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

Lady Oscar compie 50 anni

Nel maggio del 1972 sulla rivista bimestrale Margaret dedicata ai manga shojo esordì Le rose di Versailles dell’autrice venticinquenne Riyoko Ikeda. Nel primo episodio si anticipava che il racconto, ambientato alla vigilia della Rivoluzione francese, avrebbe esplorato il legame fra tre personaggi: due realmente esistiti, la regina di Francia Maria Antonietta e il suo amante svedese Fersen, e uno di finzione, l’ufficiale della guardia reale Oscar Françoise de Jarjayes, una donna allevata come un uomo.

👉 https://bit.ly/3LwnmIg

Fenomenologia dello showrunner (e della sua attuale, profonda crisi)

Money quote: "What was once an inside-baseball term for a job that encompassed everything from writing a pilot to making sure everyone was fed on set has, as TV has entered its “auteur” phase, taken on a more mystical air. The term showrunner, according to Jeff Melvoin, first appeared in print in a profile of John Wells’ work on ER, meaning that the general public has only been aware of the term for, at most, a few decades. In that time, “showrunner” has come to mean visionary or genius, and in an age where fans feel ennoscriptd to be heard, the showrunner has also been the person lauded or jeered by fans. This can mean that writers entering television for the first time, pitching their stories, feel like they should have that noscript, while not truly being aware of all the non-creative work that goes with it. Or, as Rogers put it in a recent tweet: “I have followed my bliss to become a weaver of dreams and now I'm on the phone with the line producer screaming about how expensive it is to move the trucks.”"

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxeze/television-is-in-a-showrunning-crisis

Va in pensione il critico gastronomico del *New York Magazine*. Il suo articolo è bello, ma il ricordo del collega che lo sostituisce credo sia, al di là della retorica, quello che ogni giornalista di mezza età vorrebbe rimanesse di lui. Perlomeno, io lo vorrei.

Money quote: "As a writer, Adam prose has catalogued several sea changes in the industry and in the city at large. Over the years, I’ve come to know him to be a charming dining companion, as well as a caring colleague, a champion of young journalistic talent, and an all-around enjoyable presence"

Detto questo, è vero che fare il critico gastronomico a New York City è una opportunità unica per vivere il cambiamento della nostra società da una prospettiva ottima anche se meno frequentata e con una profondità incredibile. Insomma, ha capito più lui che interi dipartimenti di sociologia, architettura o di economia, per dirla in parole povere. Articolo gustoso, tutto da leggere.

https://www.grubstreet.com/article/adam-platt-new-york-magazine-restaurant-critic-farewell.html

Visite medice con ologramma a bordo della Stazione spaziale internazionale. Star Trek dietro l'angolo.

Money quote: "“This is completely new manner of human communication across vast distances,” NASA flight surgeon Dr. Josef Schmid, one of the doctors on the team who were projected into the ISS, said in the statement . “Furthermore, it is a brand-new way of human exploration, where our human entity is able to travel off the planet.”"

https://futurism.com/the-byte/hologram-doctors-space-station

La collaborazione virtuale secondo Mozilla (Firefox). Ecco come se lo immagina Mozilla Hubs, cercando di fare un po' di rumore sul mercato dei metaversi.

Money quote: "Meet, share and collaborate together in private 3D virtual spaces."

https://hubs.mozilla.com/

La bandaccia, che però ha fatto il giro del mondo. Grazie al bassista Keanu Reeves, certamente. Ma anche per altri motivi

Money quote: "Of course, Keanu deciding to be a sideman in a mediocre rock band is like a kid covering his eyes and declaring himself invisible. It’s impossible for him to disappear. And the fact that Dogstar is a hobby and not a project doesn’t mean it’s not an expression of Keanu’s own neuroses and his relationship to stardom. He meets Mailhouse the year Point Break comes out, which means the band’s life coincides with the first blockbuster-movie-star phase of his career. They become a major touring concern—and therefore a big part of Keanu’s life, at least timewise—beginning in 1995, right after Hamlet. He spends the summer of his Hamlet year playing Dogstar shows all over the world, from San Francisco (where they play the five-hundred-capacity club Slim’s) to Japan where they’re already big enough to sell out much larger halls."

https://www.gq.com/story/keanu-reeves-most-triumphant-dogstar-excerpt

I soliti problemi da 1%

Money quote: "The 36-year-old artist invited me into her home for a tour last November. She has spent the past year decorating a sprawling 19th-century stone house in the Connecticut woodlands about an hour and a half outside New York City, turning it into the backdrop for her recent series of haunting photographs, “Rooms in the First House.” These stylized, intricately composed self-portraits and interiors, some of which Tendler first debuted on Instagram, were recently exhibited at a Brooklyn art fair where they sold out quickly, some fetching prices in the mid-six figures."

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a38727685/anna-marie-tendler-profile/

Ci siamo completamente dimenticati la figura fondamentale di Karl Jasper, l’ultimo e il più importante dei filosofi esistenzialisti. E soprattutto, quello che ci ha spiegato che l’incertezza deve essere compresa, non sconfitta.

Money quote: “Jaspers is one of the very few existentialist thinkers who did not seek to master, tame or conquer the unknowable and finite condition of human life. Instead, he tried to cultivate a relationship to this essential quality of life and engage it on its own terms. He repeatedly insisted that ‘I do not accomplish my freedom. I did not make myself. I do not exist by my own means.’ Rather, I depend on the freedom of others and the complex makings of a fragile world. Only because our lives are contingent and vulnerable can we experience love, freedom and purpose as something meaningful. The attempt to prove love or catch the ephemeral presence of beauty would likely take away the experience.”

https://psyche.co/ideas/to-karl-jaspers-uncertainty-is-not-to-be-overcome-but-understood