Usare degli alberi che volano, sospesi sopra la strada, come strumento mimetico. Ah, l'ingegno finnico.

Money quote: "This photo—which has appeared on social media in recent years, usually by accounts that specialize in history—is from the Finnish Defence Forces’ Photograph Archive. “War photographers were given instructions about generic topics to capture,” says Johanna Palokangas, the head of the archive. “Still, in the end they decided what to shoot and what not.” The collection contains around 160,000 images captured between 1939 and 1945, when Finland fought two separate wars against the Soviet Union: the Winter War and the Continuation War."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/finland-world-war-ii-camouflage

Là fuori, da qualche parte, c'è la bolla in cui la conversazione sugli orologi meccanici di lusso procede imperterrita. A più livelli.

Money quote: "The purpose of this article is not to tell you that you need to buy an Omega Speedmaster. You don’t need to buy any watches, period. Here are just 10 reasons in favor of buying a Speedmaster watch. If you’ve been debating whether or not to buy one, these might encourage you to pull the trigger."

https://www.fratellowatches.com/10-reasons-to-buy-a-speedmaster/

Uno strano, lungo, interessante, ipnotico articolo letterario. È una madre vera, con una figlia vera, al tempo stesso è una creatura letteraria, artefatta come tutte le creature letterarie. Buone intenzioni, ideologia, autoanalisi, ritratto di una generazione che non sa esprimersi dentro un privilegio morbido, non radicale ed esposto: ci ritrovo tantissimi discorsi e tantissima America che ho incontrato in questi anni. Una ottima lettura per la domenica.

Money quote: "Much of the time, I feel like a girl. A curious girl of 48 who, today, is walking the neighborhood streets with a girl of 13, and listening to what this girl has to say. She happens to be my kid, this person I made, a living being that gave my life a whole new significance. She will grow up and leave me and yet never leave me; she will be mine forever, a being I shaped."

https://longreads.com/2023/04/27/girl-genius/

Sam Altman, il fondatore di OpenAI (leggi: ChatGPT), nel tempo libero si occupa anche di crittografia e cerca di trovare la quadra per entrare anche in quel mondo in maniera innovativa. Direi che sta facendo mosse interessanti, come questa di qualche settimana fa passata un po' sotto traccia.

Money quote: "As advances in AI make it more difficult to discern bots from humans, Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI – the company behind ChatGPT – thinks blockchains can help.
Altman’s crypto project, Worldcoin, rose to prominence last year with a controversial, Silicon Valley vision for a universal basic income (UBI): a crypto token that can be distributed in equal quantity to everyone in the world.
Worldcoin is back again this week with a new launch – this one poised to be its biggest yet. World App, Worldcoin’s crypto wallet, built on the Ethereum sidechain Polygon, is the first product from the elusive identity upstart that anyone, anywhere will be able to download.
The new app is one part minimalist crypto wallet, and one part passport for the AI era. It’s Worldcoin’s biggest swing yet to redefine itself in the eyes of consumers."

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/05/08/sam-altmans-crypto-project-worldcoin-releases-first-major-consumer-product/

Da salvare e leggere con calma.

“Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models” è un paper di "literature review", vale a dire non fa ricerca originale ma serve per fare il punto della situazione. E lo fa in maniera estremamente chiara e comprensibile.

Il link è diretto al pdf.

Money quote: "The widespread public deployment of large language models (LLMs) in recent months has prompted a wave of new attention and engagement from advocates, policymakers, and scholars from many fields. This attention is a timely response to the many urgent questions that this technology raises, but it can sometimes miss important considerations. This paper surveys the evidence for eight potentially surprising such points:
1. LLMs predictably get more capable with increasing investment, even without targeted innovation.
2. Many important LLM behaviors emerge unpredictably as a byproduct of increasing investment.
3. LLMs often appear to learn and use representations of the outside world.
4. There are no reliable techniques for steering the behavior of LLMs.
5. Experts are not yet able to interpret the inner workings of LLMs.
6. Human performance on a task isn’t an upper bound on LLM performance.
7. LLMs need not express the values of their creators nor the values encoded in web text.
8. Brief interactions with LLMs are often misleading."

https://cims.nyu.edu/~sbowman/eightthings.pdf

Il personaggio interpretato da Julia Louis-Deryfus nella sitcom Seinfeld, Elaine Benes, è una bomba sexy o una ragazza normalina-bruttina?

Uno di quegli articoli come la cioccolata che, se non li avessero già pubblicati e letti in tutto il mondo, ti verrebbe voglia di tradurli e far finta di averli scritti tu.

Money quote 1: "Which is how, in a roundabout way, I’ve found myself thinking about Elaine Benes. Is Seinfeld’s best character hot? Obviously Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine Benes for nine seasons, is a certifiably gorgeous woman, but that’s not the question. Is Elaine herself canonically hot? If she is, why is she hanging out with these dorks? Is she a hot woman doing dorky things? Or is she a dorky woman who happens to be extremely hot? Are hotness and dorkiness mutually exclusive properties?"

Money quote 2: "Sitcoms, especially those from the ’80s and ’90s, are a strange animal. There’s a baseline level of attractiveness that people, especially women, need to get on television, and sitcoms usually depict what are supposed to be “regular” people. Also, when I first watched Seinfeld, I was 8, and gay: Elaine’s attractiveness eluded me.

Elaine’s canonical hotness might seem clear to modern, adult eyes, but there are reasons to question it."

https://www.vox.com/culture/23721402/seinfeld-elaine-canonically-hot-julia-louis-dreyfus

C'è stato un momento nella storia della civiltà umana che negli Usa non avevano l'aria condizionata. Sembra incredibile, ma c'erano già delle persone in America.

Money quote: "People on West 110th Street, where I lived, were a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes, but around the corner on 111th and farther uptown mattresses were put out as night fell, and whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/06/22/before-air-conditioning

"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse", la recensione - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2023/06/spider-man-across-the-spider-verse-recensione-film-marvel/

Per me Craig Mod è un esempio e un fenomeno da studiare. Non so quanto sia effettivamente gradevole come persona ma quel che riesce a fare scrivendo è veramente notevole. Soprattutto perché si è disintermediato e vive del frutto del suo lavoro, per il quale i lettori lo pagano direttamente. Chapeaux .

Ma come fa? Beh, qui lo spiega.

Money quote: "If you’re thinking about running a membership program, you’re probably a bit wacky. Everything I write about membership programs should be filtered through the lens that: I live a somewhat uncommon, sometimes extremely wacky life. It’s good to keep that in mind. My work is mostly, inherently, non-commercial. Or less commercial than it might be “optimized” for. When people ask me: Who are you? What do you do? And I tell them — I walk, I write, I photograph, I make books, I run a membership program. Their suspicion is plainly visible: No, but what do you do to survive? As if the soul itself wasn’t a thing to be nourished. This is survival, I want to say. But instead I say: And from those activities I make several hundred-thousand dollars a year. That changes the tenor quickly. Cashflow, sadly, validates. "

https://craigmod.com/essays/memberships_year_four/

Mostly Weekly è la mia newsletter di tecnologia e cultura che costruisco con quel che leggo e scrivo durante la settimana. Va avanti da parecchio tempo. Tipo 221 settimane.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/221/

È tutta gratuita e open: iscriviti numeroso qui:

https://antoniodini.com/archivio/

Amazon con AWS vuole mangiarsi l'industria della telefonia mobile con un sistema che sposta nel cloud il lavoro e il valore dei carrier.

Money quote: "I’ve noted in past blogs on MWC that the cloud providers were front and center at the show, and also that public cloud providers had their sights on the telco space in general, and 5G in particular, as a conduit for future revenues. Amazon sent a copy of their MWC presentation, and it’s a good way to analyze what cloud providers are saying and thinking with regard to their future relationship with telecom. The key slide in their presentation shows three layers of AWS support for telcos, so we’ll look at them starting at the bottom."

https://blog.cimicorp.com/?p=5367

Recensione in anteprima di iA Presenter, un altro modo di fare le presentazioni - La mia prova per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/prova-in-anteprima-di-ia-presenter-un-altro-modo-di-fare-le-presentazioni/

Il nuovo gioco di Zelda per la Switch di Nintendo, Tears of the Kingdom, sta facendo gridare al miracolo. È veramente fatto molto bene, e se ne scrive tanto in rete.

Money quote: "A clip showing one potential solution went viral on Twitter shortly after Tears of the Kingdom’s release: The player uses Link’s Ultrahand ability to unfurl the stacked bridge by attaching it to a wheeled platform in the lava. When the wheeled platform — now attached to the edge of the bridge — activates and moves forward, it pulls the bridge taut, splashing lava as it goes, until the suspension bridge is actually suspended and can be crossed. But it wasn’t the solution itself that resonated with players; instead, the clip had game developers’ jaws on the ground, in awe of how Nintendo’s team wrangled the game’s physics system to do that.

To players, it’s simply a bridge, but to game developers, it’s a miracle."

https://www.polygon.com/legend-zelda-tears-kingdom/23737921/tears-of-the-kingdom-bridge-physics-game-devs-explain

C'è un notevole cambiamento nei film Disney per quanto riguarda le figure dei cattivi. Stanno diventando meno cattivi.

Money quote: "«Questo allontanamento dal personaggio che incarna intere “ideologie cattive” per consentire a tutti i personaggi di essere più umani e bilanciati ha portato ad alcuni dei film Disney più ricchi di sfumature della sua storia», ha scritto la critica Emily Kavanagh sul sito dedicato alla cultura pop Collider. Il nuovo approccio incoraggia piuttosto il pubblico a provare empatia nei confronti dei vari personaggi: «mostra che i problemi non sono tutti in bianco e nero, e che di solito non possono essere risolti rimuovendo una singola persona cattiva da una situazione. Che dev’esserci uno sforzo comune basato in larga parte sulla comunicazione. Che le persone non sono cattive solo per il gusto di essere cattive: ci sono motivazioni dietro le loro azioni, anche se sono dannose»."

https://www.ilpost.it/2023/05/24/fine-cattivi-disney/

C'è sempre più gente che passa da Android a iPhone. Google sostiene che accade perché Apple gioca sporco con il sistema integrato di iMessage-Sms. In realtà, pare che il problema sia un altro: i telefoni Android sono peggiori.

Money quote: "The top reason was actually an issue with the Android experience. Over 53% of respondents said they moved to iPhone because of problems with their Android smartphone. Specifics cited were “their old phone did not serve them, because it was aging, needed repair, or had some deficiency that affected their user experience.”"

https://9to5mac.com/2023/05/31/top-reason-android-users-switch-to-iphone/

Stiamo "proiettando" e potentemente fraintendendo quel che succede con l'intelligenza artificiale: il mito della macchina conscia ci sta rendendo tutti dei Narcisi. Ecco perché:

Money quote: "If any threshold has been crossed, however, it is solely in the capacious plasticity of the algorithm. It is most certainly not the threshold between unconscious mechanism and conscious mind. Here is where the myth of Narcissus seems to me especially fitting: the functions of a computer are such wonderfully versatile reflections of our mental agency that at times they take on the haunting appearance of another autonomous rational intellect, just there on the other side of the screen. It is a bewitching illusion, but an illusion all the same. Moreover, exceeding any error the poor simpleton from Boeotia committed, we compound the illusion by inverting it: having impressed the image of thought on computation, we now reverse the transposition and mistake our thinking for a kind of computation. This, though, is fundamentally to misunderstand both minds and computers."

https://psyche.co/ideas/the-myth-of-machine-consciousness-makes-narcissus-of-us-all

"Transformers - Il risveglio" è una buona ripartenza per il franchising - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2023/06/transformers-il-risveglio-recensione-film/

After I got my PhD, I put my academic noscript on my frequent flyer card. Once a flight attendant discreetly asked if I could help a passenger who became unwell. Me: "Sorry, I'm a doctor in quantum physics. I cannot even help you If you're unsure whether your passenger's alive or dead"

Tilde con una puntatona quasi estiva: *Non prendi in giro nessuno quando ti porti il laptop al coffee shop*

https://tilde.show/podcast-28/

Tanta roba anche questa volta

🎙 Non prendi in giro nessuno quando ti porti il laptop al coffee shop.

È uscita Tilde ~ 28, la nona puntata della seconda stagione!

"Pronti per le nuove trabahanze, con buoni libri da leggere (Thomas Mann, Chuck Palanuck) e qualche riflessione sulle mappe e sulle guide da usare in viaggio".

→ 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 giovedì!

Mi ero perso The Playlist, il biopic su Spotify prodotto da Netflix in Svezia. L'ho beccato per caso perché lo guardava un tipo sull'aereo tornando da Londra, qualche tempo fa. Uno dei miei sport preferiti in aereo è guardare le cose che guardano quelli seduti accanto o davanti a me, ovviamente senza volume. È divertente "riempire gli spazi vuoti" di senso che il video senza audio produce. A casa ho dato un'occhiata e ho trovato la serie su Netflix e me la sono guardata in un paio di fine settimana. Non male. La recensione del Guardian ancora meglio.

Money quote: "Spotify is one of those apps – along with most products made by Meta – that people never feel entirely jazzed about using. Convenience, and its market saturation, mean that we are all forced to hush our misgivings about its exploitation of musicians whenever we open it. Luckily, this is where the focus of the final episode lies. The Ek we see here is Charles Foster Kane, brittle and aloof and so insulated by wealth that he has lost sight of what he ever wanted Spotify to be. In contrast, there’s a talented musician who can no longer pay her rent with the royalties she receives from streaming. It’s a necessary note for the series to strike, and one you wish took up more airtime."

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/oct/13/the-playlist-review-netflix-daniel-ek-spotify