A metà tra l'aiuto-aiuto e il pistolotto filosofico, ecco a voi la ricetta per la grandezza. Niente di meno.

Money quote: "Over the years, we’ve all encountered our fair share of successes and failures. As I’ve acquired more of both under my name, I’ve started to contemplate which experiences were truly “great” and why.

Interestingly enough, I realized that it was not the sporadic highs that were exceptional, but instead the long hauls; the sequences of events that seemed minimal at each juncture, but compounded into major gains. This led me to think further about what greatness truly means. I’ve come to learn that it’s not about overnight successes or flashes of excellence, but periods of repeatable habits.

Perhaps “great’, is just “good”, but repeatable."

https://blog.stephsmith.io/how-to-be-great/

Se quest'estate volete farvi una giratina sulla Luna, questa pagina creata a suo tempo per celebrare l'anniversario utilizza materiale originale dell'epoca per ricostruire una interessante "retro" versione della missione Apollo 11.

Money quote: "A real-time journey through the first landing on the Moon

This website consists entirely of original historical mission material"

https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/

Al posto del numero di telefono, da qualche anno è nata la moda di scambiarsi il nome dell'account Instagram. Ah, i giovani.

Money quote: "Crucially, Instagram provides much more context—and conversation fodder—than a random string of 10 digits. Because iMessage and SMS don’t come with public profiles, when someone texts you from a number outside your contacts, you have little to no information on who that person is or where you met. Sometimes people will provide this information themselves via text, but often you’re left guessing.

But adding people on Instagram is like scanning a digital business card into your address book. You get their full name and bio, and a direct line of contact through Instagram DM. Plus, you have the added benefit of scrolling back on their profile for additional context on who they are and what they’re into."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/why-everyone-gives-out-their-instagram-handle/585916/

Come combattere le nostre piccole dipendenze.

Money quote: "It’s natural to think we need more discipline, willpower, energy, stamina, focus, or grit to resist these distractions. More something, for sure.

But for most people, I don’t think willpower is the right approach. New psychology research is showing that old ideas about willpower and self-control weren’t quite right. Just ask a gambling addict or a smoker. It’s possible that we can’t build willpower and we can’t summon self-control, after all. They’re myths. What often looks like strength of resolve is really the result of an environment or mindset that makes the right decisions the easy decisions."

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/feeling-busy-and-distracted-it-s-not-your-fault

Il ruolo della fortuna nei giochi di oggi e come si fa a mettercela, nel senso che è un lavoro piuttosto complicato.

Money quote: "Luck is equally vital in modern games, whether it emerges from dice rattling in a cup or the treacherous Chance cards in Monopoly. But its role has changed: Humans have taken the reins from the gods, and luck has become a design tool capable of changing players’ experiences and expectations. For instance, it enables players of varying abilities to play together by reducing the advantage of actual skill. The New York-based designer Zach Gage recently decided to reinvent chess by introducing a hefty element of luck. “Chess is historically a very balanced game that is entirely up to the skill of the player,” he said. “This is great if you want to see who is better at chess but not so good if you’re trying to play a fun game with your friends of varying skill levels.”"

http://nautil.us/issue/70/variables/how-designers-engineer-luck-into-video-games-rp

Ci siamo, i due simpatici omarell che conducono Tilde (io e Riccardo) hanno colpito ancora: ecco la nuova puntata del "podcast conversazionale"

https://tilde.show/podcast-25/

Se Riccardo e io vivessimo nella Silicon Valley (io preferirei San Francisco, ma è comunque in zona) probabilmente ci saremmo lanciati in questa attività

Money quote: "Ms. Susewitz, who started Reseat in 2020, is one of an increasing number of behind-the-scenes specialists in the Bay Area who are carving out a piece of the great office furniture reshuffling. There are professional liquidators, Craigslist flippers and start-ups spouting buzzwords like “circular economy.” And a few guys with warehouses full of really nice chairs.

All of them are capitalizing on a wave of tech companies that are drastically shrinking their physical footprints in the wake of the pandemic-induced shift to remote work and the recent economic slowdown."

https://archive.ph/rJYzh#selection-723.193-723.365

Ciclicamente escono fuori queste cose da fantascienza, che tutti noi schifiamo. Sino a che non si realizzeranno veramente e ci troveremo ad avere le colonie su Giove. Ahahah, scherzo. È il solito vaporware, solo di un po' di anni fa. Ma tanto avrebbero potuto darla come notizia di stamani, e avrebbe lo stesso impatto: wow. E poi: meh...

Money quote: "Laser propulsion has various advantages. The most significant is that the spacecraft need not carry any fuel, vastly reducing their mass. It should also be capable of accelerating the light sails to a velocity of up to 20% the speed of light. At that rate, a starchip would arrive at Proxima Centauri in less than 30 years."

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613127/a-halo-drive-could-accelerate-interstellar-spacecraft-to-close-to-the-speed-of-light/

Ok, non fa per me. Ma magari a qualcuno interessa, però. Musica elettronica generata proceduralmente.

Money quote: "Endlessly unique ambient music"

https://generative.fm/

Startup che produce graffiti automaticamente con dei robot, a scopo pubblicitario, ma solo se sono (abbastanza) artistici

Money quote: "“Make art not adverts”. That’s the motto of Sirje ‘Sirla’ Joala, an artist-turned-entrepreneur who has been making public art in Estonia since she was a teenager.

“I really want to bring beauty and meaning to public spaces instead of adverts that manipulate people to buy more than they need,” she told Sifted at TechChill startup festival in Riga, Latvia."

https://sifted.eu/articles/the-graffiti-robot-startup-thats-turned-down-millions/

L'economia circolare di Halo - il mio nuovo articolo nella fantastica rubrica "And so what" su Fumettologica (tanta roba anche stavolta)

https://fumettologica.it/2023/03/halo-serie-tv-videogioco/

La comunità Unix, che è ancora viva e vegeta e lotta insieme a noi, sta producendo cose notevoli. Come questo repository su GitHub con tutte le versioni del sistema operativo (fino al 2017) delle principali varianti e contenuti. Da Epoch a FreeBSD-release/11.0.0, 11.0.1

Ricordate che, a differenza di Linux che è un kernel più GNU più quel che le varie distribuzioni ci vogliono mettere sopra, ogni distribuzione di Unix contiene lo stack completo del sistema operativo.

Money quote: "The history and evolution of the Unix operating system is made available as a revision management repository, covering the period from its inception in 1970 as a 2.5 thousand line kernel and 26 commands, to 2017 as a widely-used 27 million line system. The 1.1GB repository contains about half a million commits and more than two thousand merges. The repository employs Git system for its storage and is hosted on GitHub. It has been created by synthesizing with custom software 24 snapshots of systems developed at Bell Labs, the University of California at Berkeley, and the 386BSD team, two legacy repositories, and the modern repository of the open source FreeBSD system. In total, about one thousand individual contributors are identified, the early ones through primary research. The data set can be used for empirical research in software engineering, information systems, and software archaeology."

https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo

Una gran bella storia. Ne risentirete parlare presto! :-)

https://video.corriere.it/cultura/la-lettura/volo-dell-idrovolante-pacific-clipper/4165fbfc-b930-11ed-b194-e55eac395b06

Io ve lo dico: questo libro secondo me è una figata (me lo sono comprato)

Money quote: “Nel momento in cui scriviamo la creatura di Marcin Wichary, Shift Happens, ha sbandato Kickstarter. È infatti, a pochi giorni dalla fine della campagna, il libro di tecnologia più supportato della storia del sito di crowdsourcing.

Marcin Wichary, programmatore polacco trapiantato negli Usa, ha scritto un’opera struggente degna di un solitario genio totalmente incentrato su un unico tema (che sta molto caro a chi fa il giornalista, peraltro, e a molte altre professioni intellettuali), cioè le tastiere per scrivere.”

https://www.macitynet.it/shift-happens-il-libro-sulle-tastiere-che-ha-sbancato-kickstarter/

Non è un approccio per i poeti, lo è piuttosto per gli ingegneri. Ma insomma, se volete scrivere un libro su Unix, ecco gli strumenti che si possono usare. Spiegati bene.

Money quote: "I had all the tools in front of me - and had already started using them. I could use a git repo to keep a backup of the book and track changes, using Unix tools like wc, cat, ag (basically a faster grep) and others to accomplish everything I needed to - in a workflow I was already comfortable with.

It was tooling kismet."

https://joecmarshall.com/posts/book-writing-environment/

Altro che Orient Express: perché non traversare gli Stati Uniti in treno? Un viaggio inutile che tutti gli amanti di quel paese e di quella cultura dovrebbero fare

Money quote: "As I quickly learned, there are no passenger rail routes that cross the entire United States in a single trip, nor are there likely to be any soon. Even proponents of the high-speed railway systems much lauded in Asia and Europe (and tentatively proposed in Congress’s Green New Deal resolutions) generally give the competitive edge to planes for travel across distances greater than 600 miles. At present, reaching California by rail from New York requires at least two trains, one of which will depart from New Orleans or Chicago, all of which, like most lines operated by Amtrak, have names so sumptuously picturesque (Maple Leaf, Coast Starlight, Sunset Limited) they make the storybook “Polar Express” sound as sterile as “Amtrak” by comparison. To book tickets, a person must first complete a battery of tests measuring her patience, hand-eye coordination and aptitude for deductive mathematical reasoning, in the guise of Amtrak’s impossible-to-use online trip planner. (While the trip planner cannot identify the train station nearest to an address, or even a city, it can tell you the name of the city you have already typed into its search bar, provided there is an Amtrak train station there.) The fastest way to complete this slow journey is to take the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago’s Union Station, then board the Southwest Chief to Los Angeles, one of sunny Southern California’s much-hyped premier attractions."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/20/magazine/train-across-america-amtrak.html

Alan Alda è malato di Parkinson e fa da testimonial per una serie di iniziative che vogliono creare attenzione e migliorare la prevenzione delle malattie del cervello. Un comportamento particolare, cioè quello delle persone che mettono in atto ciò che stanno sognando, è una spia di possibili malattie di quel tipo.

Money quote: "When RBD occurs in the absence of these alternative explanations, the chance of future disease is high. Some epidemiological studies suggest that enacted dreaming predicts a more than 80 percent chance of developing a neurodegenerative disease within the patient’s lifetime. It may also be the first sign of neurodegenerative disease, which on average shows up within 10 to 15 years after onset of the dream disorder."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/acting-out-dreams-predicts-parkinsons-and-other-brain-diseases/

A quanto pare non solo i vichinghi venivano in vacanza nel Mediterraneo per fare bagni caldi e un po' di battaglie mercenarie, ma anche il leone di Venezia, quello dell'Arsenale lungo tre metri, originariamente viene dal Pireo. E 350 anni fa era usato come bersaglio dai Turchi. Ce ne sono di cose da sapere.

Money quote: ‘Åsmund drew these runes with Asgeir and Torleif and (...) Even though the Greeks forbade it.’

https://sciencenorway.no/archaeology-history-runes/vikings-tagged-the-great-lion-in-venice-with-runes/2157444

Le pompe di calore sono il futuro che viene dal passato.

Money quote: "The pumps are much more efficient than gas heaters, but standard models that absorb heat from the air are prone to icing up, which greatly reduces their effectiveness.

Yu, who works at the University of Glasgow, UK, pondered the problem for weeks. He read paper after paper. And then he had an idea. Most heat pumps waste some of the heat that they generate — and if he could capture that waste heat and divert it, he realized, that could solve the defrosting issue and boost the pumps’ overall performance. “I suddenly found a solution to recover the heat,” he recalls. “That was really an amazing moment.”"

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/02/how-heat-pumps-of-the-1800s-are-becoming-the-technology-of-the-future/

È proprio vero, i cinquantenni di oggi sono i quarantenni di dieci anni fa (cioè, sono proprio loro).

Non c'è più la mezza età di una volta.

Money quote: "Back in the day, 40 was the marker for midlife, but now, finding consensus on when middle age begins and what it represents isn’t easy. The Collins English dictionary gnomically defines it as “the period in your life when you are no longer young but have not yet become old”. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says it is between 40 and 60. Meanwhile, a 2018 YouGov survey reported that most Britons aged between 40 and 64 considered themselves middle-aged – but so did 44% of people aged between 65 and 69."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/feb/16/whatever-happened-to-middle-age-the-mysterious-case-of-the-disappearing-life-stage