Tressie McMillian Cottom vale sempre la pena. Questa volta, intervistata da Roxane Gay, ancora di più. (E Guernica continua ad essere una delle pubblicazioni più interessanti in rete).

Money quote: "One of the most remarkable things about McMillan Cottom’s work is the way she blends the theoretical and the practical: how she prioritizes the intellectual work done in secular spaces as much as, if not more than, such work done in the Ivory Tower. She knows who she is and where she comes from; she knows the people who made her and the woman she has made herself into. She is provocative, yes, but always with purpose—with an eye toward challenging and changing the status quo. She is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, a cultural critic, and a popular figure on the lecture circuit. Dr. McMillan Cottom has a singular voice on social media, where, all too often, people willfully misinterpret the things she says, then lose all sense when she remains unbothered in the face of their futile blathering."

https://www.guernicamag.com/dr-tressie-mcmillan-cottom-raising-really-good-hell-for-people-who-cannot/

Puntini su una mappa che rappresenta molto più del suo territorio. Stiamo demandando settori cruciali della nostra cultura sociale e individuale a società private hi-tech che, oltretutto, sugli aspetti "soft" più delicati lavorano con i piedi.

Money quote: "The renaming of Buffalo, New York’s Fruit Belt neighborhood reveals as much about gentrification as it does the flawed ways tech companies add locations to their maps."

https://onezero.medium.com/how-googles-bad-data-wiped-a-neighborhood-off-the-map-80c4c13f1c2b

Google ha iniziato da tempo ad attivare una modalità "confidential" per la sua posta elettronica nella versione a pagamento per le aziende (la G-Suite). Questo è il percorso storico della funzione, un relitto del passato. Utile testimonianza quando bisognerà rispondere al quesito: avvicina il momento del salto dello squalo, quando Gmail si exchangerizzerà completamente?

Money quote: "We’re opening a beta program for Gmail confidential mode. With confidential mode, it’s easier to protect sensitive content in your emails by creating expiration dates or revoking previously sent messages, and removing options for recipients to forward, copy, print, and download."

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/keep-data-secure-with-gmail-confidential-mode-beta.html

Una cosina semplice semplice, carina carina...

Money quote: "strans (string transform) is an intuitive string manipulation utility for the shell (primarily Unix, but should work™ cross-platform). Users do not need to know anything about programming. All they need to do is provide strans with a set of examples. strans will automagically learn transformation rules from these examples and apply them to the input given on STDIN."

https://github.com/Inventitech/strans

C'è un problema con la statistica che manda in palla la maggior parte degli scienziati che fanno ricerca

Money quote: "How do statistics so often lead scientists to deny differences that those not educated in statistics can plainly see? For several generations, researchers have been warned that a statistically non-significant result does not ‘prove’ the null hypothesis (the hypothesis that there is no difference between groups or no effect of a treatment on some measured outcome)1. Nor do statistically significant results ‘prove’ some other hypothesis. Such misconceptions have famously warped the literature with overstated claims and, less famously, led to claims of conflicts between studies where none exists."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00857-9

È quel giorno della settimana, quello della vostra rubrica preferita: https://bit.ly/3zg6Dqn

Eh, sì: potremmo proprio chiamarla obsolescenza programmata. È quella dei programmatori che superano una certa età...

Money quote: "The software industry is overwhelmingly young. The median age of Google and Amazon employees is 30, whereas the median age of American workers is 42. A 2018 Stack Overflow survey of 100,000 programmers around the world found that three-quarters of them were under 35. Periodic posts on Hacker News ask, “What happens to older developers?” Anxious developers in their late thirties chime in and identify themselves as among the “older.”
I turned 40 this October, and I have worked seven years in the same job at a database company called MongoDB in New York City."

https://onezero.medium.com/ctrl-alt-delete-the-planned-obsolescence-of-old-coders-9c5f440ee68

Il wasabi che avete usato per rendere piccante il vostro sushi al ristorante giapponese sotto casa è praticamente sicuro che non è realmente wasabi.

Fake wasabi!

Money quote: "The reason boils down to supply and demand. Authentic wasabi, known as *Wasabia japonica*, is the most expensive crop in the world to grow. The temperamental semiaquatic herb, native to the mountain streams of central Japan, is notoriously difficult to cultivate. Once planted, it takes several years to harvest; even then, it doesn’t germinate unless conditions are perfect. Grated wasabi root loses its flavor within 15 minutes."

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/585172/wasabi-fake/

Un po' di tempo fa una persona mi chiedeva: cos'è un grafo? Pensa te cosa mi chiederebbe adesso che ci mescoliamo matrici e probabilità. Perché l'idea è che ogni matrice corrisponda a un grafo.

Money quote: "Today I'd like to share an idea. It's a very simple idea. It's not fancy and it's certainly not new. In fact, I'm sure many of you have thought about it already. But if you haven't—and even if you have!—I hope you'll take a few minutes to enjoy it with me. Here's the idea:"

https://www.math3ma.com/blog/matrices-probability-graphs

Un gruppo di scienziati ha trovato una molecola, usata per i malati di Alzheimer, capace di indurre le persone in uno stato di "sogno lucido", cioè quello in cui si è consapevoli che si sta dormendo e ci si può muovere in maniera deliberata. È l'inizio di *Inception*?

Money quote: "That's important because in addition to helping people enjoy fantastic dreams where they can help control what happens, the research could also help explain the links between lucid dreams and consciousness and help people to confront their fears and process trauma while safely asleep.

"This new method finally has the success rate we need to be able to properly do research on lucid dreaming," psychologist Denholm Aspy from the University of Adelaide in Australia, who wasn't involved in the study, explained to New Scientist at the time."

https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-a-reliable-way-to-trigger-lucid-dreams-scientists-have-found

È il migliore momento possibile per fare il programmatore. Sul serio: entrano gran soldi anche come impiegati. Ma siamo sicuri che durerà? Probabilmente no.

Money quote: "Developers are expensive. If a new IDE shows up and they can deliver stuff 5% faster, that means you can have 5% less programmers! Of course the IDE has a price, but it is almost certainly cheaper than 5% of a developer.

I haven’t seen that much improvement in developer tooling over the last couple of years, but AI is making some really meaningful progress in this field with things like github copilot. For now it only delivers some smarter auto complete suggestions, not that far in the future we could see AIs finding bugs in our code, or even generating tests."

https://vaghetti.dev/posts/times-are-great/

Perché è utile portare con sé un taccuino 🔥 https://www.thecut.com/2022/05/benefits-of-keeping-a-journal.html e scrivere delle sensazioni fisiche ogni volta che si esauriscono i pensieri.

Momento relax: un giochino simil-pong che vi farà diventare scemi

Money quote: "Press space (or tap the screen) to make the ball jump and hit the paddles for as long as possible. This arcade game works on desktop and mobile."

https://www.lessmilk.com/almost-pong/

Volete vincere con Wordle? Ecco il tutorial

Money quote: "Years ago when I did a notebook to solve Jotto, I never expected that a similar word game, Wordle, would become so popular. Congratulations to Josh Wardle for making this happen. I added Wordle to my old notebook, but in this notebook, I answer two questions about Wordle (based on the pre-NYTimes version, with its word list of 2,315 possible words)."

https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/main/ipynb/Wordle.ipynb

Ci sono varie regole nella organizzazione e gestione delle superfici di vendita. Per ragioni economiche e soprattutto di marketing e design delle esperienze, si seguono certe regole. Ikea, che è bravissima a farvi comprare cose che non vi servono, invece, ha un'agenda diversa riguardo alle regole del settore.

Money quote:

"Ikea breaks all of these rules.

Inside, customers are led through a preordained, one-way path that winds through 50+ room settings. The average Ikea store is 300k sq. ft. — the equivalent of about 5 football fields — and their typical shopper ends up walking almost a mile."

https://thehustle.co/how-ikea-tricks-you-into-buying-more-stuff/

Euristiche.

Money quote: "Sometimes there’s a Heuristic That Almost Always Works, like “this technology won’t change everything” or “there won’t be a hurricane tomorrow”.

And sometimes the rare exceptions are so important to spot that we charge experts with the task. But the heuristics are so hard to beat that the experts themselves might be tempted to secretly rely on them, while publicly pretending to use more subtle forms of expertise. “My statistical model, accounting for chaos theory, barometric pressure, and the price of tea in China, says there won’t be a hurricane tomorrow. Rejoice!”"

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work

Cos'è una matrice: ogni tanto si incontrano parole usate da altri che sai cosa vogliono dire ma non riesci a convincerli né a capirti. Meno male che c'è "Una parola al giorno" che spiega Matrice.

Money quote: "Esemplificando, è quindi matrice lo stampo in cui versare il metallo fuso per produrre la statuetta del soldatino o del cavallo; è matrice dell’assegno il pezzetto di carta che resta nel libretto dopo che lo si è staccato; in matematica è matrice la tabella numerica chiusa, uterina, che genera risultati nell’incrocio di dati."

https://unaparolaalgiorno.it/significato/matrice

🫦Non è vero che va bene così https://www.instagram.com/p/CevOzEKKhsd/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

Una rifugiata in fuga dalla guerra dell'ex Yugoslavia. La buona samaritana americana che le lascia un biglietto e 100 dollari. L'inizio di una nuova vita da un atto di generosità che porta la speranza. Una storia che piace perché taglia molti angoli e fa stare meglio.

Money quote: "Zugay says she was a nearly 12-year-old refugee fleeing the former Yugoslavia with her older sister when a stranger handed them the envelope on a flight to the United States in 1999. The woman made them promise not to open it until they got off the plane.
The girls were later shocked to discover dangly earrings and a $100 bill inside.

A note scribbled on the outside of the envelope is signed with only a first name — Tracy. And for almost a decade, Zugay says she's been trying to find her."

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/refugee-airplane-mystery-gift-cec/index.html

E qui c'è l'immancabile lieto fine

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/refugee-airplane-mystery-reunion-cec/index.html

La cosa del Buy Now, Pay Later (la fanno anche PayPal e Amazon, per dire) sembra una forma molto più figa di credito al consumo completamente ripensato. Invece, sta creando una bomba atomica di debiti alla velocità della luce.

Money quote: "In California alone, 91% of all consumer loans issued in 2020 — defined by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation as loans for “personal, family or household purposes” such as car, utility or medical loans — were buy now, pay later loans, also known as point-of-sale loans.

Gen Z, in particular, has fallen in love with the short-term loans, spending 925% more now through point-of-sale services than in January 2020. But coupling nearly instantaneous loans with an influencer-addled social media culture that prioritizes exorbitant spending and normalizes debt could be further jeopardizing the financial futures of young people through just four easy payments."

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/influencers-lead-Gen-Z-into-debt-17142294.php

Il foglio di carta digitale sul quale scrivo praticamente tutto