Negli Usa c’è una lotta al coltello per fare più nuggets di pollo: McDonald e il resto dei fast food presenti in America ci stanno impazzendo. È difficile fare la nuggets perfetta, ma il guadagno può essere miliardario: 40 miliardi nel 2022, per la precisione. Ah, le piccole meteore sono fatte con fette di pulcino pucciate nell’antibiotico.

Money quote: “The burgeoning nugget craze is "largely driven by shifts in Gen Z consumer behavior," says Maeve Webster, president of Menu Matters, a restaurant consultancy.

"Since the pandemic, more consumers in general are snacking and looking for those easier-to-eat, smaller bites," she tells Axios.
Chicken nuggets also lend themselves to a lot of "customization and experimentation," she said — like using them as a pizza topping or as a base for flavorful sauces. (Chicken nugget poutine, anyone?)”

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/25/chicken-nugget-wars

La gravità mi ha sempre affascinato, perché... beh, perché non sappiamo esattamente come funziona.

Money quote: "Problem is, particles have quantum properties. They can, for example, be in two places at once. These particles also have masses, and masses cause gravity. But since gravity does not have quantum properties, no one really knows what’s the gravitational pull of a particle in a quantum superposition. To solve this problem, physicists need a theory of quantum gravity. Or, since Einstein taught us that gravity is really curvature of space-time, physicists need a theory for the quantum properties of space and time."

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-gravity-breaks-down

Facciamo un viaggio nella mente dei conservatori americani. Qui quelli di National Interest che interpretano la storia in maniera quantomeno singolare e forzata.

Money quote: "Since the early 1970s, American policymakers believed they could avoid such nurturing, cherishing and threatening by making the success of the Communist Party of China a goal of U.S. foreign policy. With interests defined this way, American presidents helped China’s communists at crucial moments."

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/its-time-america-break-beijing-63327

Un cattivo maestro, retoricamente piacevole

Money quote: "A sad fact is that many people are now spending huge portions of their lives at work that, they know, is not benefitting society (see Graeber, 2013). It leads to such cynicism that people begin to stop even thinking that jobs are supposed to benefit society. We have the spectacle of politicians on both sides of the aisle fighting to keep munitions plants open in their states, to preserve the jobs, even when the military itself says the weapons the plant is building are no longer useful. And we have politicians and pundits arguing that fossil fuel mining and carbon spewing factories should be maintained for the sake of the jobs, let the environment be damned."

http://evonomics.com/less-work-job-creation-peter-gray/

Rendere facile una attività per "liberare il talento delle persone" magari facendole collaborare permette spesso di raggiungere ottimi risultati. Ma il concetto non può essere "stirato" all'infinito, soprattutto perché non sempre è prevedibile che ci sia del talento da impegnare.

Questo esempio di videogioco in cui l'obiettivo è divertirsi insieme a realizzare un videogioco, cioè un meta-gioco, è singolare, intrigante ma anche totalmente discutibile sia per gli obiettivi che si dà che per i risultati che raggiunge.

Money quote: "What if creating games could be as easy and fun as playing them? What if you could enter a virtual world with your friends and build a game together in real time? Our team within Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental projects, took on this challenge. Our prototype is called Game Builder, and it is free on Steam for PC and Mac."

https://www.blog.google/technology/area-120/create-3d-games-friends-no-experience-required/

Se state per passare del tempo dentro la shell e dovete trovare delle cose, è arrivato il momento di imparare Grep. Ho li libro che fa per voi.

Money quote: "You are likely to be familiar with using Ctrl+F to quickly locate where a particular string occurs. grep is similar, but much more versatile and feature-rich version of the search functionality usable from command line. Two different implementations - GNU GREP and RIPGREP are discussed in this book."

https://leanpub.com/gnugrep_ripgrep

https://gumroad.com/l/gnugrep_ripgrep

La strana vita dell'Avocado: frutto (e seme fuori scala) che è sopravvissuto all'estinzione dei grandi mammiferi sino ad arrivare ai giorni nostri. Ancora non abbiamo capito bene come abbia fatto a sopravvivere, dato che il nocciolo di un frutto - il seme - ha dimensioni adatte ad essere ingerito e defecato a distanza: è il metodo con il quale la natura permette alle giovani piante di crescere lontano dai loro generatori e quindi non competere per la stessa particella di suolo e rettangolo di luce nel bosco. Solo che se il seme è troppo grosso, chi se lo ingoia?

Money quote: "How the avocado still exists in the wild after surviving its evolutionary failures remains a puzzle. But once Homo sapiens evolved to the point where it could cultivate the species, the fruit had the chance to thrive anew. Back when the giant beasts roamed the earth, the avocado would’ve been a large seed with a small fleshy area—less attractive to smaller mammals such as ourselves. Through cultivation, humans have bulked up avocados so there is more flesh for us to eat."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-avocado-should-have-gone-the-way-of-the-dodo-4976527/

Salman Rushdie su Mattatoio numero 5 e Comma 22, e un paio di altri ragionamenti non male per il New Yorker

Money quote: "It hadn’t occurred to me until I read them that antiwar novels could be funny as well as serious. “Catch-22” is crazy funny, slapstick funny. It sees war as insane and the desire to escape combat as the only sane position. Its tone of voice is deadpan farce. “Slaughterhouse-Five” is different. There is much comedy in it, as there was in everything Kurt Vonnegut wrote, but it does not see war as farcical. It sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye. Vonnegut is a sad-faced comedian. If Heller was Charlie Chaplin, then Vonnegut was Buster Keaton. His predominant tone of voice is melancholy, the tone of voice of a man who has been present for a great horror and lived to tell the tale. The two books do, however, have this in common: they are both portraits of a world that has lost its mind, in which children are sent out to do men’s work and die."

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-kurt-vonneguts-slaughterhouse-five-tells-us-now

Quando arriva il momento - per voi utenti Chrome (io sto con Safari) - di passare a Firefox, serve sapere alcune cose. Sono tutte qui

Money quote: "Switching to Firefox is fast, easy and risk-free. Firefox imports your bookmarks, autofills, passwords and preferences from Chrome."

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/switch/

Storia di un addio

https://www.macitynet.it/jony-ive-e-il-lungo-addio-ad-apple/

Uno dei motivi per cui bisognerebbe andare a vivere a Tokyo è che c’erano i Gundam nelle piazze.

Money quote: "Standing at 19.7 meters tall in front of the Diver City shopping complex, this RX-0 Unicorn Gundam is built on a one-to-one scale, features a movable head, and transforms between Unicorn Mode and Destroy Mode (complete with flashing lights and epic anime soundtrack) throughout the day at scheduled times."

https://grapee.jp/en/94345

Tra i tanti sistemi per cercare di reinvetarsi il libro, questo è uno dei più interessanti. (E complicati; il motto è intrigante: "The book is a program").

Money quote: "Pollen is a publishing system that helps authors make functional and beautiful digital books."

https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/index.html

Un altro tizio che si è convertito all'iPad Pro. Io devo dire che invece ho sempre più difficoltà.

Money quote: "What I've discovered this time around is a sense of delight from the iPad that I hadn't really seen in technology for a while. Essentially, I liked the iPad because, despite its restrictions and rigidity, it actually helps me get more work done."

https://char.gd/blog/2019/i-was-wrong-about-the-ipad-pro

"The Art of Computer Programming" è l'opera in volumi più importante sull'informatica. È il lavoro di una vita di Donald Knuth, uno dei più grandi geni dell'informatica viventi e non (ha creato tra le altre cose Tex di LaTex proprio per stampare in maniera più efficiente i suoi libri). Eppure, secondo molti, è uno dei libri meno utili da leggere per un programmatore. Su Hacker News ne hanno fatto un dibattito molto interessante.

Money quote: "Almost anywhere on the internet people will respond to this with basically "no, it's extremely inefficient to learn how to program this way", and they're right.

But.

If you want to learn _other_ things, these books are incredible. Maybe you want to learn deeply the combinatorial ideas behind data structures, or general techniques for squeezing small optimizations out of low level code. Or even maybe you want to see simple data structures used every-which-way to efficiently solve a huge range of mathematical problems. None of this is normal programming per se. I treat these as math books, and love them for it.

Like much of mathematics, it will make you a better programmer, but only accidentally."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19976957

Digitalizzato grazie alla biblioteca ambrosiana, il Codice Atlantico di Leonardo da Vinci è tutto online.

Money quote: "Codex Atlanticus is the biggest collection of Da Vinci papers and it covers his entire career. It begins in 1478 (when he was working in his hometown of Tuscany) to 1519 (when he died in France). The name Atlanticus comes from the fact that Da Vinci used large sheets, similar to those used for geographic Atlases. The diverse portfolio reveals sketches and diagrams for his creative inventions such as parachutes, war machines, and hydraulic pumps. It also features his detailed architectural sketches and anatomy studies."

https://mymodernmet.com/leonardo-da-vinci-codex-atlanticus

La scomparsa di Olivia Newton-John è veramente un colpo basso. La sua storia però ha degli aspetti incredibili.

Money quote: "Olivia Newton-John was born on Sept. 26, 1948, in Cambridge, England, the youngest of three children of Brinley Newton-John and Irene Helene, the daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born. Her Welsh-born father had been an MI5 intelligence officer during World War II and afterward served as headmaster at Cambridgeshire High School for Boys.

When Ms. Newton-John was 6, her family immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, where her father worked as a college professor and administrator."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/arts/olivia-newton-john-dead.html

Ci metto la faccia.

Lo sapete che ciclicamente lo propongo: è il servizio di backup che utilizzo per il mio computer e che pago ogni mese. È l'unico servizio a pagamento del quale mi senta di fare l'endorsement. Se usate il mio referral qui sotto avrete (come me) un mese gratuito in più oltre al periodo di prova.

https://secure.backblaze.com/r/01ti3i

BackBlaze è l'ideale d'estate: ho iniziato a usarlo anni fa in vacanza, rendendomi conto che se avessi perso o mi avessero rubato il computer mi sarei giocato tutti i dati. L'ho attivato al volo e da allora non sono mai più tornato indietro. Ve lo consiglio.

La fioritura del bamboo. Una cosa di cui non sapevo niente ma alla quale adesso non posso smettere di pensare (tipo che rischio di non dormirci la notte)

Money quote: "Perhaps even more surprising than the long intervals at which they flower is the fact that all plants of the same stock of bamboo will bloom at the same time, and then die, no matter where they are in the world. Although the mechanism has yet to be explained by science, many believe there is some kind of natural "alarm clock" in the plant's cells causing the behavior. The depletion of bamboo can have considerable environmental and economic impacts."

https://grapee.jp/en/114838

Tex tra esotismo ed esoterismo - continua la serie delle mie recensioni su Fumettologica per la saga del ritorno di Mefisto

https://fumettologica.it/2022/08/tex-741-sierra-nevada-mefisto-bonelli/

C'è uno che ha sviluppato un sistema per fare tutto, anche le cose più difficili. O al limite capire che non si possono fare

Money quote: "The system “always” works in the sense that “eventually” either you will find out why the objective is impossible for you or you will succeed, but it’s very much the unhelpful kind of eventually where there’s no guarantee that it won’t take an interminably long time. The more likely outcome is that either you will succeed relatively quickly or get bored and give up, but that’s OK – the system is designed so that you will have gained benefit from following it at every step along the way even if you do not achieve your final goal."

https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/how-to-do-hard-things

L'intelligenza artificiale al tempo della sua riproducibilità tecnologica - il mio commento su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/08/intelligenza-artificiale-midjourney-arte-disegni-fumetti/