Quel genio (tossico) di Pascal, morto a 39 anni, e la sua straordinaria intuizione sul vero problema dell'umanità: riuscire a stare seduti da soli in silenzio. Ma come si fa a stare seduti in silenzio, da soli, magari in una stanza, senza guardare il telefonino? Vale lo stesso?

Money quote: “Interestingly enough, much of this was done in his teen years, with some of it coming in his twenties. As an adult, inspired by a religious experience, he actually started to move towards philosophy and theology”

https://qz.com/1309242/the-most-important-skill-nobody-taught-you/

Sullo scrivere e sulla difficoltà nel riuscire a farlo.

Money quote: “The work of writing a novel isn’t predicated on punching in every day, but clocking in when you can. When you can find the time. As Ciplex founder Ilya Pozin notes, measuring productivity by hours worked every day is borderline prehistoric”

https://medium.com/s/an-outsiders-guide-to-publishing/when-your-art-is-the-thief-of-your-joy-e88e1b206b89

Alla scoperta dell'affascinante mondo dei microbrand. Che, non sembra, ma tirano da matti. E questo, più che su di loro (che peraltro sono genuinamente interessanti), dice molte più cose su di noi e su come stiamo diventando.

Money code: "I think this mass of micro brands with massively efficient marketing are, in aggregate, having a much bigger impact than anyone thinks. Using hyper-targeted marketing, just-in-time manufacturing, and social media, these brands find and engage their audience wherever they may be. Of course, small brands are nothing new, but they typically remained small companies. Now I’m hearing about more and more of these brands with tiny teams generating over $10M in sales, with higher-than-normal-retail profit margins. What is driving this new wave of commerce, and what are the implications?"

https://medium.com/positiveslope/attack-of-the-micro-brands-c0b7835c3633

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

La storia di Wil Wheaton e della sua depressione cronica raccontate da se medesimo.

Money quote: “I have to tell you a painful truth: I missed out on a lot of things, during what are supposed to be the best years of my life, because I was paralyzed by What If-ing anxiety.

All the things that people do when they are living their lives … all those experiences that make up a life, my anxiety got in between me and doing them. So I wasn’t living. I was just existing”

https://medium.com/@wilw/my-name-is-wil-wheaton-i-live-with-chronic-depression-and-generalized-anxiety-i-am-not-ashamed-8f693f9c0af1

Negli Usa la monetica digitale sta evolvendo piuttosto rapidamente. PayPal, tramite la controllata Venmo, sta lavorando su cose che noi umani europei ancora non abbiamo visto, come una card che permette di condividere automaticamente il conto della cena... e non è certo l'unica.

Money quote: "The Venmo launch comes at a time when there’s a shift in how younger consumers are using payment cards and banking services. Many are turning to online banks, like Simple, Varo and Chime, and transfer money through peer-to-peer (p2p) payment apps like PayPal, Venmo and, now, the bank-backed app Zelle. Tech companies like Apple and Google are also getting into the p2p space, with their own services like Apple Pay Cash and Google Pay Send, for example.

Venmo says its new card is in limited release starting today. Beta customers will be invited to sign up, and others will need to fill out a form to reserve their spot."

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/venmo-officially-launches-its-own-mastercard-branded-debit-card/

Il vero colpo basso al giornalismo italiano: Wikipedia oscurata per protesta.

https://www.ilpost.it/2018/07/03/wikipedia-bloccata/

Ps: poi come mi fa notare giustamente Luca le pagine so vedono lo stesso, eh. Non temete (troppo).

Compito in classe: questa estate imparate a disegnare. Esercizi a seguire

Money quote: "Tip: For the following 6 exercises I suggest you stick with one pen and one particular type of paper (for instance A5)."

https://medium.com/personal-growth/a-quick-beginners-guide-to-drawing-58213877715e

Dopo tutte le strade portano a Roma, ecco tutti i voli portano a Roma (alla faccia di Alitalia). Ma ci sono poi anche tutti i voli che portano a XXX...

Money quote: "Flights to Rome is our follow up to one of the biggest unsolved quests of mobility: Do all roads lead to Rome?! We've explored this question on a global scale and found a route from anywhere in the world!

Starting at 712.425 locations spread evenly around the globe, we calculated routes from everywhere on the planet. Intermodal routes are calculated to the airport based on the OpenStreetMap road network. From there on a flight network shows all flights to Rome. The network was created with data of Flightradar24. Flights to Rome is a project between data visualisation and art."

https://flightstorome.moovellab.com/#roadsinthesky

Certo che Donald Trump è veramente un personaggio marcio, non c'è che dire. Marcio a misura d'uomo. Ma sempre marcio.

Money quote: "Trump’s trust agreement is a little different. For one thing, it’s not blind—Trump’s children have admitted to providing their father with regular business updates. For another, the agreement allows him to withdraw profits and assets from the trust at any time. That means Trump has a direct and ongoing financial interest in any policy decision that could affect his businesses."

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january-february-march-2018/commander-in-thief/

Un fumetto, perché no: cosa succede se ci si stacca dal telefonino un po'

Money quote: "“Sometimes you just have to unplug from everything to find yourself again” — Robin Lee"

https://medium.com/personal-growth/this-is-what-happened-when-i-turned-my-smart-phone-off-6fc0d8c494be

Ma voi da bambini sareste stati in grado di resistere per un quarto d’ora senza mangiare il Marshmallow? Perché il successo che hai avuto nella vita lo capisci da quello.

Money quote: ““The capacity to hold out for a 2nd marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success.””

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/561779/

Cosa succede nella testa dei bambini quando gli viene letta una storia? E soprattutto, cosa cambia se, anziché essere i genitori a leggerla, è un tablet?

Money quote: “In an ideal world, you would always be there to read to your child. The results of this small, preliminary study also suggest that, when parents do turn to electronic devices for young children, they should gravitate toward the most stripped-down version of a narrated, illustrated ebook, as opposed to either audio-only or animation.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/05/24/611609366/whats-going-on-in-your-childs-brain-when-you-read-them-a-story

Comunque, io qui ve lo dico: se la direttiva europea sul copyright passa e viene poi accolta in Italia, "Mostly, I Write" cambia completamente oppure chiude...

https://changecopyright.org/it/impact

Il discorso non si limita al legislatore europeo e al suo modo di intedere il copyright. Il punto non è quello (là, alla fine, si tratta dei soliti interessi economici e dei gruppi che spingono per attuarli). Invece Internet, le reti, il computer: tutto questo non è un problema tecnologico, è invece un grande problema culturale. Grande perché grande è l'ignoranza della cultura informatica in cui tutti viviamo inzuppati.

Segue a mo' di esempio una ricerca sul tema (pdf)

Money quote: "All major web browsers include a private browsing mode that does not store browsing history, cookies, or temporary files across browsing sessions. Unfortunately, users have misconceptions about what this mode does. Many factors likely contribute to these misconceptions. In this paper, we focus on browsers’ disclosures, or their inbrowser explanations of private browsing mode. In a 460-participant online study, each participant saw one of 13 different disclosures (the desktop and mobile disclosures of six popular browsers, plus a control). Based on the disclosure they saw, participants answered questions about what would happen in twenty browsing scenarios capturing previously documented misconceptions. We found that browsers’ disclosures fail to correct the majority of the misconceptions we tested. These misconceptions included beliefs that private browsing mode would prevent geolocation, advertisements, viruses,"

https://www.blaseur.com/papers/www18privatebrowsing.pdf

È nato come un saggio di rivista diventato virale e adesso è un libro, Bullshit Jobs, scritto dall’economista David Graeber. Non so quanto andrà lontano ma secondo me è un libro notevole, da leggere, perché tocca un tema profondo della nostra società.

Money quote: “There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.“

http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bullshit-Jobs/David-Graeber/9781501143342

Sul perché grandi classici come Ifconfig, netstat eccetera, non sono più adatti e bisognerebbe (ahimé) sostituirli con altri, più appropriati strumenti. La cosa vale soprattutto nel mondo Linux e per i sistemisti che amministrano dei server. Ma ha senso anche per l’umile utente Mac con Homebrew...

Money quote: “However, the deeper issue is the interface that netstat, ifconfig, and company present to users. In practice, these commands are caught between two masters. On the one hand, the information the tools present and the questions they let us ask are deeply intertwined with how the kernel itself does networking, and in general the tools are very much supposed to report the kernel's reality. On the other hand, the users expect netstat, ifconfig and so on to have their traditional interface (in terms of output, command line arguments, and so on); any number of noscripts and tools fish things out of ifconfig output, for example. As the Linux kernel has changed how it does networking, this has presented things like ifconfig with a deep conflict; their traditional output is no longer necessarily an accurate representation of reality.”

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ReplacingNetstatNotBad

Un’idea molto, molto bella per avere un sistema di gestione del proprio budget personale in testo semplice. Minimalista e promettente. Molto promettente.

Money quote: “This is a work in progress. The goal is to turn this into a web application where an user can have multiple sheets and save/export his work. If you feel like helping check out these open issues.”

https://galvez.github.io/plainbudget/

Quando l’auto-aiuto arriva alle sue vette, è un derviscio che danza nel cielo, avvolgendosi in aria come un nastro di carta colorata.

Money quote: “When you open yourself to new experiences, you open yourself to change. Obviously, being open to new experiences is hard. In order for you to truly be open, you must be humble”

https://medium.com/the-mission/to-have-what-you-want-you-must-give-up-whats-holding-you-back-65275f844a5a

Apple con iOS 12 vuole ridarci il nostro tempo

Money quote: “Though, as a culture, we are somewhat recently woke to the nature of our digital relationship — and have watched as major tech companies, including Google and Facebook, introduce new tools to help us regain control — Apple has, apparently, been working on these tools for a long time.”

https://medium.com/@LanceUlanoff/apple-ios-12-is-a-toolbox-full-of-iphone-breaks-613630e7c1f

Lasciamo perdere per un attimo il discorso degli hipster, del ritorno all’analogico, del fatto che una volta qui fosse tutta campagna e Ms-Dos. Questo ragionamento sulle interfacce fisiche è fantastico (soprattutto per chi scrive, come me, anche se si parla di auto e di registratori di cassa).

Money quote: “Will we see a return to analog interfaces? I certainty hope so. While analog interfaces aren’t applicable to every situation, they do force designers to make permanent decisions. And because specific choices must be made for physical button placement, it’s harder to design an unusable analog interface. And design decisions must be final. Software interfaces can be quickly changed and deployed without the same process — and the world is filling up with nested, mystery-meat menus and confusing user flows.”

https://medium.com/@caseorganic/why-do-we-keep-building-cars-with-touchscreens-alt-the-hidden-lives-of-touchscreens-55faf92799bf

La USB Type-C purtroppo si sta trasformando in un grande casino

Money quote: “Devices are just as problematic too when it comes to support for “Alternate Modes” and non-USB protocols. These include DisplayPort, MHL, HDMI, Ethernet, and audio functionality provided over the connector, all of which rely on the connected devices and cables to support them. These are not a compulsory part of the specification, as the capabilities and needs clearly vary from device to device. A USB battery pack doesn’t need to support HDMI, for example.”

https://www.androidauthority.com/state-of-usb-type-c-870996/