Ha creato il web e adesso soffre a vedere come funziona e viene usato dalle grandi multinazionali digitali e dai governi. Per questo lo vuole rifare. Storia di Tim Berners-Lee e della sua nuova visione del futuro.

Money quote: “This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new software, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he had come to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he started in 2009 to protect human rights across the digital landscape. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to a fast-approaching future.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/the-man-who-created-the-world-wide-web-has-some-regrets

L’autrice di questo articolo sul paradosso di Fermi è un personaggio singolare. L’ho incontrata a Las Vegas un po' di tempo fa. Laureata in astrofisica, divulgatrice, personaggio televisivo ma anche campionessa di poker. Sul serio. Fa le gare e le vince (tipo: un paio di milioni di dollari vinti). Risultato? Ti strega e poi ti incanta. Gli alieno? Una bieca scusa per parlare di lei (dal vivo rende molto meglio).

Money quote: “My excitement was short-lived as my mother explained it was a satellite catching the sun as it tumbled along its orbit. I went to bed disappointed: The X-files was on TV twice a week back then, and I very much wanted to believe.”

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/3/17522810/aliens-fermi-paradox-drake-equation

Block chain come se piovesse. Anche da parte della Borsa Svizzera. L’hype cresce, la bolla si gonfia...

Money quote: “"The first step is to build up a regulated exchange platform. In a second phase we will offer the service to tokenize existing bankable assets which will be followed by the tokenization of non-bankable assets. Following an agile approach to meet the needs of today's dynamic environment, the first services will be rolled out in mid-2019," the company said.”

https://www.coindesk.com/swiss-stock-exchange-to-tokenize-securities-in-new-dlt-platform/

​​Negli aeroporti americani si aggira un anonimo folle genio che attacca adesivi trompe-l’œil: simulano inesistenti prese elettriche. Sta diventando una cosa seria.

40 fumetti da leggere questa estate - la grande ma agile raccolta di consigli di Fumettologica alla quale modestamente ho contribuito anche io

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/08/estate-fumetti-leggere/

40 fumetti da leggere questa estate, consigliati e commentati dalla redazione e dai collaboratori di Fumettologica, che ne hanno scelti due a testa: una novità pubblicata di recente e un recupero dai loro scaffali.

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/08/estate-fumetti-leggere/

Breve ma significativo articolo che spiega bene non solo l’idea che le popolazioni antiche vivessero più a lungo di quanto solitamente non riteniamo. Ma spiega bene anche i criteri statistici e scientifici per determinare l’aspettativa di vita. Bello.

Money quote: “Studies on extant traditional people who live far away from modern medicines and markets, such as Tanzania’s Hadza or Brazil’s Xilixana Yanomami, have demonstrated that the most likely age at death is far higher than most people assume: it’s about 70 years old. One study found that although there are differences in rates of death in various populations and periods, especially with regards to violence, there is a remarkable similarity between the mortality profiles of various traditional peoples.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/think-everyone-died-young-in-ancient-societies-think-again

La Cina digitale in cifre

Money quote: “China has twice as many internet users as the total population of the United States -- and it’s growing fast. This unique collaboration between Abacus, 500 Startups, the South China Morning Post, will break down everything you need to know about China’s thriving tech industry, the big players in each field, and lay out the four overarching trends that have emerged.”

https://www.abacusnews.com/china-internet-report/

La complessità delle cose semplici. Per chi conosce il C e programma, anatomia di printf()

Money quote: "The common questions fit roughly in to two forms:

Easy: How does the printf mechanically solve the format problem?
Complex: How does printf actually display text on my console?"

http://www.maizure.org/projects/printf/index.html

Noise from the net: “My wife and I recently got married and decided that neither of us would change our last names. Some people disagree with this approach, commonly critiquing with "what will you do with your children's last names?? How will they know they're a family?!" My solution: the blockchain”

Le auto che si guidano da sole sono il futuro? Se lo saranno, hanno ancora molta strada da fare. E forse non vogliamo l'esperienza che dovrebbero accumulare per diventare veramente sicure.

Money quote: "“The reality is there will be mistakes along the way,” James Lentz, the CEO of Toyota North America, said at a public event after Herzberg was killed. “A hundred or 500 or a thousand people could lose their lives in accidents like we’ve seen in Arizona.” That week, the company announced that it would pause AV testing on public roads. Recently, when I asked if Toyota has calculated how many casualties it expects to cause in pursuit of AVs, a spokesperson replied that the company is focused on reducing the number of fatalities at the hands of human drivers: “Our goal in developing advanced automated technologies is to someday create a vehicle incapable of causing a crash.”"

https://longreads.com/2018/06/12/the-menace-and-the-promise-of-autonomous-vehicles/

Un progetto iniziato nel 2001 al Mit che sta dando i suoi frutti

Money quote: "When we started Processing in 2001, the goal was to bring ideas and technologies out of MIT and into the larger world. One idea was the synthesis of graphic design with computer science, combining the visual principles of design with ways of thinking about systems from computer science. We also wanted to share a way of working with code where things are figured out during the process of writing the software. We called this sketching with code. A third idea was to share what we had learned about how to teach programming to designers — to share this beyond the people we could teach directly through our workshops and classrooms. We wanted to spread this as far as we could."

https://medium.com/processing-foundation/a-modern-prometheus-59aed94abe85

Simulatore di circuiti logici nel vostro browser. Mai più senza (scherzi a parte, è divertente e, in alcuni rari casi, può essere anche utile).

Money quote: "Only if both switches are on, the LED will go on. Try enabling both(The 'a', this simulator comes with its own letter based notation). Read results from the red 'l' outputs. For example, below is an AND gate I"

https://lodev.org/logicemu/

Cominciamo a rimettere a posto un po’ di cose... i muri per esempio.

Tutti vogliono il trucco per fare le cose più veloci, più efficienti, più efficaci. Tutti vogliono qualsiasi modo tranne che quello che funziona veramente: farle bene.

Money quote: "There’s a scene in Lawrence of Arabia where one man puts out a match with his fingers, and doesn’t flinch. Another man watching tries to do the same, and yells in pain.

“It hurts! What’s the trick?” he asks.

“The trick is not minding that it hurts,” the first man says."

http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/useful-hacks/

Una valorizzazione del pensiero di Max Weber: niente di muovo ma molto interessante, perché poi la storia la scrivono i vincitori, no?

Money quote: "We use the word ‘capitalism’ today as if its meaning were self-evident, or else as if it came from Marx, but this casualness must be set aside. ‘Capitalism’ was Weber’s own word and he defined it as he saw fit. Its most general meaning was quite simply modernity itself: capitalism was ‘the most fateful power in our modern life’. More specifically, it controlled and generated ‘modern Kultur’, the code of values by which people lived in the 20th-century West, and now live, we may add, in much of the 21st-century globe. So the ‘spirit’ of capitalism is also an ‘ethic’, though no doubt the noscript would have sounded a bit flat if it had been called The Protestant Ethic and the Ethic of Capitalism."

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-max-weber-mean-by-the-spirit-of-capitalism

Un mondo senza più adulti. Un romanzo di crescita e di passaggio. “El último recreo” è un capolavoro anni ottanta dei fumettisti argentini Carlos Trillo e Horacio Altuna. Li ho adorati per anni. La recensione di Golem Cómics.

Money quote: “En ‘El último recreo’, Altuna inaugura un estilo muy personal a la hora de situar los bocadillos de diálogo en la página, guiando con su ubicación el orden de lectura de las viñetas y controlando de esa manera el ritmo interno de cada dibujo, ayudando al lector a detenerse donde debe detenerse y a avanzar por la página cuando debe hacerlo. Hoy en día, ese recurso es aún muy utilizado en todo tipo de cómics de viñetas irregulares y en muchas ocasiones ha conseguido hacernos olvidar la dichosa flecha que nos indicaba el camino a seguir. ¡Alabado sea!“

http://www.golemcomics.com/el-ultimo-recreo-de-trillo-y-altuna/

Noise from the net:

Them: How old are you?
Me: 33.
Them: And you don’t have kids? Wow, time to get on that.
Me: I’ve had 7 miscarriages.
Them: Looking incredibly uncomfortable
Me: Annnnnnnnnd I hope we’ve learned a lesson in asking inappropriate personal questions.

Questo matto ha scattato con una tonnellata di macchine fotografiche, analogiche e digitali: è il Rocco Siffredi dell’otturatore. E si è fatto delle idee ben precise.

Money quote: “Work is hard. Every dollar, or euro, or yen, or beaver pelt (if you’re still bartering), comes only through sacrifice. Every minute you spend working to earn that cash is a minute less that you can spend doing something else. Don’t waste that time and effort (that’s good life advice, generally). When it comes to cameras, specifically, don’t be silly with your money.

As of this writing, Contax T2 and T3 prices are astronomical, and the Olympus Mju series cameras are similarly outrageous. For the price of a Contax T2 you can buy a Leica M6 or an M2 with a lens, or a flight to (and hotel room on) the other side of the world. And if the absurdity of that fact doesn’t strike you, you need to read more of our articles.”

https://www.casualphotophile.com/2018/07/08/five-lessons-ive-learned-in-five-years-of-shooting-a-different-camera-every-week/

Ho intervistato Fei-Fei Li, la persona più competente di AI che abbia mai incontrato. Qui la sua storia raccontata dalla CNN

Money quote: “"As one of the leaders in the world for A.I., I feel tremendous excitement and responsibility to create the most awesome and benevolent technology for society and to educate the most awesome and benevolent technologists -- that's my calling," Li said”

https://money.cnn.com/2016/07/21/news/economy/chinese-immigrant-stanford-professor/index.html

L’età giusta per fondare una startup di successo? 45 anni - il mio articolo per Wired Italia

https://www.wired.it/economia/start-up/2018/08/07/startup-eta-successo-45-anni/