Certo che scrivere su Medium perché non ha senso pagare per leggere gli articoli di Medium è veramente una doppia libidine con i fiocchi.

Money quote: “But what will I get if I subscribe to Medium for 5€/month?

Let’s start with the price, it is cheap, and I can afford more than that if I really think I need it, but here are the points that are not OK for me”

https://medium.com/writing-blog-2018/why-i-dont-pay-medium-membership-92c2c4afd9e9

Un tizio va lungo disteso dal punto di vista professionale (anzi, imprenditoriale) e da questo trova lo spunto per scrivere che è riuscendo a uscire da queste secche che si diventa migliori. L’acqua calda invece la scopriamo settimana prossima.

Money quote: “One thing that helped me was realizing that we all have career low points. This thought gave me perspective”

https://medium.com/the-mission/how-to-deal-with-a-huge-low-point-in-your-career-47fa81ce67c4

La scelta della canzone che conclude l’ultimo episodio di “The Staircase” (un vero capolavoro che ha creato un genere, oggi rimandato in onda da Netflix con l’aggiunta di tre nuovi episodi che chiudono definitivamente una storia durata vent’anni e per vent’anni documentata dalla troupe che confezionava il documentario) è, ovviamente, un capolavoro.

Link: http://bit.ly/2Jw8Jtr

Non solo Julia Evans mi ha fatto riscoprire le gioie dell’editing in batch di file di testo con “ed” (una opportunità anche per chi scrive prosa, oltre che per chi fa codice), ma mi ha fatto anche comprare un libro fantastico su come si usa “ed”.

Money quote: “In a surprising turn of events, I ended up using the ed editor to do this task, and it was really easy and simple to do! In this blog post I’ll make the case that if you have something you might normally accomplish with a Vim macro, you might conceivably want to use Ed for it!”

https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/05/11/batch-editing-files-with-ed/

La ricchezza dei romani incapsulata nei ghiacci della Groenlandia.

Money quote: “Modern people aren’t the only ones who’ve polluted the atmosphere. Two thousand years ago, the Romans smelted precious ores in clay furnaces, extracting silver and belching lead into the sky. Some of that lead settled on Greenland’s ice cap and mixed in with ever-accumulating layers of ice. Now, scientists studying annual deposits of those ice layers have found that spikes and dips in lead pollution during the Roman era mirror the timing of many historical events, including wars fought by Julius Caesar.”

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/rise-and-fall-roman-empire-exposed-greenland-ice-samples

Nella grande caccia alle streghe contro Facebook & c., durata pochi giorni, la “colpa” del social media di Mark Zuckerberg è stata monetizzare gli utenti. In realtà, come Cambridge Analityca dimostra, il problema ha più a che fare con la dimensione politica delle persone. Stiamo parlando di un’altra cosa, insomma.

La cronaca delle elezioni indiane dovrebbe spiegarlo meglio: una piattaforma tecnologica straniera che ospita e gestisce il dibattito politico di una nazione, riorganizzandolo con le priorità e schedando i partecipanti...

Money quote: “Yet the most intense political campaigning was not taking place on the streets. Instead, the action was happening on WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook that has about 250 million users in India.”

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/technology/whatsapp-india-elections.html

Qui secondo me finisce male...

Money quote: “According to a pool report, President Trump responded by pointing to a window in the White House residence, and said: “She’s doing great. She’s looking at us right there.”

Reporters turned to look at the spot he indicated, but there was no sign of the first lady.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trump-says-the-first-lady-is-doing-great-she-hasnt-been-seen-in-public-for-two-weeks/2018/05/25/b9107c60-5f97-11e8-a4a4-c070ef53f315_story.html

Elon Musk vuole aggiustare il giornalismo con la nuova Pravda. Sito web in cui i lettori votano gli articoli.

Vox riflette sul problema che solleva Musk.

Money quote: “The implication of his post appears to be that journalists are shaping their content in order to cater to advertisers, which … isn’t really how journalism works. Sure, publications rely on advertising dollars as a funding source — but journalists themselves aren’t in charge of getting that money or catering content to advertisers.

Plenty of journalists have spoken out saying as much.”

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2018/5/24/17389388/elon-musk-twitter-pravda

Commoventi foto di piccoli, piccoli treni tedeschi

Money quote: “The island of Nordstrandischmoor is connected to mainland Germany by a tiny narrow gauge railway, on which residents (at least those 15 years of age and older and holding a moped license) can drive private trains back and forth to and from Lüttmoorsiel. Each island house has its own wagon — some used to be wind-powered, using sails, but today they run on diesel.”

https://weburbanist.com/2018/05/08/tiny-trains-neat-narrow-gauge-rail-connects-german-island-to-mainland

Se siete anche voi persi dentro Westworkd, questa timeline è una mano santa

Money quote: "To help "Westworld" fans better understand the events that have led up to the current season, INSIDER has put together a chronological timeline."

http://www.thisisinsider.com/westworld-timeline-spoilers-2018-4

Non seguo il calcio, ma se lo dovessi seguire, terrei d'occhio questa previsione automatica di chi vincerà...

Le valutazioni quantitative sono una cosa molto, molto brutta.

Money quote: “Contrary to commonsense belief, attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics discourage initiative, innovation and risk-taking. The intelligence analysts who ultimately located Osama bin Laden worked on the problem for years. If measured at any point, the productivity of those analysts would have been zero. Month after month, their failure rate was 100 per cent, until they achieved success. From the perspective of the superiors, allowing the analysts to work on the project for years involved a high degree of risk: the investment in time might not pan out. Yet really great achievements often depend on such risks.“

https://aeon.co/ideas/against-metrics-how-measuring-performance-by-numbers-backfires

La verità ha un suo luogo fisico? Per molto tempo, sì, l'ha avuto. Ma il rapporto tra verità e spazio è molto più sottile e articolato di quanto non si possa credere. Alle volte la difficoltà del viaggio per arrivare al posto in cui ha sede la verità la rende più forte, altre volte l'avvicinarsi della verità ai posti dove vive la gente la rende più democratica.

Money quote: "We ought not to forget possibly the most important lesson from the Oracle at Delphi. After a thousand years as the mythic centre of the universe, a spot where mortals once connected with the gods and received credible prophecies about the future, the sanctuary at Delphi vanished from the side of Mt Parnassus. Starting after the fourth century AD, stones previously used to hold up sacred temples and treasuries were refashioned by local residents to build mundane houses and shops in a place they called Kastri – largely oblivious to the oracular history of the site. Only in the 19th century did archaeologists rediscover the location where the legendary activities of Delphi had taken place. No truth-spot is forever (but some are more fleeting than others)."

https://aeon.co/essays/labs-courts-and-altars-are-also-traveling-truth-spots

La fantastica parabola di Vice. Ottima lettura

Money quote: "Vice employees like to divide the company’s history into Old Vice and New Vice, with the only disagreement being the precise moment of the shift. If an investment from Rupert Murdoch hadn’t buried Vice’s claim to countercultural cachet, a year later, the company received $250 million from TCV, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, and another $250 million from A&E, which is jointly owned by Disney and Hearst. The investment valued Vice at $2.5 billion. “We were like, Whoa! What are we doing that’s worth that much money?” remembers one former editorial employee. “There was also this moment of realization: I have just built this really valuable brand, and I’m making like $32,000.”"

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/inside-vice-media-shane-smith.html

Un'altra teoria su come sia nato (e a che cosa serve da un punto di vista evoluzionistico) il linguaggio umano.

Money quote: "Oren Kolodny, a biologist at Stanford University, puts the question in more scientific terms: “What kind of evolutionary pressures could have given rise to this really weird and surprising phenomenon that is so critical to the essence of being human?” And he has proposed a provocative answer. In a recent paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Kolodny argues that early humans—while teaching their kin how to make complex tools—hijacked the capacity for language from themselves."

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/toolmaking-language-brain/562385/

Siamo liberi di credere quel che vogliamo? No, decisamente no. Non è una posizione moralmente ed eticamente sostenibile.

Money quote: "But belief is not knowledge.

Beliefs are factive: to believe is to take to be true. It would be absurd, as the analytic philosopher G E Moore observed in the 1940s, to say: ‘It is raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining.’ Beliefs aspire to truth – but they do not entail it. Beliefs can be false, unwarranted by evidence or reasoned consideration. They can also be morally repugnant. Among likely candidates: beliefs that are sexist, racist or homophobic; the belief that proper upbringing of a child requires ‘breaking the will’ and severe corporal punishment; the belief that the elderly should routinely be euthanised; the belief that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is a political solution, and so on. If we find these morally wrong, we condemn not only the potential acts that spring from such beliefs, but the content of the belief itself, the act of believing it, and thus the believer."

https://aeon.co/ideas/you-dont-have-a-right-to-believe-whatever-you-want-to

Il trucchetto con cui, a quanto pare, Amazon tira avanti i suoi centri di logistica (lo segnalo da cliente Prime super-soddisfatto, casomai più infastidito degli spedizionieri che fanno l'ultimo pezzo, BRT e gli altri).

Money quote: "When a Fulfillment Center opens, the expectation is that anywhere from 1,000 to 2,200 positions will become available overnight, each providing 40 hours of work per week at a minimum. In reality, the labor hours Amazon needs to power its brutally efficient supply chain appear to be far fewer. To reduce overhead but continue to sop up performance-based incentives from the local governments it operates in, Amazon has become increasingly reliant on a work scheduling scheme that often coerces workers into leaving their shifts early or turns them away at the door without notice."

https://gizmodo.com/on-amazon-s-time-1826570882

Come si fanno gli scoop. La storia di un giornalista che ha affondato un Unicorno, una startup da dieci miliardi di dollari di valutazione.

Money quote: "Several people who have worked at Rupert Murdoch papers have told me that he isn’t above interceding in editorial matters, but in this case, despite his personal interest, he didn’t. A source who has known Murdoch for years explained it, “He’s a newsman — and a good story is a good story no matter what or who the story is about.”"

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/john-carreyrous-new-book-on-silicon-valley-bad-blood.html

Oggi, a 30 anni dalla morte, raccontiamo la rocambolesca, bellissima e molto poco conosciuta storia di come Andrea Pazienza evitò il servizio militare:

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/06/andrea-pazienza-militare/