Questo presidente degli Stati Uniti si sta dimostrando sempre più strano, veramente atipico, e anche straordinariamente umano e normale nelle sue piccolezze e nella sua totale mancanza di senso dello Stato. Un uomo medio, un perfetto grillino d'Oltreoceano, direi. Chi non simpatizzerebbe con il suo sistema di archiviazione dei documenti, suoi e altrui? E con il lavoro di chi deve recuperare e ricucire il tutto, per preservarlo ai fini della normativa sulla trasparenze e sull'accesso ai documenti pubblici?.

Alla fine, è più umana la mente dell'autocrate che non quella del burocrate. È questo il segreto del suo successo?

Money quote: "It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them — what some people described as his unofficial “filing system.”"

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filing-system-635164

Fotografare la Luna e i gabbiani con un Game Boy e un obiettivo Canon. Meraviglia.

Money quote: "I took my abomination out for a walk to the beach to shoot some nature and wildlife. (see gallery below.)"

http://ekeler.com/game-boy-camera-canon-ef-mount/

Long read: droni a vela che permettono di andare là dove praticamente nessuno è mai andato prima e scoprire cose che voi umani... Dopotutto gli oceani sono uno degli spazi più misterioso nell'esperienza umana. Altro che cosmo.

Money quote: "“We’re talking about a place that is a long way from anywhere, that few people have ever been to,” Block says. “Then I’m sitting in my office, and the images start to appear of the sharks doing dives in these day and night patterns. What I saw was almost unbelievable.” The sharks appeared to be diving toward a layer of deep ocean teeming with fish, which suggested they came to the Cafe to dine. Block has since set out with a dozen researchers to sail alongside the robotic scouts and learn whether some special kind of food, or perhaps a romantic getaway, helps draw the sharks to the middle of nowhere. “This is one of the largest migrations, one of the largest stories, and we don’t know enough about it or about what goes on in the ocean overall,” she says. “I think this type of technology will help us fill in the gaps at a crucial time for our planet.”"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-15/this-man-is-building-an-armada-of-saildrones-to-conquer-the-ocean

In 3 mesi in Italia 120 milioni di numeri di cellulare spostati da un operatore ad un altro - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/portabilita-italia/

La bellezza per l’artista e per lo scienziato, secondo Richard Feynman (magari) e soprattutto per il tizio di Medium che ha scritto il suo compitino.

Money quote: “The artist and the scientist both see and appreciate the aesthetically profound, but they don’t always fully experience what the other person experiences when they look at something.”

https://medium.com/personal-growth/richard-feynman-how-to-not-cheat-yourself-out-of-lifes-beauty-e4c70eee3ab

70 videogiochi giapponesi dati per persi ma ritrovati in rete. Mistero. Fortuna! Complotto?

Money quote: “Since its release in 1998, retro gaming fanatics have scoured the web for this game but come up empty. The game has a listing on Amazon Japan where the cover appears, but where it has never been in stock. A May 2014 post on Hardcore Gamer 101 reads “Labyrinthe is completely lost, and begs the question as to whether it was released at all.”“

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3anja/labyrinthe-japanese-game-discovered-on-private-forum

Una bella storia, da ricordare se già la conoscete. Come Susan Kare ha creato le icone del primo Macintosh.

Money quote: ““Andy Herzfeld wrote an icon editor and that let you see magnified what you were working on and also as you turned the bits on and off you could see it real size. It was a huge asset that it automatically generated the hex values because before that I was taught how to look at each group of four pixels and write down each of those hexadecimal numbers. I made this one the bomb really irreverent because I was told ‘nobody will ever see this icon!’””

https://milanote.com/the-work/the-story-behind-susan-kares-iconic-design-work-for-apple

È una idea. Come spesso succede, le idee tendono a diventare piuttosto estreme quando arrivano dopo e sembra che tutto sia già stato detto e inventato. In questo caso però Zerocracy è davvero una cosa singolare...

Money quote: “We believe that most of the above is caused by broken management, not technical incompetence. To solve this, we recommend replacing empowering a human project manager with Zerocrat, a hosted chat bot. To make a project manageable by a computer we use a strict Policy which derives the following principles from the eXtremely Distributed Software Development methodology”
http://www.zerocracy.com/toc.html

Il WSJ racconta un storia interessante, che spiega come mai alle volte cose apparentemente sensate possono essere utilizzate per fare il loro esatto contrario.

Money quote: “As Amazon has cracked down on fake reviews, some sellers are leaving five-star, fake-looking reviews on rival listings so they trigger Amazon’s scam-detecting algorithm and get the rival seller suspended”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-sellers-trick-amazon-to-boost-sales-1532750493

Basta la parola: l’Interpol riconosce le persone dalla voce - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/07/30/tecnologia/basta-la-parola-linterpol-riconosce-le-persone-dalla-voce-ut5dSwrwgBP3Xo0oUtBM8N/pagina.html

Le etichette mentali ci fanno semplificare molte cose. Alcune volte anche troppo. Come in questo caso: quando è che open è davvero open.

Money quote: “"I believe that open source doesn't just mean the code is readable without authorization. It means something much bigger." What do you mean by "open source"? “

https://www.yegor256.com/2018/05/08/open-source-attributes.amp.html

Un’intera letteratura, anzi quel che resta di una letteratura. Codificata con Excel. Anzi, con degli abachi. Anzi, con corde e nodi. Benvenuti tra i misteri poveri degli Inca.

Money quote: “Using locally available materials such as camelid fleece and cotton, the khipukamayuqs (Quechua for ‘knot-makers/animators’) encoded administrative data such as census figures and tax allocation in the twisted strings of these ancient spreadsheets. The Inka bureaucrats used these data to keep tabs on the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas. We have known for about a century that the accounting khipus follow a base-10 knot scheme (imagine an abacus made out of string). However, these quantitative khipus account for only about two-thirds of the samples remaining today. The remaining third of these devices – the so-called narrative khipus – appear to contain encoded non-numerical, narrative information, including names, stories and even ancient philosophies. For those who love puzzles, the narrative khipus are a godsend.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-khipu-code-the-knotty-mystery-of-the-inkas-3d-records

localghost: 127.0.0.o.o.o.O.O.o.o.0.1

Pensavate che la depressione fosse il male del nostro tempo, soprattutto se siete persone ragionevoli che votano a sinistra e rispettano l’ambiente. E invece c’è di peggio: ecco a voi l’accidia: demone medievale (i monaci che vivevano sulle colonne nel deserto ben la conoscevano) che si aggira ancora tra di noi.

Money quote: ““The demon of acedia — also called the noonday demon — is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all…He makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and…he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself.”

Many of the desert monks found themselves in the same place as my friend. Work in the morning, but by noon, they despised the repetitive nature of chores or work. After some time in this condition, they felt little zeal for life. Prayer stopped, sleeping increased, and they felt numb. Eventually, they despised life itself as they spiraled into a dark hole.”

https://blog.heartsupport.com/you-might-not-actually-be-struggling-with-depression-8ce57ab41f66

Fenomenologia della vita e metafisica di Hemingway. Non necessariamente in quest’ordine.

Money quote: “My point in showing this part of Hemingway’s process isn’t just to definitively disprove the myth — partly of Hemingway’s own making — that great writing is something that flows intuitively from the brain of a genius (no, great writing is a slow, painstaking process, even for geniuses). My point is to give some perspective on one of Hemingway’s most profound insights, one that he, considering his tragic suicide some 32 years later, struggled to fully integrate into his life.

The world is a cruel and harsh place”

https://medium.com/s/story/how-to-recover-when-the-world-breaks-you-94a423b7586d

Storytelling come se non ci fosse un domani

Money quote: “Essentially, when you start telling a story, your reader’s brain snaps to attention and becomes re-engaged in your writing. The more detailed and denoscriptive the language you use, the better.”

https://medium.com/the-mission/how-to-strengthen-your-writing-with-one-simple-technique-37ab13eaf83c

Abbiamo un problema anche con le banane: rischio estinzione. Mai un gioia, eh.

Money quote: “However, the banana that people ate in the early 20th century was not the one we know today. There are hundreds of edible banana varieties, but to standardise production, banana companies selected a single type to grow: the Gros Michel, a large, flavourful banana. Gros Michel did well up until the 1950s. But then a fungus known as Fusarium wilt, or Panama disease, rapidly infected entire plantations, and caused a global collapse in the banana trade. The industry quickly found a replacement, a banana resistant to Panama disease, called the Cavendish. But while these new bananas were filling a growing Western appetite, Cavendish suffered from the same flaw that brought down Gros Michel: monoculture”

https://aeon.co/ideas/bananas-nearly-went-extinct-before-dont-let-it-happen-again

Gli Electric Scooter dell’articolo sono i monopattini elettrici. Avevo già condiviso una storia qualche settimana fa sul servizio di sharing Birdie o come si chiama. Attenzione, secondo me questa diventa una cosa seria (da noi, norme sull’utilizzo nel codice della strada permettendo).

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/561440/

Internet è un posto strano. Anche il mondo analogico lo è, solo che l’accesso e lo storytelling nella realtà degli atomi hanno una frizione maggiore di quella dei bit. Il combinato disposto del digitale è veramente singolare, almeno rispetto all’esperienza di un maschio bianco nato in Italia quando i bit erano pochi e grossi come mosconi che li potevi quasi vedere a occhio nudo. (In questo frangente, è proprio il caso di dirlo)

Money quote: “This isn’t your garden-variety revenge porn story. I wish a disgruntled ex had posted a video of me masturbating on the internet. That would be easier to explain. But this is more deviant. More shameful.”

https://medium.com/s/darkish-web/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-make-peace-with-my-revenge-porn-b47a164eee59

Questa persona è semplicemente folle. Ma lucida, eh.

Money quote: “This practice became my new UI. As soon as I started using it, everything changed: this system prompts me to set goals and track my progress, and broadens my perspective of the overall process. At the same time, it turns my emotions into fuel, giving me motivation, aesthetic pleasure and fun”

https://betterhumans.coach.me/draft-how-to-hack-your-brain-to-achieve-consistency-that-lasts-7f5fdc520d28

Compare il porno in Super Mario Odyssey, lo racconta Polygon

Money quote: “DevMenu appears to have been leaked to the public after a member of the Switch hacking community purchased a developer kit on eBay. A poster on the Switch Haxing subreddit and GBAtemp forums said they bought a “defective” Switch from a seller, which turned out to be an EDEV unit — a console intended for software developers. The buyer has since deleted their original Reddit post in which they asked what they should do with it; multiple posters suggested sending it or dumping its software data so homebrew developers and hackers could study it. It appears that shortly afterward, a torrent containing the EDEV unit’s data was uploaded to an anonymous storage service”

https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2018/6/22/17494552/nintendo-switch-hack-super-mario-odyssey-luigis-balloon-world