La storia che viene fuori dalla lettera di Elon Musk ai dipendenti sul "traditore" interno è semplicemente pazzesca.

Money quote: "I was dismayed to learn this weekend about a Tesla employee who had conducted quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations. This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties.

The full extent of his actions are not yet clear, but what he has admitted to so far is pretty bad. His stated motivation is that he wanted a promotion that he did not receive. In light of these actions, not promoting him was definitely the right move."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/18/elon-musk-email-employee-conducted-extensive-and-damaging-sabotage.html

Una vita senza notifiche è possibile? - Il mio articolo per Wired.it

https://www.wired.it/mobile/smartphone/2018/09/12/vita-senza-notifiche/

Un palazzo storico di New York, recentemente restaurato, è quello dove venne installato il primo ascensore. Elemento fondamentale, come sappiamo, per la nascita dei grattacieli e quindi per la forma di quella (e di varie altre) città. Il tutto per aprire un grande magazzino con cineserie e porcellane varie in stile veneziano.

Money quote: "Haughwout was a forerunner of the gigantic post-Civil War department stores. Its front was magnificent, a richly sculpted Venetian palace. But instead of limestone, marble or brownstone, the Haughwout store was made from cast iron from the foundry of Daniel D. Badger. The building is credited to the architect John P. Gaynor, but it is just as likely that the Badger company developed the scheme for the facade.

Certainly Haughwout arranged for the elevator installed in April 1857 by Elisha H. Otis. According to Dennis A. Barrow, archivist for United Technologies/Otis Elevator, this was the first passenger elevator to have an automatic safety device; it led the way to the tall-building revolution a generation later. The appearance and position of this early elevator have never been established."

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/01/realestate/streetscapes-the-haughwout-building-restoring-a-richly-sculpted-venetian-palace.html

La forma di New York è dettata dagli ascensori. È quella la tecnologia chiave. Spettacolare articolo scritto grazie agli Open data

Money quote: "As of 2015, there were more than 76,000 elevator devices in New York — basically anything that moves people up and down. The average listed capacity of these is about 2,750 pounds, which means that approximately 18 percent of the city’s adult population could be safely suspended in mechanical elevation or descension at any given moment, if they were so moved.2 There are many more miles of elevator shafts (about 1,570, assuming a reasonable average floor height, etc.) than there are miles of subway tracks (about 840)."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/new-yorks-elevators-define-the-city/

iPhone XS e XR, poche rivoluzioni: Apple vuole fare soprattutto cassa - il mio articolo per Wired.it

https://www.wired.it/mobile/smartphone/2018/09/13/iphone-xs-apple-fa-cassa/

Trump minaccia di censurare le ricerche su Facebook e Google, ma i loro algoritmi verranno difesi dalla Costituzione americana - il mio articolo per La Stampa (a pagamento)

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/09/12/tecnologia/trump-minaccia-di-censurare-le-ricerche-su-facebook-e-google-ma-i-loro-algoritmi-verranno-difesi-dalla-costituzione-americana-QAD5nz3m0ZA0Chqjr5KXKI/premium.html

Tutto sulla metropolitana di New York. Denso e poco spettacolare. Fondamentale, però. (E, per chi fosse interessato, sono a New York)

Money quote: "From the original 28 stations built in Manhattan and opened on October 27, 1904, the subway system has grown to 472 stations, most of which were built by 1940. Their design represents three distinct styles since two private companies – the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) – and the city-owned Independent Rapid Transit Railroad (IND), built them. The more ornate IRT and BMT stations were largely open by 1928, while the newer IND, which mostly opened between 1932 and 1948, used a more streamlined, Machine-Age design. The primary difference among the three types of stations is platform lengths. IRT stations have platforms that are generally 525 feet long; most BMT platforms are around 615 feet long, and some IND platforms are 660 feet."

http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ffsubway.htm

Storia (triste) di un giornalista scientifico e della sindrome da affaticamento cronico che lo ha azzerato, pur non essendo una malattia, secondo la scienza americana.

Money quote: “For a man who had once churned out breaking news stories in minutes, it had taken four days, with frequent breaks, to compose the 1600-word piece”

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/409534/

Viviamo tutti all’ombra della crisi di dieci anni fa. Ma pare che molti economisti non siano riusciti a cogliere l’occasione per far evolvere i propri strumenti interpretativi. Non hanno ancora capito come e perché sia successo quel che è successo.

Money quote: “To lots of people, it seems obvious that the 2008 crisis was long in the making — the product of years of financial and regulatory folly. In general, the notion that economic booms cause busts, instead of being random unrelated events — an idea advanced by the maverick economist Hyman Minsky — seems to have much more currency beyond the ivory tower than within it.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-29/what-economists-still-don-t-get-about-2008-crisis

Lenovo con NetApp, un'alleanza per il cloud ibrido - il mio articolo per Il Sole 24 Ore

https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/tecnologie/2018-09-14/lenovo-netapp-alleanza-il-cloud-ibrido-102401.shtml?uuid=AEgHzjrF

La stampa, oggi

A quanto pare c’è una distribuzione di Linux con una interfaccia che fa la differenza. Ma c’è sempre il solito problema dietro: la mancanza di coerenza.

Money quote: "There is a very real problem in the GNU/Linux ecosystem but it’s not the App Menu in Gnome 3. The problem is lack of consistency. Or maybe, more precisely, a culture that celebrates lack of consistency as a feature, confusing it with “choice”.

Beautiful, consistent defaults are not mutually exclusive with choice. Choice is about having the option of diverging from the defaults, not whether or not those defaults mandate a certain cultural cohesion or consistency."

https://ar.al/2018/07/26/popos-18.04-the-state-of-the-art-in-linux-on-desktop/

Una analisi molto interessante del mercato del lavoro americano, che ha raggiunto la quasi occupazione ma a prezzo di una sistematica precarizzazione dei lavoratori. Insomma, a piena occupazione non ha fatto seguito un innalzamento dei salari (per la ricerca di nuovi lavoratori) ma una loro eccessiva possibile mobilità.

Money quote: “The typical American worker now earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned in 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Although the US economy continues to grow, most of the gains have been going to a relatively few top executives of large companies, financiers, and inventors and owners of digital devices.

America doesn’t have a jobs crisis. It has a good jobs crisis”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/29/us-economy-workers-paycheck-robert-reich

Prezzi iPhone 2018: Apple sempre più cara, una strategia che paga - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/prezzo-degli-iphone-2018/

C’è una vera e propria epidemia di narcisismo collettivo e c’è un nuovo libro, Selfie, che racconta quel che succede negli Usa. Il tema è rilevante se non altro per l’impatto della cultura americana. La domanda però è un’altra: da noi chi racconta queste cose? Chi ci aiuta a guardarci da fuori per capirci meglio?

Money quote: “Storr, a British novelist and journalist, has previously written about human credulity and how the stories we tell ourselves about the world color our beliefs about what’s true. A book like Selfie seems like a departure from this, but it’s not. This, too, is a book about beliefs and their consequences. And it’s not merely a snapshot of internet culture; it’s really a survey of the history of individualism in the Western world, and how it contrasts with the more community-minded cultures in the East.”

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/19/17518086/selfie-will-storr-book-psychology-west

Per difendersi da Trump la Cina fa shopping di talenti a Taiwan - il mio articolo per La Stampa (a pagamento)

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/09/15/tecnologia/per-difendersi-da-trump-la-cina-fa-shopping-di-talenti-a-taiwan-SZhCb7f5CgxxUZCV0JnvnJ/premium.html

Il mondo dei colori. E soprattutto dei loro nomi. Come “orange”, che in inglese è sia colore che frutto. Ma quando nasce? Purtroppo la nostra Accademia della Crusca non è più in grado (se mai lo è stata) di parlare a dei lettori più giovani dei novecentenni suoi abituali fruitori.

Money quote: “Orange, however, seems to be the only basic color word for which no other word exists in English. There is only orange, and the name comes from the fruit. Tangerine doesn’t really count. Its name also comes from a fruit, a variety of the orange, but it wasn’t until 1899 that “tangerine” appears in print as the name of a color—and it isn’t clear why we require a new word for it. This seems no less true for persimmon and for pumpkin. There is just orange. But there was no orange, at least before oranges came to Europe.”

https://lithub.com/color-or-fruit-on-the-unlikely-etymology-of-orange/

Un editor di codice molto semplice ma nient’affatto banale, che lavora con il Python ed è pensato per chi impara: bambini e non solo. Io con il Python ci sto giocando e trovo Mu ottimo pure per uno zuccone come me.

La frase portatrice sana di valore di questa breve meteora di contenuto su Mostly, I Write, è una citazione che appartiene ad Alan Kay, coioè a una generazione precedente a chi ha fatto questo editor, ma ha ispirato gli autori di Code with Mu.

Money quote: “It’s not a fake version of math. It’s kind of like little league, or even T-ball. In sports they do this all the time. In music, they do it all the time. The idea is, you never let the child do something that isn’t the real thing—but you have to work your ass off to figure out what the real thing is in the context of the way their minds are working at that developmental level.”

https://codewith.mu/

Non so se avete presente i fumetti di Julia Evans, ma sono spettacolari e informativi (su Linux, riga di comando, etc). Adesso sono anche testo universitario. Anche da noi https://jvns.ca/zines/

Parlare in modo critico e cospiratorio di grandi multinazionali del farmaco è come fare gol a porta vuota un mercoledì mattina quando gli avversari sono ancora a casa loro. Però ogni tanto ci vuole. Perché dopotutto capire che il business delle grandi multinazionali de farmaco è avere un pubblico di malatici cronici dipendenti un giorno ci farà capire che l’approccio stile cartello di Medellín all’industria farmaceutica è profondamente da ripensare.

Money quote: “In a private report leaked to news outlets in April 2018, the Goldman Sachs analysts caution against investments in pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies aiming to develop outright cures, and cite Harvoni as a case study. It’s a simple point to make – if profit is your goal, then a product that eradicates its own demand might not be a wise investment”

https://aeon.co/essays/will-medicine-ever-recover-from-the-perverse-economics-of-drugs

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