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

Una avvocatessa a quanto pare single assume una tata full time e le si sblocca la testa e quindi la carriera. Il titolo è ovviamente un click-bait per giovani madri che non riescono a coniugare lavoro e famiglia.

Money quote: "What Luisa allowed me to achieve in just a few short months got me thinking about whether certain male lawyers had the edge over someone like me simply because they had wives holding down the domestic front. Perhaps the extra time and brain space that I just discovered was something they had all along."

https://medium.com/@chrismorgan_1657/i-hired-a-wife-and-my-career-took-off-16dc8ae481fe

David Burnett è il fotografo che si aggira come uno spettro nell'America del potere e dintorni facendo foto a pellicola. E che pellicola: la sua mitica "Aero Liberato" (e anche una Holga). Essere artisti richiede essere consapevole e andare all'essenza delle cose, anziché puntare ad avere una apparecchiatura avanzata.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnL24q11oEU

Visto anche qui

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/2937027624/photographer-david-burnett-at-today-s-impeachment-hearings

Seguo con interesse Matt Stroller perché la sua visione radicale di come funziona l'economia e soprattutto sul ruolo dei big (contro i piccoli) e soprattutto dei monopoli è la cosa più interessante che abbia trovato negli ultimi anni. Ed è americano.

Money quote: "The big lesson from Stoller’s book: the way our economy and politics works is not just natural law, created in a vacuum. It’s real policies, created by real people.

We are confused because we were taught to conflate democracy with the success of a few large businesses. As Louis Brandeis, says, “we can have democracy, or we can have power in the hands of a few, but not both.”

When we have large companies ignoring the way they are exacerbating inequality, tearing down our democratic systems, and accelerating climate change in the name of “we’re doing what’s best for the consumer” or “we need to serve our shareholders,” they’re not citing natural law: they’re citing ideas invented by a relatively small number of people in Chicago in the 1970s, that then spread like a virus."

https://impactalpha.com/beyond-blue-vs-red-americas-great-battle-is-small-vs-big/

Vizi e virtù: comportamenti morali e immorali. Buoni e cattivi. A quanto pare c'è una relazione tra il modo con il quale ci si comporta e il modo che ci definisce. Razzolare bene porta a cose non buone. Come diceva Oscar Wilde: "Charity creates a multitude of sins."

Money quote: "In one paper, economists at the University of Chicago reported that working for a socially responsible company motivated employees to act immorally. In one experiment, people were hired to transcribe images of short German texts and paid 10 percent upfront, with the remaining payment being delivered if they completed the trannoscriptions, or if they declared the documents too illegible to transcribe. When they were told that, for every job completed or marked illegible, 5 percent of their wages would be donated to Unicef’s educational programs, the instances of cheating rose by 25 percent, compared to where no charitable donation was offered. Cheating manifested in both workers not completing jobs (taking the 10 percent upfront fee and running) and also workers saying that documents were too illegible to transcribe (and so receiving the full fee)."

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-doing-good-makes-it-easier-to-be-bad

Quella cosa facile facile da capire che è la ricorsività.

Money quote: "My background is in OO programming, mostly using C#. C# being the versatile language it is, I have had the perception that whatever you do in other programming languages, you can with a little more code and hassle achieve in C# as well. If need be, I can program C# using a functional paradigm. And, of course I use recursion all the time. I know all there is to know about recursion."

https://www.bekk.christmas/post/2019/18

Sono ipnotizzato da questo tizio che, usando un iPhone X e GarageBand, rifà le canzoni in tempo reale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xljyigEc-Ag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMVTnUg-xcc

Giocare a scacchi richiede concentrazione. Ma che vuol dire? E che cos'è? E perché si tratta della materia di cui è fatta la nostra capacità di vivere attraverso un mondo sempre più complesso?

Money quote: "In chess, concentration usually unfolds in quick succession through perceiving, desiring and searching. But it’s recursive, so I often find something I didn’t expect in a way that leads me to see my position differently and want something else from it. My perception is pre-patterned through years of experience, so I don’t see one square or piece at a time. Instead, I see the whole position as a situation featuring relationships between pieces in familiar strategic contexts; a castled king, a fianchettoed bishop, a misplaced knight, an isolated pawn; it’s a kind of conceptual grammar. The meaning of the position is embedded in those patterns, partly revealed and partly concealed, and my search to do the right thing feels fundamentally aesthetic in nature."

https://aeon.co/essays/playing-chess-is-an-essential-life-lesson-in-concentration

L'elaborazione automatica delle informazioni porta anche a dei gustosi paradossi, come quello dei programmatori che sostanzialmente si ritrovano senza lavoro per aver creato sistemi in cui non serve più il loro lavoro, adesso svolto automaticamente dalla macchina che loro stessi hanno programmato.

Money quote: "About a year later, someone calling himself or herself Etherable posted a query to Workplace on Stack Exchange, one of the web’s most important forums for programmers: “Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job?” The conflicted coder described accepting a programming gig that had turned out to be “glorified data entry”—and, six months ago, writing noscripts that put the entire job on autopilot. After that, “what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes.” The job was full-time, with benefits, and allowed Etherable to work from home. The program produced near-perfect results; for all management knew, its employee simply did flawless work."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/agents-of-automation/568795/

Notizia ferale

È la fine di un’era: Lupo Alberto non sarà più pubblicato in edicola
👉 https://bit.ly/3RY8ghU

Ridefinizione della famiglia e dell'identità dei maschietti e delle femminucce stile Disney, parte seconda: Frozen II

Money quote: "Does it matter if, in the end, Disney tells us that Elsa has a girlfriend, or if we all just know that she and Honeymaren are off riding horses into the sunset? This is the tip of the sword on which the question rests: At what point does representation become assimilation? When it comes to the kind of behemoth nation-state corporation like Disney, it is extremely telling that they have lagged behind on the representation of every marginalized group, that they still struggle to get even the most basic things right (like, for example, not retroactively giving white characters a Native lineage!). There’s a reason, of course, for all of this, and it’s often because, even as diverse as marginalized groups are, Disney stories are, generally, about the preservation of tradition, of the status quo. Disney stories, generally, protect the “good” people who are in power; the “villains” are the disruptive ones, those who are chaotic or power hungry, who seek to upend the way of things. Where is there space for folks on the margins? There is no revolution here, and expecting it from Disney is a fool’s game."

https://longreads.com/2020/01/02/princess-problem-of-frozen-ii

Broot è bello e molto comodo

Money quote: "See what takes space"

https://dystroy.org/broot/

Se crediamo che il passato non esista più e il futuro non esista ancora, dobbiamo chiederci qual è la misura dell' "adesso". Da una parte deve essere sufficientemente lungo da essere colto, dall'altra il minimo istante percepibile da un umano non coincide col più piccolo istante temporale. Se il presente – unico ad esistere, seppur per poco – fosse più breve del minimo istante percepibile però non potremmo esperire alcunché, e non è così.

L'alternativa é un tempo che esiste nella sua totalità. È tutto già dato, ma non alla nostra vista – passato e futuro sono come paesaggi troppo lontani. Questo però non implica il determinismo, dato che il futuro non sarebbe determinato *dal* passato, ma *assieme* ad esso; ciononostante nulla di ciò che è, è stato e sarà può essere altrimenti.

Tex e i demoni di Mefisto - la mia recensione del penultimo capitolo della saga del ritorno di Mefisto per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/10/tex-743-deserto-altar-mefisto-bonelli/

Le bugie hanno le gambe corte, mentre le storie vanno avanti sulle spalle di intere generazioni. Come mai?

Money quote: "Fiction is more complicated. Note first that, on the face of it, a work of fiction (a short story, a novel, a movie, a joke, or children’s game of pretend), consists of speech acts that, for the most part, look like ordinary assertions. As with lies and irony, there is no dedicated grammar or style for constructing fictional statements that would reliably distinguish them from regular assertions. When I give you a couple of pages of a seemingly realistic story, say in a diary format, you might not be able to tell if it’s a work of fiction or an actual diary. Moreover, as with lies and sarcasm, most if not all those assertoric (or fact-based) statements in a work of fiction are known by the author to be false. Again, we seem to be dealing with a genuine Gricean quality violation."

https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-tell-fact-from-fiction-in-fiction-and-other-forms-of-lies

C'è una gag ricorrente che utilizza come criterio l'incapacità di moltissima gente di sapere come uscire da Vim. C'è più di un modo, in realtà. E addirittura molti modi, in realtà. C'è chi si sta divertendo a raccoglierli

Money quote: "The simple way

Credit: @tomnomnom

:!ps axuw | grep vim | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9"

https://github.com/hakluke/how-to-exit-vim/blob/master/README.md