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/

Noise from the net:

Thank god the Matrix didn't run in Docker.

But Agent Smith was clearly a container, which was why he could be spun up repeatedly. He didn't scale well though.

L’immagine del giorno

La tremenda inefficienza del settore librario secondo El Pais. Vale anche in Spagna, non solo in Italia.

Money quote: “Es habitual en España que las librerías no dispongan de ejemplares editados apenas unos meses antes. Esos títulos han vuelto al almacén para ser destruidos, saldados o, en menor medida, guardados, si el editor lo decide. Según el último dato oficial del gremio de editores, de 2016, el 29,4% de los ejemplares impresos para las librerías vuelven al almacén, un dato que libreros, editores y distribuidores, elevan hasta casi un 40%. Es decir, de 100 ejemplares se venden 60 como promedio.“

https://elpais.com/cultura/2018/07/09/actualidad/1531163370_371133.amp.html

Ode ai marginalia

Money quote: “We reached out to members of the Atlas Obscura community and asked them to tell us about the most remarkable examples of writing in the margins that they’d ever found. As ever, they didn’t disappoint. You sent us pictures of scathing hand-written criticism, a book that held a short record of family deaths, and a particularly creepy-looking example of a secret “government code.” Great stuff”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/best-notes-written-in-books

Noise from the net:

Ora di pranzo ad Apple Park: la gif animata pubblicata su Twitter da Tim Cook

https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1029903616750977025?s=12

L’amore al tempo di internet: meno divorzi, più coppie multietniche - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/08/18/tecnologia/lamore-al-tempo-di-internet-meno-divorzi-pi-coppie-multietniche-KhCVrXKkC8oweo4IQWQZpM/pagina.html

E così, se siete nudisti, la vostra cosa sarà Twitter

Money quote: “Meanwhile, two of the very things that have made Twitter toxic for many people—its maximalist commitment to free speech and its lack of enforcement of real names—have also, strangely, made it the best place to be a nudist on the internet.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/565085/

Hasselblad: ecco l’adattatore per gli obiettivi storici V sulla X1D–50c - il mio articolo per intenditori su Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/hasselblad-adattatore/

Se in realtà un “equilibrio della Natura” non esiste, cosa dobbiamo preservare esattamente? Quando la domanda ha una connotazione etica diventa meno scontata.

Money quote: “The term ‘balance of nature’ raised the hackles of some scientists as early as the first decades of the 20th century. The Oxford ecologist Charles Elton forcefully claimed in his book Animal Ecology (1927) that ‘the balance of nature does not exist, and perhaps has never existed’. “

https://aeon.co/essays/nature-is-out-of-balance-but-it-s-still-worth-saving

Noise from the net:

Men—when you introduce your employee who's a woman and say, "She does all the work"/"runs things"/"keeps us all sane"/etc.:
1-You are not paying her enough.
2-You haven't given her the noscript or team she deserves.
3-Talking about her contributions doesn't make up for 1 and 2.