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Mostly, I Write
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Storie e pensieri suoi e di altri, raccolti da Antonio Dini http://www.antoniodini.com
Per contatti su Telegram: @antoniodini
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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/
Forwarded from 𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗙𝗔
💿 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
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
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
La storia attraverso i documenti che registrano i prestiti della biblioteca pubblica di New York (che è un posto fantastico, altro che Ghostbusters: quando ho una mezza giornata vuota a Manhattan e fa freddo o piove, è la mia destinazione preferita)

Money quote: "The Society Library has survived in part because New York is a city of readers and writers who have been willing to pay the annual fee, like a gym-membership for the mind. While anyone can walk in and ask for something to read in the Reference Room, only members have borrowing privileges and access to the stacks, as well as electronic resources, access to reading and workrooms, and the children’s library. Past members on the roster include Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edward Steichen, Willa Cather, P.G. Wodehouse, W.H. Auden, Djuna Barnes, George Plimpton, Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman, John Cheever, Barbara Guest, Lewis Mumford, Helene Hanff, Roald Dahl, Leonard Bernstein, and Shirley Hazzard."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-york-society-library-borrowing-records
Viviamo in un mondo pornificato, in cui la sessualità è diventata non solo sempre più esplicita, messa in scena, ma anche una delle fonte di continua di rielaborazione del potere sociale. Ovviamente, come tutti sappiamo nella nostra cultura la sessualità maschile è al centro e il piacere femminile è un oggetto e non un soggetto del discorso. È anzi una funzione di quello maschile.

C’è un tema sul quale si potrebbe riflettere di più: la masturbazione femminile, che è misteriosa e a quanto pare non diffusa quanto (sempre a quanto pare) sia invece diffusa quella maschile. In questo articolo se ne parla in maniera interessante.

Money quote: “Numerous forums and websites address the question, sometimes from men, of why certain women don’t masturbate. They are often told that the woman probably just isn’t admitting it. But the reasons for not admitting it are coincidentally the same reasons some women say they don’t actually do it — shame, lack of interest, embarrassment, or not knowing how.
Still, we should continue to promote masturbation as good and healthy, and also take these women at their word. Some women do masturbate. Some women don’t. Women who really don’t, and really don’t want to, and “have enough sexual outlets,” or are otherwise satisfied with their sexual interest, don’t need to. They shouldn’t be ashamed of that, or feel as if they’ve missed the liberation boat that leads to only one place: Jerk-Off City.”

https://melmagazine.com/why-some-women-dont-masturbate-e2ceb6832b5f
Mettiamola così: i mercati grazie alla digitalizzazione cambiano profondamente. Ma questo cambiamento non è lineare e prevedibile. Ci sono fattori esterni e fattori congiunturali che possono dare forme molto particolari a quel che viene fuori.

Quartz in questo articolo mostra chiaramente che il digitale applicato all’industria editoriale non solo ha portato alla nascita di un nuovo e più fiorente mercato del self publishing (quello che prima era vanity publishing, cioè editoria a pagamento, e che ora probabilmente sta morendo) ma che in questo mercato il ruolo monopolistico e totalmente non collaborativo di Amazon altera notevolmente lo sviluppo nel futuro.

Money quote: “Amazon’s power over self-publishing, a shadow industry running outside the traditional publishing houses and imprints, is insidiously invisible. As a result, the publishing industry has a data problem, and it doesn’t look like Amazon will be loosening its grip any time soon.”

https://qz.com/1240924/are-ebooks-dying-or-thriving-the-answer-is-yes/
Se avete il Mac (ma Arq c'è anche per Windows), un progettino veloce veloce: backup nel cloud fai-da-te. Non male.

Money quote: “Paid cloud services can readily fill this gap, such as Backblaze (a TidBITS sponsor), but you can also now roll your own cloud service at a reasonable price by combining Haystack Software’s Arq backup app for macOS with Backblaze’s B2 on-demand, usage-based cloud storage service. I reviewed Arq for Macworld in March 2017, and found it generally good, although it needs more refinement in its restore process; Arq added B2 support a year ago”

Non solo B2, però:

Money quote2: "Dropbox: Dropbox’s lowest-tier paid service includes 1 TB of cloud storage, and Arq can talk directly to Dropbox’s API. You can use Dropbox’s Selective Sync or Smart Sync to prevent those backups from being unnecessarily synced to a desktop computer"

https://tidbits.com/2018/05/18/roll-your-own-cloud-backups-with-arq-and-b2/
Per programmare occorre essere bravi in matematica? È una domanda molto più ricorrente, e che spesso scuote nel profondo il programmatore, che si sente inadeguato. Perché, nonostante l'informatica nasca dalla logica-matematica, e possa essere intesa come una branca applicativa della matematica per molti versi, in realtà i programmatori non sono matematici e non hanno necessariamente bisogno di esserlo. Anche se fa comodo. Vedi di seguito.

Money quote: "Often times, I want to compute the worst-case or upper bound of, say, the size of some data set. The calculations can be nontrivial for many of these. Or, I may want to analyze some recurrence relation to see how it varies as I increase the recursion depth. To do that, I need, among other things, the Master Theorem and a good understanding of how to analyze series. Believe it or not, this sometimes means I need to evaluate an integral (though mostly of the Riemann variety). Or can I just solve the recurrence and get a closed-form solution? Do I have to resort to linear algebra? This gets into things like generating functions, Stirling numbers, matrix computations, etc. If you are curious what goes into “fundamental” mathematical concepts necessary to understand computer science, have a look at volume 1 of, The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald Knuth, or Concrete Mathematics, by Knuth, Ronald L. Graham and Oren Patashnik."

http://pub.gajendra.net/2012/10/mathematics_i_use

PS: se vi definite anche un po' come "programmatori" e arrivate in fondo all'articolo che vi ho appena segnalate ma non siete laureati in matematica (e laureati pure bene, peraltro), poi forse potreste cambiare la vostra definizione mentale.
La notizia è di qualche giorno fa: c'è stata una rivoluzione nel management di Facebook. Una di quelle cose che occorrono settimane solo per decodificarla, mesi o anni per vederne le conseguenze

Money quote: "The moves, which were announced internally to employees today, are meant to improve executive communication and user privacy, but the changes also come as Facebook contends with the backlash from the U.S. presidential election, revelations of manipulation by the Russian government and the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal."

https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17330226/facebook-reorg-mark-zuckerberg-whatsapp-messenger-ceo-blockchain
Tom Wolfe è morto, viva Tom Wolfe. Ecco la sua epica intervista per la Paris Review. Lunga ma assolutamente necessaria. Soprattutto se scrivete.

Money quote: “For eight months I had sat at my typewriter every day, intending to start this novel and nothing had happened. I felt that the only way I was ever going to get going on it was to put myself under deadline pressure. I knew that if I had to, I could produce something under deadline pressure. I found the only marvelous maniac in all of journalism willing to let me do such a thing. That was Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. This book would have never been written if Jann Wenner had not said, OK, let’s do it. Let’s see what happens.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2226/tom-wolfe-the-art-of-fiction-no-123-tom-wolfe
La televisione sta morendo ma, nel suo canto del cigno, produce le sue cose più belle: i telefilm. Sono il ritratto di una epoca, e producono una ulteriore spinta per quanto riguarda l’atomizzazione della nostra società. Al centro del cambiamento: la famiglia.

Money quote: “How might we understand new television’s invocation of the family? The first thing to note is that these invocations are not commitments to traditional ‘family values’, where what’s being affirmed is a nuclear family: the range of families for which characters act are quite broad and often not traditional. We are not dealing here with reproduction or property. Yet, we shouldn’t think that these invocations aren’t potentially regressive. Most new TV presents and responds to the increasing atomisation and the breakdown in our world by withdrawing into and idolising the institution most representative of it.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/our-golden-age-of-tv-amid-collapse-a-new-family-emerges
Invitate gli amici a cena. Anziché cercare di emulare Vissani, perché non gli fate un bel piatto di tagliatelle fatte in casa?

Idea Smart, a parte mettere l’olio nell’acqua...

Money quote: “Eggs… and fucking Flour. Seriously.

Apart from a pinch of salt, that’s ALL THERE IS TO IT. You’ve already got all the ingredients for pasta and you didn’t even realise it.”

https://medium.com/@chazhutton/stop-buying-pasta-you-idiot-1f90bf761b60