalisti sulla qualità della riproduzione audio, rispose candidamente:

”Everybody knows that mp3 compresses the the sound and therefore loses some of the warmth. That’s why some people collect vinyl…”

Sull’idea che le storie siano il primo, vero formato nativo per i telefonini.

Money quote: “Stories is not a technology, nor is it a feature. It is a media format, or even a genre, in the way that a magazine or a murder mystery or a 30-minute television program is. This is also why it’s a little silly to worry about who “copied” Stories from whom, since the whole point of formats and genres is to develop independent of single tools of creation and dissemination”

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/smartphone-stories-snapchat-instagram-facebook/559517/

C’è poi quella categoria di dissidenti delle fedi rivelate e costituite in chiesa. Una volta dicevano: “Credo, ma a modo mio”. Adesso credono come fanno le foto su Instagram: tutte uguali, tutte basate sugli stessi principi e idee.

Money quote: “Call it God, The Universe, karma or whatever you prefer — I just know I’ve seen it work too often in my life to not believe in it. It’s not about making petty materialistic requests through foxhole prayers. It’s just a belief in the natural order of things. Faith in the unseen. My belief system falls somewhere between an unwavering faith in karmic winds and the law of attraction. I truly believe what we put out into The Universe is what we get back. Our thoughts form our realities, quite literally. Because where is it most of us reside if not in our own minds? Tell yourself something enough and it has an odd way of becoming true”

https://medium.com/hopes-and-dreams-for-our-future/i-truly-believe-the-universe-speaks-to-those-who-are-listening-to-it-3addc05dc9e7

In California cancellano i voti per posta - a migliaia - se la firma non corrisponde. E non avvertono gli elettori il chi voto viene rigettato.

Money quote: “How did California, of all states, wind up suppressing so many votes? The problem lies in the state election code’s rules for counting absentee ballots. All registered voters can choose to vote by mail in California if they want to; they need only request a ballot, fill it out, sign the ballot envelope, and drop it in the mail. Unbeknownst to most voters, however, is the stipulation that their signature on the envelope must match the signature on their voter-registration form. If it does not, election officials do not count the ballot.”

http://amp.slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/california-is-quietly-disenfranchising-thousands-of-voters-based-on-their-handwriting.html

Fujitsu: il futuro del calcolo? Lo trovate dentro pochi centimetri quadrati - il mio articolo per Il Sole 24 ORE (e intanto io sto tornando in Italia)

http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/tecnologie/2018-05-18/fujitsu-futuro-calcolo-lo-trovate-dentro-pochi-centimetri-quadrati-140244.shtml?uuid=AEdfrcpE

Rieccomi in Italia.

Come si fa a scrivere bene? È una domanda che mi fanno molto spesso gli studenti o le persone che scoprono che scrivo per vivere. Beh, questo breve articolo di Karl Philipp Moritz spiega che scrivere bene vuol dire pensare bene e lo sottoscrivo pienamente.

Money quote: “An appropriate instruction to a good way of writing does not have to overwhelm the memory with useless rules. Instead, it should sharpen the mind. A useful instruction to a good way of writing will inevitably contain an instruction to a right way of thinking, an instruction to a somewhat practical logic.”

https://ia.net/writer/support/writing-tips/lectures-on-style

Se volete condividere su Telegram o sui social questa storia o le altre che metto qui, ricordate che l'indirizzo di Mostly, I Write è https://news.1rj.ru/str/mostlyiwrite

Ho sempre pensato che gli indiani (dell'India) sono gente strana. Fino ad oggi però non sapevo come argomentare meglio questa idea. Adesso invece...

Money quote: "One of the most striking examples of this is the meditation on corpses presented in the Buddhist Satipatthana Sutta. In ancient India, corpses were left out in ‘charnel grounds’, and people would have had the opportunity to observe the various stages of decomposition. The text is nothing if not thorough, describing in some detail ‘a corpse thrown aside in a charnel ground – one, two or three days dead, bloated, livid, and oozing matter … being devoured by crows, hawks, vultures, dogs, jackals or various kinds of worms’, eventually turning into ‘bones rotten and crumbling to dust’. On observing this, the monk reminds himself that ‘This body too is of the same nature, it will be like that, it is not exempt from that fate.’"

https://aeon.co/ideas/is-meditating-on-death-like-putting-on-a-fur-coat-in-summer