Mefisto non è morto! - la mia recensione del nuovo capitolo della saga di Mefisto per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/08/tex-742-mefisto-bonelli/

Nel tentativo di educare le masse sul metaverso, Meta ha arruolato la superstar Keke Palmer per aiutare in una nuova serie intitolata "Are We There Yet". Purtroppo, nonostante i loro sforzi per creare un divertente "Metaverso 101", per così dire, le recensioni non sono così gentili. Non ci sta capendo niente neanche lui.

Money quote: Keke “Palmer is (as always) a delight, as is the company's metaverse VP Vishal Shah, who breezily jokes with her while hitting talking points. But as the duo "drives" down a virtual road, passing a floating skateboard the length of a city block and two massive paddles playing ping pong in mid-air, it becomes clear that Meta still has absolutely no idea how to explain its products to normies.”

https://mashable.com/article/meta-keke-palmer-are-we-there-yet

“Do not be careful only about what you wish for. If your actions are not aligned with your values, be careful what you work for as well. Have a plan. Or else you let the plan have you”


Da "Enough" di Patrick Rhone

Un tizio ha avuto un’idea fantastica: spiegare come fa a scrivere un articolo. Segue quattro fasi: si prepara, scrive l’articolo, prepara le foto e poi pubblica il tutto. Genio, no? Chissà qual è il suo segreto per l’igiene orale. Forse prepara il dentifricio, prepara lo spazzolino, si pulisce gli spazi interdentali con il filo e poi si lava i denti con lo spazzolino? Chissà.

Money quote: “This workflow can be modified in several ways, including replacing the software or apps you prefer in your steps. I follow a similar workflow on my MacBook as well, but there are some slight modifications that I may mention as we go through each. So with all that being said, let’s get started.”

https://techuisite.com/my-writing-workflow-on-mac-3453d0173bc3

Sapete cosa vuol dire greenwashing? Beh, leggete pure questo articolo per capirlo bene.

Money quote: “"US banks have released a spate of climate promises, committing to achieve net zero by 2050 and reduce emissions by 2030. But the hard truth remains: Wall Street's financing of coal, oil and gas was higher in 2021 than it was in 2016, the year after the Paris agreement was adopted."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/27/looking-for-someone-to-blame-for-the-extreme-heat-try-wall-street

Non male il ragazzo!

https://www.instagram.com/tv/ChN-Phkqiyw/

Tutto, ma proprio tutto su macOS Ventura da MacStories, per gentile cortesia di John Voorhees.

Money quote: “This year, the process of harmonizing the Mac with Apple’s other devices continues with Stage Manager, a new window management system available on macOS and iPadOS that offers users a similar windowing experience on both systems for the first time. On the Mac, Stage Manager is very different from the Mac’s traditional windowing systems, but it’s also very easy to get the hang of, which bodes well for new users coming from the iPad. And, of course, the feature is entirely optional, so anyone with whom it doesn’t click can ignore Stage Manager completely. However, as you’ll read below, I think everyone should give Stage Manager a chance because I’ve been surprised at how much I enjoy using it.”

https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-ventura-the-macstories-preview/

Salta fuori che una delle certezze del vecchio West, cioè quella casa nella prateria, sia in realtà potenzialmente un ricettacolo di malati mentali. La follia della prateria.

Money quote: "Both fictional and historical accounts of this time and place often blame “prairie madness” on the isolation and bleak conditions the settlers encountered. But many also mention something unexpected: the sounds of the prairie. Smalley wrote that during winter “the silence of death rests on the vast landscape.” And a character in Manitoba settler Nellie McClung’s story “The Neutral Fuse” writes a poem about the droning soundtrack of the plains, “I hate the wind with its evil spite, and it hates me with a hate as deep, and hisses and jeers when I try to sleep.”"

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/prairie-madness-study-silence-great-plains

Come diceva Flaiano, gli italiani perdonano tutto tranne il successo. Ecco, i Måneskin non li perdonerà proprio nessuno, allora.

Monet quote: "Nel caso siate appena tornati da un ritiro spirituale in un eremo, la notizia è che uscita la versione di I Wanna Be Your Slave cantata da Damiano con Iggy. A giudicare dai commenti che ho letto nei giorni scorsi sui social, nessuno ha sentito il bisogno di ascoltarla: le opinioni sulla collaborazione erano già pronte e polarizzate. E del resto perché aspettare e perdere tre minuti per sentire il pezzo quando puoi dire la tua opinione secca e definitiva su Facebook?"

https://www.rollingstone.it/musica/i-rocker-da-tastiera-sono-piu-selvaggi-di-iggy-pop-a-lui-i-maneskin-vanno-bene-a-loro-no/57715

È stato un disastro annunciato, non solo nel Regno Unito. Alcune cose erano già abbastanza chiare: compagnie aeree sotto-staffate e una domanda esplosa grazie alla velocità delle vaccinazioni che hanno rimesso in pista il turismo e il commercio internazionali. Più le vacanze estive.

Money quote: "“It is understandable why airlines rapidly increased their Spring/Summer schedules for 2022, as vaccination programmes displayed strong progress in many key markets for the travel industry, resulting in booking confidence increasing in 2021,” comments Ralph Hollister, travel and tourism analyst at GlobalData.

“However, many airlines have found it difficult to hire, vet, and train new staff members to meet the unforeseen demand for international flights from travellers and are now having to cancel hundreds of flights.”

https://www.airport-technology.com/analysis/understaffed-airlines-and-oversold-flights-lead-to-cancellation-chaos-2/

Tanto tempo fa, in un mondo lontano lontano, gli orologi stradali erano pneumatici. Detto meglio: ecco come funzionava la rete di orologi ad aria di Parigi

Money quote: “The pneumatic clock network was not a power distribution network but a time distribution network, which synchronized a large number public clocks by sending a pulse of air every minute. The pipes ran through the sewers of the city, and the tunnels of the Metro and the RER, a commuter rail network serving Paris and its suburbs. Each clock contained a metal bellows which advanced a 60-tooth wheel by one tooth per minute. Compressed air from the plant left at a pressure of 15 to 45 pounds per square inch (about 1 to 3 atmospheres) for storage in a high-pressure air tank. From there it travelled through a pressure regulator to a low-pressure storage tank or accumulator. Its release was controlled by a distributing clock. The driving weights were lifted by compressed air to keep the clock running and on time. An automatic timing mechanism opened a valve to release a 20-second pulse of air every minute and then the valve closed for 40 seconds. The 20-second-on, 40-second-off cycle was repeated every minute. The pulse of air travelled to every receiving clock, be it in a private home or office or in a street or public building, and advanced the minute hand by one minute. The system worked uninterrupted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2022/02/the-pneumatic-clocks-of-paris.html

Nel caso vogliate fare un recap di come sono andati i primissimi mesi della guerra in Ucraina, il *Washington Post* ha un ottimo riassunto in cinque punti

Money quote: "“I’m not trying to hold on to power,” Zelensky said he explained to the Western officials. “If the question is that I leave, and that will stop the bloodshed, then I am all for it. I will go right now. I didn’t get into politics for that — and I will go whenever you say, if it will stop the war.”
While he believed some Western officials were truly concerned about his personal safety, Zelensky also suspected that some of his foreign interlocutors simply wanted the conflict to end as quickly as possible, with his administration effectively surrendering to Russia."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/24/kyiv-battle-ukraine-defense/

Le singolari e fragilissime culture che compaiono grazie a Internet

Money quote: ""Maskers" are mostly men that put on female silicon masks as a hobby or a fetish or just for fun. They have Instagram accounts because Insta is safer than going out in the streets, but they are "not sure if they want to be known"

https://www.inputmag.com/culture/instagram-female-masker-community-men-silicone-masks

C'è questa cosa che per lo sviluppo anche del front-end dei siti è necessario tornare a lavorare con la riga di comando. Ed è una buona cosa, probabilmente. Se si sa come farla. Ecco, questo è il motivo oltre che il modo.

Money quote: "The use of UI not only slows you down a few seconds each time you navigate through it but also gives you the freedom to not remember many shortcuts that are there to make your work life easier. And this doesn’t just apply to the command line but also when you use any kind of editor."

https://betterprogramming.pub/hacking-your-iterm-5d2bdacdaccf

Se avete sempre detto che non avreste potuto vivere senza Vim ma poi siete dovuti passare ad altro, forse questa modifica di VSCode potrebbe piacervi

Money quote: "‌TLDR; Using a modern text editor that provides a good Vim emulator provides the best user experience for the average Vim enthusiast. Because in addition to almost everything you use Vim for, many modern text editors like VSCode can also do the things you wish Vim could."

https://medium.com/zeals-tech-blog/vim-is-the-v-in-vscode-448a6e10901c

Erano anni che non leggevo un articolo così chiaro e centrato su un tema come quello della prostituzione. L'autrice ha scritto un libro dopo essersi prostituita per sette anni, dai 15 ai 22, e spara ad alzo zero su tutta quella parte del mondo che fa credere per un motivo o per un altro che la prostituzione sia qualcosa di plausibile. Non lo è. Neanche da lontano. Il problema non è legalizzarla o meno. Il problema è che esiste, e non c'è un modo per romanticizzarla.

Detto questo, se volete pensare che io sia un moralista, beh, potreste anche aver ragione. Ma almeno non sono un ipocrita.

Money quote: "While it is fashionable for some female academics, journalists and social commentators to declare the validity of prostitution as employment and to endorse and support this fiction in their books, articles and opinion columns, I note that they resolutely will not practise what they preach. They are not usually willing to have their own bodies used to prove their point. What’s always been particularly galling to me about socially privileged upper middle-class women who popularise these views is that, just like Marie Antoinette before them, they are so far removed from the experience that they cannot relate to it even at a conceptual level. That they are handsomely remunerated to opine on what’s good enough for desperate women is just the spit and polish on the insult."

Moeny quote 2: "Oh, and the oldest profession in the world is midwifery. Prostitution is not any sort of profession, never mind the oldest one."

https://psyche.co/ideas/the-reality-of-prostitution-is-not-complex-it-is-simple

Fra le strane cose di cui è fatto il mondo ci sono le *vending machine*, le macchinette distributrici di bibite, caffè e snack. Se ne sa poco e se ne parla ancora meno. Peccato, perché hanno una storia piuttosto particolare, bisogna dire.

Money quote: "The coffee we drank that morning had trickled into cardboard cups from one of his own hot-beverage makers. Business had been hurt badly by Covid, he said. There had been one wretched day in the spring of 2020 when he awoke to find himself not the owner of the second-largest fleet of vending machines in the UK, but instead, of “timebombs. All these machines of ours in places we couldn’t access. All full of perishable food.” After enduring months of closed workplaces, abandoned airports and dead campuses, the Brodericks had lost millions on foregone Twirls and Mini Cheddars. Even so, Johnny Brod was bullish, insisting that the pandemic presented him with opportunities, too."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/14/a-day-in-the-life-of-almost-every-vending-machine-in-the-world

L'uomo forte non è una cosa che succede da sola, grazie al tipo che prende in mano le redini del comando e parte. No, c'è di più, è un fenomeno molto più complesso. Dentro il quale ci sono anche pensieri giuridici alquanto raffinati, come nello studioso di diritto che sta dietro alla Repubblica di Weimar e poi al nazismo, morto nel 1985. E le cui idee adesso stanno tornando di gran moda.

Money quote: "Populism is not just a bull-in-a-china-shop way of doing politics. There is a theoretical tradition that seeks to justify strongman rule, an ideological school of demagoguery, one might call it, that is now more relevant than ever. Within that tradition, one thinker stands out: the conservative German constitutional lawyer and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). For a time, he was the principal legal adviser to the Nazi regime. And today his name is approaching a commonplace. Academics, policymakers and journalists appeal to him in order to shed light on populist trends in the US and elsewhere. A recent article in The New York Review of Books argues that the US attorney general William Barr is ‘The Carl Schmitt Of Our Time’. The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (2017) came out in print the year after Trump’s election. After decades as a political rogue, forced to launch his attacks on liberalism from the sidelines, Schmitt’s name has returned to prominence."

https://aeon.co/essays/carl-schmitts-legal-theory-legitimises-the-rule-of-the-strongman

Il tema della privacy è un tema politico, certamente. Ma le sue complessità tecniche lo rendono difficile da comprendere basandosi su una logica per così dire "analogica" o meglio ancora "fatta di atomi". Occorre una capacità di analisi e comprensione diversa e più ricca. È questo che mi viene in mente leggendo questo articolo in cui emergono aspetti e spigolature come ad esempio il bisogno di tutelare l'integrità degli scritti sulle proprie pagine per evitare che le Cdn ci pasticcino e mettano altre cose dentro. Insomma, il mondo è piuttosto complicato, no?

Money quote: "As the founder of Simple Analytics, I’m running into privacy issues while building our product. Based on those learnings I would like to show you some practical tips to improve the privacy of your visitors. Some of the tips seem very logical but can be hard to implement. That’s why I have provided examples with every tip so you or your team can apply them without doing all the research."

https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/practical-privacy-tips-for-your-business

Randall Munroe è un genio vero, IMHO

Title caption: “In Universe Pro®™ the laws of physics remain unchanged under time reversal, to maintain backward compatibility."

Il futuro dei documenti secondo Microsoft è "fluid". E, pur di riuscire ad imporre il nuovo formato cloud, lo ha reso open source. L'azienda lo scriveva un paio di anni fa, ma ormai è una costante della sua strategia.

Money quote: "Microsoft’s Fluid Framework sounds a lot like Google Docs, but it’s actually Google Docs on steroids. Microsoft is so confident it has built the future of productivity, it’s now open-sourcing its Fluid Framework so the rest of the world can help shape what it has created. Some Office.com users will even be able to start getting an early look at this Fluid future in the coming months."

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21260005/microsoft-office-fluid-web-document-features-build