Anche oggi un ottimo numero della mia newsletter è partito! (E non ancora tornato)

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/218/

L’abbiamo fatto di nuovo: ecco la puntata 27 di Tilde, fresca fresca.

https://tilde.show/podcast-27/

🎙È uscita Tilde ~ 27, l'ottava puntata della seconda stagione!

Titolo: L’esperienza di essere sé ~ Pontiggia è come Prince ~ Mostly Digest

"Siamo in ritardo ma abbiamo un prodotto invidiabile, no? Due famosi ladri di tè che fanno flanella online: cosa volete di più.".

→ tilde ~ su Spotify
→ tilde ~ su Apple Podcast
→ tilde ~ su Google Podcast

Potete ascoltare il podcast da Spotify, Google Podcast o Apple Podcast, oppure dal sito: tilde.show. Buon ascolto e buon lunedì!

P.S. In copertina, un disegno del nostro amico Karel (magari).

"Ricerca scientifica: la sola forma di poesia che sia retribuita dallo Stato".

Il biologo, filosofo e aforista Jean Rostand (1894-1977) ci ha lasciato alcune idee che sono piccoli gioielli soprattutto sul rapporto tra scienza e poesia.

Ad esempio, la scienza e la poesia sono come la sorella brutta e sistemata in società e la sorella bellissima e abbandonata. La prima, nonostante le sia andata meglio, si arrovella invano per farsi dire bella come la seconda.

https://metropolitanmagazine.it/jean-rostand-aforismi/

Il problema di Domus, la rivista ma soprattutto il sito, è che ha una qualità estremamente discontinua e non sempre riesce a cogliere davvero quello di cui parla. C'è un problema che prima o poi dovranno risolvere, se riescono a guardarsi da fuori. Questo articolo su Zaha Hadid, l'architetto scomparso alcuni anni fa che però è diventato un marchio che prosegue in maniera unica e anche un po' particolare, è un ottimo esempio. Titolato sul metaverso (Zaha Hadid era già pronta per il Metaverso) il testo poi parla d'altro e, nonostante sia interessante, è anche confuso e a tratti incongruente. C'è un'intenzione a monte ma un sacco di rumore e attrito nell'esecuzione. Peccato.

Money quote: "Oggi studi come Zha si fondano sulla “costruzione di una fitta rete di collaboratori accademici, scientifici, progettisti, consulenti ingegneristici, start-up tecnologiche, fornitori di software” racconta Bhooshan. Attraggono talenti “in grado di “sviluppare un approccio di primo principio alla pedagogia architettonica”, che si adoperano nella sperimentazione costante di nuove tecnologie in tutti i campi del design: automotive, computer grafica, videogiochi, moda, robotica."

https://www.domusweb.it/it/architettura/2023/05/02/zaha-hadid-era-gi-pronta-per-progettare-nel-metaverso.html

Il lavoro di Psyche è straordinario per qualità dei contenuti. Se venisse tradotto pari pari in italiano sarebbe una bomba, secondo me. O forse non interesserebbe nessuno, chissà. Comunque, prendete per esempio questo articolo e leggete come maestosamente arriva al punto dove vuole arrivare, e fa quello di cui racconta: ti cambia senza un bang.

Money quote: "We tend to think of major personal transformations as big, loud and sudden. We imagine an explosion of fireworks or, conversely, an earthquake that brings everything crashing down. But personal transformations don’t always follow a ‘bang’. Sometimes they build from a whisper."

https://psyche.co/ideas/personal-transformation-can-start-with-a-whisper-not-a-bang

Le intelligenze artificiali non ci rendono artisti - la mia rubrica per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2023/05/ai-intelligenza-artificiale-artisti/

Uno spiazzante genio e le sue spiazzanti idee

Money quote: “Lanier calls this technology Together mode; he helped design it this spring for Microsoft, where he has a post as an in-house seer of sorts. Initially he'd conceived of Together mode as a way to help Stephen Colbert—in whose house band Lanier sometimes performs when he's in New York—figure out how to host his show in front of a remote audience. (Lanier is sometimes credited as the father of virtual reality; he is also sometimes credited as the owner of the world's largest flute, in addition to the many other exotic instruments he collects and expertly plays.) But mostly he was trying to solve, as he's been doing since the early '80s, a problem relating to technology and how humans might use it. In this case: How could we better, more naturally communicate with one another in the middle of a pandemic?”

https://www.gq.com/story/jaron-lanier-tech-oracle-profile

Ecco il “Personal kanban” con i suggerimenti per ridurre il multitasking. Perché fa male al cervello.

Money quote: "James Benson, a former urban planner based in Seattle who authored Personal Kanban: Mapping Work — Navigating Life, tells Quartz that industrial Kanban was a way for Toyota to avoid overproducing. He has adapted the system to reduce overhead of the emotional sort—the “too many tasks on my mind” feeling that’s the biggest downside of our mostly doomed attempts to multitask"

https://qz.com/985821/personal-kanban-a-life-changing-time-management-system-that-explodes-the-myth-of-multitasking/

Alcuni piccoli o meno piccoli errori nel libro anti-Trump di Michael Wolff ne incrinano la credibilità. Oppure no.

Money quote: “Amid such an uproar, the matter of Mark Berman’s nonexistent breakfast at the Four Seasons hardly ranks. Still, even among the many errors in the book, some big and many small, this one stood out. It was the kind of mistake that only someone who doesn’t know Washington could have made—the kind of mistake that matters to a small handful of D.C. players. And it prompts readers to ask, If Wolff got the small things wrong, did he get the big things wrong as well? The Trump White House has seized on such mistakes to call into question the book’s damning, and mostly accurate, larger portrayal of this Presidency”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/michael-wolff-says-that-washington-will-bury-trump

Roger Federer è tornato più volte in testa alla classifica ATP, l’ultima ad un’età, 36 anni, semplicemente fantascientifica. È come se fosse andato a giocare con la generazione di tennisti dopo la sua. Secondo me però questo è il momento di rileggere uno degli articoli-fiume più belli scritti da David Foster Wallace per il New York Times, tradotto da noi come Tennis e Trigonometria. Un capolavoro di long form journalism che mi fa sentire ancora di più la mancanza dello scrittore americano. Lettura domenicale perfetta.

Money quote: “The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples. Here is one. It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), “How do you hit a winner from that position?” And he’s right: given Agassi’s position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.” I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.

Anyway, that’s one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV — and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

Plasma, quarto sconosciuto. Un articolo sul mio stato della materia preferito.

Money quote: “Plasma physics is a rich and diverse field of enquiry, with its own special twist. In some areas of science, intellectual vitality comes from the beauty of grand theories and the search for deep underlying laws – as shown by Albert Einstein’s account of gravity in general relativity, or string theorists’ attempt to replace the Standard Model of subatomic particles with tiny oscillating strands of energy. The study of plasmas also enjoys some remarkably elegant mathematical constructions, but unlike its scientific cousins, it’s mostly been driven by its applications to the real world.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/plasma-the-mysterious-and-powerful-fourth-phase-of-matter

Lo segnalo un po’ in ritardo, scusatemi, perché è un periodo un po’ pieno di cose: questa settimana, da ieri sino a venerdì, la mattina alle 0818 sono ospite del programma “In altre parole” della Radio Svizzera per parlare di:… molte cose!

Qui ci sono le puntate della trasmissione già andate in onda:

https://www.rsi.ch/rete-due/programmi/cultura/in-altre-parole/?f=podcast-shows

Un editor di codice molto semplice ma nient’affatto banale, che lavora con il Python ed è pensato per chi impara: bambini e non solo. Io con il Python ci sto giocando e trovo Mu ottimo pure per uno zuccone come me.

La frase portatrice sana di valore di questa breve meteora di contenuto su Mostly, I Write, è una citazione che appartiene ad Alan Kay, coioè a una generazione precedente a chi ha fatto questo editor, ma ha ispirato gli autori di Code with Mu.

Money quote: “It’s not a fake version of math. It’s kind of like little league, or even T-ball. In sports they do this all the time. In music, they do it all the time. The idea is, you never let the child do something that isn’t the real thing—but you have to work your ass off to figure out what the real thing is in the context of the way their minds are working at that developmental level.”

https://codewith.mu/

Non parliamo molto di security qui su Mostly, nonostante sia uno dei temi dei quali scrivo abbastanza regolarmente. Beh, ecco qui un bell’attacco...

Money quote: “A few months ago, I began to follow a winding path of research into a 10 year-old network attack called DNS rebinding. Put simply, DNS rebinding allows a remote attacker to bypass a victim’s network firewall and use their web browser as a proxy to communicate directly with devices on their private home network. By following the wrong link, or being served a malicious banner advertisement, you could inadvertently provide an attacker with access to the thermostat that controls the temperature in your home”

https://medium.com/@brannondorsey/attacking-private-networks-from-the-internet-with-dns-rebinding-ea7098a2d325

Sarà perché avrei voglia di viaggiare, o perché sono un nerd degli aeroporti, ma sono affascinato dalla storia di questo tizio che mescolando i codici aeroportuali cerca di formare parole di nove lettere con senso compiuto (in inglese)

Money quote: “Higgins started with a fairly limited vocabulary list, and came out with just 36 words that qualified, from AEROMETER (Sochi, Russia + Nome, Alaska + Terceira, Portugal) to TRICHROME (Bristol, Tennessee + Châteauroux, France + Nome again, Nome again, jiggity jig).”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-many-words-can-you-make-with-airport-codes

Perché voi pensate che la rete sia una cosa seria, concertata, orchestrata. Invece è un simpatico meeting di anarchici egoisti capitalisti situazionisti, incompetentisti, furbeschi e truffaldini. Insomma, funziona per caso. Come la storia di Cloudflare e 1.1.1.1 dimostrano. (Però il servizio funziona alla grande).

Money quote: “Twitter cybersecurity celebrity @SwiftOnSecurity has been retweeting some of the more egregious allegations, such as 1.1.1.1 being used by Fortinet VPN as the virtual endpoint; 1.1.1.1 being used as the default logout for Nomadix controllers, which are primarily used in hospitality industry environments; AT&T Gigapower using 1.1.1.1 on an internal interface on at least one model of router-gateway, the Pace 5268AC, which effectively blocks this address; and even Vodafone Germany using it as an image caching server on their mobile network.

Huston is familiar with usages like this, and has also seen Wi-Fi hotspots using 1.1.1.1 as their router address. He's not impressed.

"Some folk, without any material to justify it, started configuring 1.1.1.1. Now, I can start using your IP address, I suppose, but we're both going to have a problem," Huston told ZDNet, laughing”

http://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/1-1-1-1-cloudflares-new-dns-attracting-gigabits-per-second-of-rubbish/

Me l’ero persa, ma non poteva mancare Milagros Caturla, la Vivian Maier catalana.

Secondo me, guardando le foto che non sono poi questa cosa stratosferica, ci sono anche delle speculazioni dietro. Perché poi fanno le mostre, i libri e soprattutto le stampe numerate.

https://barbarapicci.com/2017/05/26/milagros-caturla/

Intrigante (lungo e ben articolato) saggio sulle tre fasi della critica ad Apple: dall’odio perdonale all’amore sviscerato

Money quote: “Apple bashing is one of the tech world’s favorite pastimes, and having a headline that criticizes Apple, highlights the company’s shortcomings, or predicts their doom is a surefire way to attract pageviews from both Apple detractors and fans. Apple is the world’s richest company, and rooting for the underdog is more fun than backing the champion, so it’s understandable that people want to see Apple taken down a few pegs”

https://medium.com/rethink-reviews/airpods-and-the-three-stages-of-apple-criticism-fed70b84e435

La tesi di questo articolo non è rivoluzionaria né inedita ma sempre godibile. La magia dei libri, la capacità di generare un mondo, sta sospesa nello spazio tra chi scrive e chi legge.

Peccato che come al solito il repertorio di citazioni sia pressoché tutto centrato su autori di lingua inglese. Che provincialismo!

Money quote: “According to Gavron: ‘Omission is a form of creation. Limit, constraint and the compulsions of the unknown – the excluded – are the true foundation of narrative art. A place for the reader to enter more fully into the book.’”

https://aeon.co/ideas/in-the-gap-between-writer-and-reader-the-novel-comes-to-life

Il problema dell'innovazione è che, quando è lasciata completamente libera e selvaggia, va più veloce. Almeno, così pensano negli Usa. In Cina, invece, si pongono il problema opposto: innovare sì, ma con giudizio e senza pregiudizio per il governo.

Money quote: "China plans to require a security review of generative AI services before they’re allowed to operate, casting uncertainty over ChatGPT-like bots unveiled by the country’s largest tech companies including Baidu Inc.

Providers of services must ensure content is accurate and respects intellectual property, and neither discriminates nor endangers security, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in draft guidelines published for public feedback. AI operators must also clearly label AI-generated content, the country’s internet overseer said in a statement posted on its website".

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-11/china-to-mandate-security-reviews-for-new-chatgpt-like-services