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

Storie di gelati, torte e sale per signore come parte di una rivoluzione culturale e sociale per il ruolo e l’autonomia delle donne a cavallo tra otto e novecento. La rivoluzione passa anche così, da là.

Money quote: “Throughout the 19th century, restaurants catered to a predominately male clientele. Much like taverns and gentlemen’s clubs, they were places where men went to socialize, discuss business, and otherwise escape the responsibilities of work and home. It was considered inappropriate for women to dine alone, and those who did were assumed to be prostitutes. Given this association, unescorted women were banned from most high-end restaurants and generally did not patronize taverns, chophouses, and other masculine haunts”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-is-it-called-an-ice-cream-parlor

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

Un ragionamento sulla privacy senza parlare di privacy. Fantastico modo di vedere senza guardare.

Money quote: “Even so, we have handed to private companies the power to set and enforce the boundaries of appropriate public speech. That is an enormous cultural power to be held by so few, and it is largely wielded behind closed doors, making it difficult for outsiders to inspect or challenge.

Platforms frequently, and conspicuously, fail to live up to our expectations. In fact, given the enormity of the undertaking, most platforms’ own definition of success includes failing users on a regular basis.”

https://www.wired.com/story/how-social-networks-set-the-limits-of-what-we-can-say-online/

Jimmy Carter probabilmente non è stato uno dei più efficaci presidenti degli Stati Uniti. Ma tra tutti gli ex ha un carisma e uno spirito straordinari. Ritratto fantastico, un altro articolo notevole di GQ.

Money quote: “About 40 Sundays a year, Mr. Jimmy materializes from thin air, flickering before us at Maranatha to lead Bible study, to say, No, the world's not going to end. Not just yet. Though he's elfin with age, you'd still instantly recognize him as our 39th president: with those same hooded ice-blue eyes, the same rectangular head, the same famous 1,000-watt smile. But when he teaches like this, he transforms from whatever your vision of Jimmy Carter is into someone different, some kind of 93-year-old Yoda-like knower, who in his tenth decade on earth still possesses that rarest of airy commodities: hope.”

https://www.gq.com/story/jimmy-carter-for-higher-office

Emacs, che io non uso, appartiene alla centralità del software open e anche alla centralità del software in generale, per come è costruito. La sua storia e affascinante.

Money quote: “Someone posted a chapter from Sam Williams’ book Free as in Freedom (online here), that discusses the early history of Emacs. The chapter, The Emacs Commune, is full of things I didn’t know about how Emacs evolved from the TECO editor”

http://irreal.org/blog/?p=7308

Darsi agli acidi: è l’unica risorsa.

Money quote: “It’s 7 a.m. on the U-Bahn. Eyes still puffy from the night before. A woman slowly nibbles her morning brötchen while staring into the static on the broken TV above. Everyone is silent. And in this crowd of straight faces, there I am, grinning like an idiot.

Why? I have a little secret. There’s acid under my tongue.”

https://medium.com/s/story/the-mental-and-metaphysical-effects-of-microdosing-lsd-72819896215d