Al largo della costa della Polonia c'è una struttura che i nazisti avevano usato per testare le torpedini (e poi dopo di loro anche i sovietici). Pensarla è già un momento di tristezza infinita.

Money quote: "The complex, which has since been nicknamed “Torpedownia,” was actively used for torpedo testing in German-occupied Poland for just a few years, from 1942 and 1945. After the war, when German troops were forced to retreat from Poland, the station was taken over by the Soviet Army. The Soviets used the facility for military dive training until it was eventually abandoned and fell into disrepair. The station’s technical equipment was taken to the USSR, and probably never reassembled or used again."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/torpedownia-torpedo-launch-station
9bcdf

C'è gente strana. Tipo questo tizio e il suo amore ossessivo per le mappe.

Money quote: "I’ve been called “The Human GPS” by friends. I’m not sure if I should consider that a complement, or an indictment of my navigational, exploratory fetish. When I’d play on the beach as a kid, I’d craft scale models of fantastic cities with intricate highway and irrigation systems to help fake sand-people get around and avoid rush hour traffic or high tides. One particularly elaborate ville took an entire week and stretched some 50′ by 50′, and contained an inner and outer beltway."

https://psiloveyou.xyz/the-navigator-f7f049399387

Un punto di vista forte - non lo condivido - su Apple e la sua attuale linea di prodotti. Interessante però.

Money quote: “The company used to stand for something. Now it’s just chasing profits.”

https://medium.com/s/story/apples-product-line-is-a-mess-5a9a5730cafa

Linkedin è davvero utile? - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/linkedin/

L’immagine del giorno (quando un virale è fatto bene, merita)

Arriva iA Writer 5.1, pronto per Mojave - il mio articolo per Macity

Money quote: "Abbiamo potuto provare anche questa versione in beta del software iA Writer, che è uno dei due editor di testo preferiti di chi scrive, e abbiamo trovato un’ottima stabilità complessiva della app e un miglioramento della fluidità di utilizzo"

https://www.macitynet.it/ia-writer-5-1/

Letture per il fine settimana. Quando è morto John McCain ci sono stati i funerali di Stato, ai quali il morituro ha voluto che Donald Trump non parlasse. Sono intervenuti Barack Obama e George W. Bush. Due bei discorsi: è passato un po' di tempo e vale la pena riprenderli in mano.

Money quote Bush: "John was, above all, a man with a code. He lived by a set of public virtues that brought strength and purpose to his life and to his country. He was courageous, with a courage that frightened his captors, and inspired his countrymen. He was honest, no matter whom it offended. Presidents were not spared. He was honorable, always recognizing that his opponents were still patriots and human beings. He loved freedom with a passion of a man who knew its absence. He respected the dignity inherent in every life, a dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/george-w-bushs-eulogy-john-mccain-funeral/569089/

Money quote Obama: "John understood, as JFK understood, as Ronald Reagan understood, that part of what makes our country great is that our membership is based not on our bloodline, not on what we look like, what our last names are, it’s not based on where our parents or grandparents came from, or how recently they arrived, but on adherence to a common creed: that all of us are created equal, endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. It has been mentioned today, and we’ve seen footage this week John pushing back against supporters who challenged my patriotism during the 2008 campaign. I was grateful, but I wasn't surprised. As Joe Lieberman said, that was John's instinct. I never saw John treat anyone differently because of their race or religion or gender. And I’m certain that in those moments that have been referred to during the campaign, he saw himself as defending America's character, not just mine. For he considered it the imperative of every citizen who loves this country to treat all people fairly."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/barack-obama-eulogy-john-mccain/569065/

Ma alla fine l'intelligenza artificiale in azienda a cosa serve?

Money quote: "Machine learning is enabling companies to expand their top-line growth and optimize processes while improving employee engagement and increasing customer satisfaction. Here are some concrete examples of how AI and machine learning are creating value in companies today"

https://hbr.org/2017/05/8-ways-machine-learning-is-improving-companies-work-processes

La plastica dal mare ha trovato la via per entrare nella catena alimentare, cioè ce la mangiamo. E non ci fa bene.

Money quote: "The main cause for concern is that these chemicals can mess with our hormones. Specifically, they can mimic hormones like estrogen, interfere with important hormone pathways in the thyroid gland, and inhibit the effects of testosterone."

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/11/17614540/plastic-food-containers-contamination-health-risks

Il grande problema delle nazioni moderne sono le loro gambe, cioè le infrastrutture. L'esempio americano è inquietante, perché la prima economia al mondo ha un problema grosso. Ma la cosa non è banale come può sembrare, dal momento che dietro c'è un tema di inclusione e di democrazia. La tesi, non totalmente condivisibile per un pensiero sanamente critico, è comunque stimolante.

Money quote: "Can we make US infrastructure great again? Yes, and clearly financial investment is essential. But that is not all. Infrastructure is not, and never has been, simply a collection of material objects. The secret of the country’s infrastructure success lies in a forgotten political history: the demands by millions of Americans over time for fairer and more equitable access to rails, pipes, wires, roads and more. The wondrous US infrastructure achievements happened when citizens participated in infrastructure decisions. One can even propose a rule: the better the democracy, the better the infrastructure."

https://aeon.co/ideas/new-tech-only-benefits-the-elite-until-the-people-demand-more

Tutti gli aggiornamenti per chi scrive con Mojave - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/tutti-gli-aggiornamenti-per-chi-scrive-con-mojave/

Italia, Spagna, Portogallo e Grecia sono il terzo paese al mondo per PIL, ma da più di dieci anni i posti di lavoro non crescono (invece la popolazione sì: con gli immigrati e i pensionati altrui)

Money quote: "To this day, there are three million fewer employed people in the four countries than in 2008 and that counts anyone who works at least one hour a week as employed. In fact, the number of employed people is still lower than in 2005 despite the population of the region having grown by over three million people since then."

http://thesoundingline.com/southern-europe-has-not-seen-net-job-creation-in-over-a-decade/

Le demo di una volta, per il Commodore 64, spiegate bene. (Peraltro un notevole hack)

Money quote: "So I recently made this little sinewave demo effect on the Commodore 64

This generated a lot of lively discussion on twitter and /r/c64. A bunch of people were curious as to how it works and I promised to explain it on my blog.

The main idea is to use character mode with a custom character set. I sample y-coordinate every 8 pixels to produce a list of line segments (0, y0), (8, y1), (16, y2), ..., (320, y40). In the below animation, you can see these line segments along with blue rectangles that signify which 8x8 character blocks intersect the line segments."

http://nurpax.github.io/posts/2018-06-07-c64-filled-sinewave.html

MacOS 10.14 Mojave: cosa cambia e come aggiornare il vostro Mac. Vi racconto come si fa l'aggiornamento in questo articolo per Wired.it (e come va il nuovo sistema operativo di Apple: tldr alla grande!)

https://www.wired.it/gadget/computer/2018/09/24/macos-10-14-mojave/

Non potremmo più vivere senza l'inglese. Ma il cinese è diventato un'altra cosa. Però com'è la mente di chi legge e scrive con i caratteri cinesi? Beh, perché non chiederlo a una AI che fa finta osservandola per trarne delle connessioni culturali? Il nuovo impero dei segni?

Money quote: "We would have to spend a lot of time during the weeknights memorising passages to prepare for the test on the following Saturday. A score less than perfection is frowned upon. This would go on for years. I still have nightmares about those dictation tests. I think that’s how most children learn Chinese as well via this rote learning method around the world. Maybe in some sense, Chinese language education resembles how LSTM’s are trained to reproduce sequences from training examples."

http://blog.otoro.net/2015/12/28/recurrent-net-dreams-up-fake-chinese-characters-in-vector-format-with-tensorflow/

Il capo di iFixit ha fatto rumore con questo lungo pezzo in cui spiega perché i MacBook Pro di Apple non vanno bene per niente

Money quote: "The first-gen butterfly keyboard showed up in 2015, but the real root of the problem dates back to 2012 in the very first Retina MacBook Pro. That radical redesign replaced their rugged, modular workhorse with a slimmed-down frame and first-of-its-kind retina display.

And a battery glued to the keyboard."

https://ifixit.org/blog/10229/macbook-pro-keyboard/

Furono i postini americani a sconfiggere la Mano Nera degli immigrati italiani.

Money quote: “No law enforcement institution in the nation had been able to penetrate the criminal organizations that had begun quietly terrorizing cities across America, particularly those with large populations of immigrants from Italy. Nearly 6 million Italian immigrants entered the country in the last two decades of the 1800s and organized crime, common in their native country, often found its way across the Atlantic, too. Increasingly in the papers, the gruesome crimes were credited to “Black Hand” criminals because of several recovered threat letters penned by “La Mano Nero” that demanded exorbitant payments, or death.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/16/the-postal-inspector-who-took-down-americas-first-organized-crime-ring-219597

La poesia è tutt’altro che morta. E questo canale, con il suo poeta residente (Roberto “Bob” R. Corsi), lo sa bene.

Money quote: “In its most recent survey, conducted in 2017 and published in 2018, the NEA found that, contrary to the sharp decline it had observed in previous surveys, poetry—reports of its death, etc.—had in fact seen a massive rise in popularity. The number of self-reported poetry readers in the United States nearly doubled between 2012 and 2017, that survey found”

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/567571/

Arriva la Ricoh GR III. Ho comprato anni fa la II, che è la mia piccola, meravigliosa macchina digitale.

Money quote: "Nel corso di oltre 20 anni di storia, la serie in questione ha mantenuto il concetto base di ottimizzazione dei valori essenziali di una fotocamera: qualità d’immagine, portabilità e praticità operativa; il produttore parla di “cambiamenti e perfezionamenti necessari per soddisfare le necessità emergenti” spiegando che i modelli della serie GR sono scelti da numerosi fotografi, professionisti ed amatoriali con esperienza."

https://www.macitynet.it/ricoh-gr-iii-fotocamera-digitale-compatta-di-fascia-alta-in-anteprima-a-photokina-2018/

Da buon fiorentino sono cresciuto a cervella di vitello fritte o al tegamino. Poi è arrivata la mucca pazza e ha rovinato tutto per 15 anni almeno. Però mi garbavano, ah se mi garbavano.

Questa delle cervella di maiale per di più a colazione devo dire mi fa un po’ senso. Temo l'infarto per eccesso di colesterolo oltretutto. Ma chissà, magari ne vale la pena.

Money quote: “The brains, typically pork, are seasoned with salt, pepper, and a bit of paprika, then tossed in a hot pan before the eggs are added into the mix. The protein medley is then served on its own or packed into a biscuit for those on-the-go mornings. Diners describe the texture as soft with a relenting firmness, akin to curdled yogurt or firm tofu with a fatty aftertaste. If you can get past the massive cholesterol punch this breakfast food delivers, you’ll be sure to enjoy its savory flavor.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/scrambled-brains-and-eggs

Signore e signori, fake news e tapas per tutti!

Money quote: "Merlo’s Victory Lab is one of the estimated hundreds of homegrown Mexican Cambridge Analytica–like marketing firms that are constantly filling up the country’s social media platforms with junk. Victory Lab will make anything trend on any platform for a fee. He said a hashtag like the one he made for BuzzFeed News would cost around $10,000 if the client really wanted it to trend at number one."

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/meet-the-29-year-old-trying-to-become-the-king-of-mexican