Farsi pubblicità, spiegato ai nerd.

Money quote: "I've dealt with any number of technically brilliant people who produce outstanding work. The majority of them never bothered to write down their work and communicate it to others - report writing is too boring, uninteresting, and hard. And irrelevant. Or so they thought.

But if you've done great work, if you've produced superb software or fixed a fault with an aeroplane or investigated a problem, without telling anyone you may as well not have bothered. You have to write, you have to tell people, and you have to do so in a way that they will take notice."

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SellYourselfSellYourWork.html

C'è bisogno di moltissima riflessione in quest'epoca piuttosto complessa. Un insospettabile modo per arrivare al dunque.

Money quote: "With our collapsing democracies and imploding biosphere, it’s no wonder that people despair. The Austrian psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl presciently described such sentiments in his book Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). He wrote of something that ‘so many patients complain [about] today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives’. A nihilistic wisdom emerges when staring down the apocalypse. There’s something predictable in our current pandemics, from addiction to belief in pseudoscientific theories, for in Frankl’s analysis, ‘An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.’ When scientists worry that humanity might have just one generation left, we can agree that ours is an abnormal situation. Which is why Man’s Search for Meaning is the work to return to in these humid days of the Anthropocene."

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-viktor-frankls-logotherapy-can-offer-in-the-anthropocene

Pubblicità memorabili. La storia del “Blown Away Guy”

Money quote: "The ad campaign was conceived by Art Director Lars Anderson. Steve Steigman was the photographer. Steigman wanted a male model with long hair in order to show the effect of the wind, but when such a model could not be found on the day of the shoot, they used the makeup artist who was hired for the shoot, Jac Colello."

https://www.vintag.es/2022/02/blown-away-guy.html

È scientificamente provato che i gatti riconoscono i nomi degli altri gatti.

Money quote: "Humans communicate with each other through language, which enables us talk about things beyond time and space. Do non-human animals learn to associate human speech with specific objects in everyday life? We examined whether cats matched familiar cats’ names and faces (Exp.1) and human family members’ names and faces (Exp.2). Cats were presented with a photo of the familiar cat’s face on a laptop monitor after hearing the same cat’s name or another cat’s name called by the subject cat’s owner (Exp.1) or an experimenter (Exp.2). Half of the trials were in a congruent condition where the name and face matched, and half were in an incongruent (mismatch) condition. Results of Exp.1 showed that household cats paid attention to the monitor for longer in the incongruent condition, suggesting an expectancy violation effect; however, café cats did not. In Exp.2, cats living in larger human families were found to look at the monitor for increasingly longer durations in the incongruent condition. Furthermore, this tendency was stronger among cats that had lived with their human family for a longer time, although we could not rule out an effect of age. This study provides evidence that cats link a companion's name and corresponding face without explicit training."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10261-5

Storia di due orologi Marvel e DC - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/09/storia-di-due-orologi-marvel-e-dc/

Soprattutto i giornalisti, ma anche un sacco di altre persone, sbagliano i termini e dicono Roma per Toma. o Carro Armato per qualcosa d'altro. Una jeep o un blindato magari. Ma quindi, cos'è veramente un carro armato? Qual è la sua definizione reale? Un lungo ma interessante (e pedante) articolo sull'argomento.

Money quote: "So what defines a tank? If I was pressed for a hard definition, I’d say that a tank is a heavily armored and tracked combat vehicle whose purpose is to offer powerful direct fire capabilities against a range of enemy targets. This isn’t quite a doctrine-only definition, but it is certainly a doctrine-first definition; the technical details (heavy armor, tracks) actually both relate to the specific capabilities they provide (which we’ll get to in a moment).

But in practice, like many weapons and weapon-systems, the tank and its definition is rooted in its developmental history and the problems that tanks were created to solve. So..."

https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-not-a-tank/

TILDE ~ 20 È IN ONDA!

TItolo: Madrid, la mistica orientale, Apple Watch Ultra, Quantified Self

Sottotitolo: Siamo tornati: con microfoni nuovi, consapevolezze inedite e soprattutto libri da consigliare.

Ascoltate il podcast su Spotify, Google Podcast o Apple Podcast, oppure dal sito: tilde.show.

- tilde ~ su Spotify
- tilde ~ su Apple Podcast
- tilde ~ su Google Podcast

Che ne dite di celebrare la prima puntata della seconda stagione con una recensione sull'app di ascolto preferita? A buon rendere!

La fisica dietro al salame piccante che si piega quando cuoce sulla pizza

Money quote: "As the pizza bakes, the edge of the pepperoni curls upwards, forming a distinct lip. Once exposed like this, the lip cooks faster than the base, which is insulated by the cheese and crust, and thus crisps and renders its fat faster. This fat drips down into the center of the cup. What you're left with is a gloriously flavorful little sip of pepperoni grease, neatly contained within its own, crisp-lipped edible container. The browned lip takes on an almost bacon-like quality—melt-in-your-mouth crunchy. It's one of the true joys of a pepperoni pizza, and once you've experienced it, plain old flat pepperoni just won't do."

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-pizza-lab-why-does-pepperoni-curl

Per gli indecisi al voto:

https://www.indecis.it

Ci sono siti, come eBay e molte banche, che quando vi collegate fanno la scansione per capire quali porte sono aperte sul vostro computer e quindi quali software funzionano. Lo scopo probabilmente è la sicurezza (capire se c'è installato un qualche software pirata o se siete stati hackerati) ma il modo e il risultato sono estremamente discutibili.

Money quote: "Port Scanning is an adversarial technique frequently used by penetration testers and hackers to scan internet facing machines and determine what applications or services are listening on the network, usually so that specific attacks can be carried out. It's common for security software to detect active port scans and flag it as potential abuse.

Most home routers don't have any open ports, so scanning an internet users IP address is unlikely to return any meaningful data. However, many users run software on their computer that listens on ports for various reasons - online gaming, media sharing, and remote connections are just a few things that consumers might install on a home PC.

A Port scan can give a website information about what software you are running. Many ports have a well defined set of services that use them, so a list of open ports gives a pretty good view of running applications. For instance, Steam (a gaming store and platform) is known to run on port 27036, so a scanner seeing that port open could have reasonable confidence that the user also had steam open while visiting the web site."

https://nullsweep.com/why-is-this-website-port-scanning-me

Tutto quello che vi serve per scrivere (finalmente) il vostro grande romanzo. Io poi però non lo voglio leggere

Money quote: "The most important point to start from is that while there are a number of things you should consider when planning your book – such as characterisation, plotting or the style and voice of your work – there is no single golden rule for how to write a novel. Some authors will sit down in their study – or even hire an office where they go to work every day – and work 9 to 5, while others will grab an hour or two at the end of the day after the children have gone to bed. Some writers like to plot out every event meticulously before they begin the first sentence; others get bored if they know everything in advance, and instead treat fiction as a kind of experiment to see how characters will react. However, while every author will write a novel differently, there are some common themes that occur again and again."

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-by-developing-your-writing-craft-and-habits

Un discorso storicamente motivato che cerca di descrivere la traiettoria del "remote working", che è una categoria generale dentro la quale ci sono sia il telelavoro che lo smart working etc. Il punto di partenza è che non funziona, l'idea è cercare di farlo funzionare.

Money quote: "Office work seemed on the brink of a profound shift. Instead of commuting into crowded cities, white-collar workers would soon relocate to more affordable, bucolic areas; they’d enjoy flexible schedules, picking up their kids from school and sitting down for family dinners after productive days at home. Some people envisioned more radical departures. In his book “The 4-Hour Workweek,” from 2007, Timothy Ferriss, a twenty-nine-year-old entrepreneur, suggested that readers aggressively negotiate remote-work agreements with their employers and then move to parts of the world where the cost of living was low. (Argentina was experiencing a currency crisis, and so could be a good spot for such “geo-arbitrage,” Ferriss wrote.) Unsupervised by bosses, these ultra-remote workers could do their jobs in highly efficient bursts, enjoying lavish lives of leisure the rest of the time."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/can-remote-work-be-fixed

Gli open space, che sono una delle cose più tremende della storia del lavoro di concetto, a quanto pare non moriranno presto

Money quote: "Open offices were popularized in the 1980s as a scheme to lower real estate costs and break down divisions between teams; with fewer walls, bosses can claim they’re emphasizing transparency and collaboration while maximizing their square footage per employee. Despite evidence-based complaints that the layout is distracting and noisy, hampers productivity, and actually discourages in-person interaction, by 2017, 7 in 10 offices had adopted the model. (Among the proponents of open-plan office design is Bloomberg LP, the parent of CityLab, and the company’s founder and majority owner, Michael Bloomberg.)"

https://www.citylab.com/life/2020/05/open-office-design-coronavirus-risk-safe-workplace-health/611299/

Esperienze quasi metafisiche: le sale di controllo sovietiche: una collezione di fotografie di tutto rispetto, esteticamente devastanti (in tutti i sensi).

https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/vintage-beauty-soviet-control-rooms

Obsidian è un cms personale che ha l'ambizione di diventare il vostro secondo cervello, quello fuori dalla vostra testa

Money quote: "The human brain is non-linear: we jump from idea to idea, all the time. Your second brain should work the same.

In Obsidian, making and following [[connections]] is frictionless. Tend to your notes like a gardener; at the end of the day, sit back and marvel at your own knowledge graph."

https://obsidian.md

Marketing per gli ingegneri. Ecco tutte le risorse, spiegate alla mente di una persona che si occupa di tecnologia (magari per fare la propria startup)

Money quote: " It’s a hand-picked collection of resources for solving practical marketing tasks, such as:

finding beta testers
growing first user base
advertising project without a budget
scaling marketing activities for building constant revenue streams."

https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Marketing-for-Engineers

Gli esseri umani hanno difficoltà con i numeri. Più precisamente, con le scale. Abbiamo difficoltà a capire le dimensioni delle cose, quando ne vediamo più di una messa a confronto. Un esempio è la trasformazione delle nostre economie: le software house sono sempre più numerose e ricche, anche se piccole. È una ricchezza le cui dimensioni non riusciamo a percepire.

Money quote: "Austen Allred shared how, when matching Lambda graduates to jobs, he’ll discover software companies he’s never heard of in Oklahoma pocketing $10m/year in profit. Doing things like “making actuarial software for funeral homes.”3

It’s not surprising. Of the 3,000+ software companies acquired over the last three years, only 7% got TechCrunch, Recode, HN, or other mainstream tech coverage.4"

https://secondbreakfast.co/patio11-s-law

La teoria dell'informazione spiegata con "Indovina chi".

Money quote: "There seems to be a dilemma here: if we want accuracy, we must lower the rate of transmission.

This is the problem Claude Shannon tackled in his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. In it, he proved that there is a limit for the rate of information that can be reliably transmitted over a noisy channel (the Shannon limit). However, below this limit we can transmit information with an increasingly small error. This important result tells us that there exists a code that allows arbitrary accuracy over a given comunication channel, but it does not tell us how to build it."

https://notamonadtutorial.com/a-brief-introduction-to-the-beauty-of-information-theory-8357f5b6a355

Scrivere codice diventa sempre più collaborativo e se ne va online: il piano di Microsoft per riconquistare la centralità nel modo con il quale viene sviluppato il software passa da GitHub e adesso dalle IDE online

Money quote: "The popular software development hosting platform GitHub may be about to change that status quo. The Microsoft-owned company unveiled a new code editor called Codespaces last week that works entirely in the web browser, regardless of the device you’re using. Based on the same codebase as Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor — which runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS — Codespaces creates a button on the GitHub website that is a one-click route to your entire development environment online. Since GitHub is where many developers are already accessing and storing their code regardless of which coding environment they use, it’s a convenient place to launch a code editor. And there’s no need to install anything on your device."

https://onezero.medium.com/the-future-of-code-is-in-your-browser-2c51a08e8ab2

I dinosauri di Jurassic Park e Jurassi World, spiegati bene

Money quote: "Many of you reading this already know that the prehistoric animals depicted in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films are not in-line with what current science tells us about these animals, however, most people are not. This article is designed to educate readers on what paleontologists have learned about the extinct animals presented in the Jurassic Park franchise."

https://jurassicparkterror.net/jurassic-park-dinosaurs

SOS dallo spazio

Money quote: "More than 100 FRBs have been discovered to date, and most of them are one-offs, flaring up just a single time (as far as we know). In January of this year, astronomers reported that one member of the "repeater" class, called FRB 180916.J0158+65, appears to exhibit a 16-day activity cycle: It fires off bursts for a four-day stretch, goes quiet for 12 days and then starts all over again."

https://www.space.com/mysterious-fast-radio-burst-repeater.html