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

Lui era orrendo prima ed è orrendo adesso. Però adesso ha una nuova consapevolezza: così, in questo modo, potrebbe fondare il “culto degli orrendi” senza problema. Secondo me c’è gente che lo seguirebbe.

Money quote: “My appearance no longer controls me because I’m in control of my life. I’ve changed the way I think not the way I appear. This has led to happiness rather than the appearance game that can never be won.”

https://medium.com/the-mission/how-to-not-let-your-appearance-control-your-life-1d8ddad85bf9

Una nota a margine: ma sono io che sto andando in burnout di letture su Medium oppure questi scrivono tutti uguali? Frasi corte e sincopate, argomentazioni meccaniche da terza media, ripetizione di concetti a blocchi per rafforzare i blocchi precedenti. Boh.

Storia di un pallone da calcio che è l’unico sopravvissuto all’esplosione dello shuttle Challenger e poi è tornato nello spazio, della sua famiglia di origine e di un tremendo e drammatico incidente che è rimasto come una luce troppo brillante guardata troppo a lungo inciso per sempre nella retina di una generazione.

http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/23902766/nasa-astronaut-ellison-onizuka-soccer-ball-survived-challenger-explosion

👣 Da militanti ad attivisti: come cambia il volontariato

Scrive Stefano Laffi su Che Fare: “C’è una dimensione politica intatta, ovvero l’urgenza di cambiare in meglio qualcosa nel mondo, e di attivisti continuano ad essercene. Buon segno, vuol dire che non si è persa la speranza, che le persone continuano a sognare”.

Ma "Se il volontariato diventa l’occasione per fare esperienza, cambia tutto: saltano le appartenenze, le adesioni morali e ideali, perché a quel punto vale la pena provare un po’ tutto; saltano le fedeltà pluriennali, i tempi lunghi, a favore delle stagioni, del mordi e fuggi, cioè di una strategie di sperimentazioni di sé per il tempo necessario a capire."

Lo scriveva anche Beth Kanter nel suo The Networked Non Profit, nel 2010: “Millennials are passionate about causes, but non passionate about non profit organizations”.

Per approfondire: https://www.che-fare.com/volontariato-militanza-attivismo/

Sorpresa: abbiamo aggiornato la nostra piattaforma e il nostro aspetto. Per offrirvi un sito più vivace, più veloce e visivamente ancora più pimpante. Buona nuova Fumettologica:

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/08/fumettologica-sito-grafica/

Era ovvio che dovesse succedere. Manovalanza al posto di algoritmi, perché non sempre il computer funziona e comunque alcune cose si fa prima (e costa meno) farle a mano. La domanda però è un’altra: in questi casi c’è davvero valore? Perché le startup si giudicano da quello...

Money quote: “It’s hard to build a service powered by artificial intelligence. So hard, in fact, that some startups have worked out it’s cheaper and easier to get humans to behave like robots than it is to get machines to behave like humans”

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/06/artificial-intelligence-ai-humans-bots-tech-companies

A me non piace il calcio né la cultura che ha costruito attorno a sé. Ma una storia come questa non è legata tanto al tipo di ascensore sociale da prendere: la chiave ovviamente non è quella. Il calcio era il frutto maturo che pendeva più in basso tra le fronte dell’albero della vita. Per altri magari è un altro frutto velenoso, illegale. Per altri chissà, un altro sogno, un altro frutto. Ma è esemplare il gesto della mano, la sua fermezza, la volontà che c’è dietro, la motivazione e l’azione: quello conta.

Money quote: “I was six years old, and I came home for lunch during our break at school. My mum had the same thing on the menu every single day: Bread and milk. When you’re a kid, you don’t even think about it. But I guess that’s what we could afford.

Then this one day I came home, and I walked into the kitchen, and I saw my mum at the refrigerator with the box of milk, like normal. But this time she was mixing something in with it. She was shaking it all up, you know? I didn’t understand what was going on. Then she brought my lunch over to me, and she was smiling like everything was cool. But I realized right away what was going on.”

https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/romelu-lukaku-ive-got-some-things-to-say

Il 2018 è l’anno degli smart speaker - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/08/04/tecnologia/il-lanno-degli-smart-speaker-4WMtA4DV1ie88rovH5wSkJ/premium.html

Storia di Snoo, la mascotte aliena di Reddit. A me fa pensare a quelle cose strane ma istantaneamente simpatiche che sembrano facili ma sono in realtà molto complesse e fenomenali.

Money quote: “This creative canvas was, in some ways, illustrative of the early web, where nobody knew you were a dog. The closest thing to verification on Reddit, even now, is a confirmation that the email attached to your account is real. Anonymity is accepted, even encouraged. You can have multiple accounts, fake accounts, throwaways for posting the kinds of deep, dark musings that absolutely must not, under any circumstances, get traced back to the real you. (I have three usernames: one for lurking, one for reportage, and one for purposes I would never share in print.) Identities are fragmented; each version of you, a new Snoo.”

https://www.wired.com/story/the-transformative-power-of-reddits-alien-mascot/

Se questo fine settimana siete a Mountain View, andare al Computer History Museum perché succedono cose alquanto interessanti. Sennò, immaginatevele a distanza...

Money quote: “The exhibits include everything from floptical disks, a fully restored and operation PDP-11/45, home computers from the UK and Japan, typewriters converted into teletypes, a disintegrated CPU, and LISP machines. The talks are equally spectacular, with a keynote from Tim Paterson, the creator of 86-DOS, the basis of MS-DOS. You’ll also hear about PLATO, the Internet before the Internet, PDP-1 demonstrations, and if we’re lucky they’re going to fire up the ancient IBM 1401”

https://hackaday.com/2018/08/01/this-weekend-the-vintage-computer-festival-west/

Sapete che sono fissato con homebrew. Ma lui è più fissato di me...

Money quote: “I’m using OSX most of the time (you know, developer AND sales, plus being CEO) and this is the noscript I use to update it all the time, can be useful for some…”

https://medium.com/@waxzce/keeping-macos-clean-this-is-my-osx-brew-update-cli-command-6c8f12dc1731

Altri convertiti sulla via dell’iPad. Arrivano dopo ma arrivano bene, direi

Money quote: “I recently traded in my trusty iPad 2 against a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Not only has it become my primary work device, on many days I don’t turn on my laptop at all”

https://medium.com/@mrstevegold/the-year-was-2011-a708b7c76a17

Buone notizie per gli appassionati di Star Trek. Patrick Stewart annuncia che ritorna il capitano Jean-Luc Picard...

Cosa c’è di peggio rispetto a una separazione? Ricominciare a vedere altre persone. Troppo presto. Perché non si è pronti: si è soli.

Money quote: “Everyone goes back to dating too soon. Everyone. Because it’s lonely being alone. But the weird thing is that it’s not for me. I like it. But 30 years of consistent relationships and sex is a powerful force feeding my brain misinformation on when the time is right.”

Resisting the Urge to Date Again – P.S. I Love You
https://psiloveyou.xyz/resisting-the-urge-to-date-again-690c747fedbd

Tu mediti per annullare il tuo essere egoista, e invece l’essenza del tuo ego cresce ipertrofica...

Meditate gente, meditate...

Money quote: “According to Buddhist teaching, the self is an illusion. The religion preaches a fundamentally selfless worldview, encouraging followers to renounce individual desires and distance themselves from self-concern. To advance this perspective, millions of people around the world practice yoga and meditation.

But a recently published psychological study directly contradicts that approach, finding that contemporary meditation and yoga practices can actually inflate your ego.”

https://qz.com/1307380/yoga-and-meditation-boost-your-ego-say-psychology-researchers/

Uso Scrivener fin dal principio per scrivere libri e altre cose. Mai pensato di usarlo per bloggare. Ma c’è chi lo fa. Interessante.

Money quote: “I used Word files to organize my blog posts for a long time. Why? I have no idea. I thought about using Scrivener, but I didn’t want to take the time to switch my files over and start a new system.

Don’t be like me.

Switch to Scrivener now”

https://www.victoriagriffin.net/blog/scrivener-for-blogging

The end of web is near

Money quote: “That's why the wonder of the web is that it is not subject to the whims of chaotic corporate management. Now, I suppose at some point it will be owned, and then after that it will be shut down. That's how we lose huge amounts of IP, open stuff, non-corporate stuff.”

http://noscripting.com/2018/06/12/140329.html

Un ragionamento prezioso sul senso del lavoro al nostro tempo.

Money quote: “In “Bullshit Jobs” (Simon & Schuster), David Graeber, an anthropologist now at the London School of Economics, seeks a diagnosis and epidemiology for what he calls the “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.” He thinks these jobs are everywhere. By all the evidence, they are. His book, which has the virtue of being both clever and charismatic, follows a much circulated essay that he wrote, in 2013, to call out such occupations. Some, he thought, were structurally extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them”

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom

Plasma, quarto sconosciuto. Un articolo sul mio stato della materia preferito.

Money quote: “Plasma physics is a rich and diverse field of enquiry, with its own special twist. In some areas of science, intellectual vitality comes from the beauty of grand theories and the search for deep underlying laws – as shown by Albert Einstein’s account of gravity in general relativity, or string theorists’ attempt to replace the Standard Model of subatomic particles with tiny oscillating strands of energy. The study of plasmas also enjoys some remarkably elegant mathematical constructions, but unlike its scientific cousins, it’s mostly been driven by its applications to the real world.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/plasma-the-mysterious-and-powerful-fourth-phase-of-matter

Scrivener è una perla, ma è lontano dal mondo open. Oppure no? Un complesso ma non impossibile dialogo con Pandoc

https://github.com/iandol/scrivomatic/blob/master/README.md#introduction