The Metaworse
(Questo gioco di parole mi fa impazzire). Il punto qui non è che bullismo e violenza vengono fuori negli spazi virtuali, ma che le forze dell'ordine stiano cominciando a occuparsene in USA.

Money quote: "Three male figures surrounded her avatar in Horizon Venues, a virtual live events program created by Meta. They touched her avatar's breasts and pressed their torsos rhythmically against her, telling her that she wanted it. A fourth took photos of the incident in the app."

Attacks in the metaverse are booming. Police are starting to pay attention

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/04/metaverse-sexual-assault-prosecution/

https://archive.is/BS0AA

Ci sono quelli che sognano il successo perché è un modo di soddisfare il loro narcisismo e il bisogno di essere visti. E ci sono quelli che hanno qualcosa da dire, ma non vogliono vivere una vita da diva. È comune a molti attori a Hollywood, quelli che chiamiamo "b star" perché vogliono fare cose interessanti, guadagnare bene ma avere una vita normale. Ed è proprio anche di qualche musicista. Almeno, io la storia di Tracy Chapman, da poco tornata sul palco con una canzone suonata alla cerimonia dei Grammy, la leggo così. Voi?

Money quote: "Chapman is so private that many San Franciscans were surprised to learn after the Grammys that she lives in their city. She’s not part of the socialite scene or involved in politics, and she seems to mostly avoid major events.

But she can still be seen around town. The owner of a bookstore where she sometimes shops posted on X after her Grammys performance that she was “so down to earth in real life” when spotted buying food for her dog at a local pet store. (The post was later deleted.) Others have observed her standing in line at a popular bakery. Before the pandemic, she served as a judge for a high school scholarship program run by the founders of “Beach Blanket Babylon,” a now-defunct cabaret."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/arts/music/tracy-chapman-career.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/T2Bvz

"Dune - Parte due" è un grande film, anche meglio del primo - ecco la mia accorata recensione per Fumettologica (riservata a chi ha visto il primo e non solo)

https://fumettologica.it/2024/02/dune-parte-due-recensione-film/
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Una cosa che mi ha sempre molto infastidito di Fantozzi (ognuno si porta dietro i propri orizzonti culturali, lo ammetto) è la battuta della "cagata pazzesca" riferita a "La corazzata Potëmkin" di Sergej Ejzenštejn, o come diavolo si scrive. L’anti-intellettualismo di Paolo Villaggio era una scelta autoriale che voleva dire qualcosa, ed ha un suo significato valido, ma ha lasciato una ferita nell’immaginario italiano, e cioè che i film di Eisenstein siano tremendi. Tutt’altro, devo dire. E non solo i film, perché hanno pubblicato da poco in spagnolo una serie di quaderni di disegni pansessuali che rendono grazia alla complessità e ricchezza stilistica oltre che tematica di un autore molto più contemporaneo di quello che una battuta al cinema non ci abbia fatto pensare per più di mezzo secolo.

Money quote: "Se publican por primera vez en castellano (por Alias Editorial) los dibujos eróticos de Serguéi Eisenstein (1898-1948). Irreverentes, subversivas, pansexuales y blasfemas, las ilustraciones del cineasta ruso por antonomasia fueron largamente censuradas por su viuda y ocultas durante más de setenta años. Marineros, monjas, sacerdotes, ángeles y demonios se ven envueltos en celebraciones de los sentidos que serían la envidia de cualquier fiesta electrónica o fiesta “negra” en saunas contemporáneos"

https://www.pagina12.com.ar/711302-los-dibujos-pansexuales-de-serguei-eisenstein

Tra l’altro, i libri di Alias Editorial, che a quel che capisco è argentina, sono meravigliosi.

https://aliaseditorial.com/alias-coleccion/

Tutte le news importanti su Apple e un po' di altre cose tech sul mio canale "fast": solo testo (e pure poco, se è per questo)

https://news.1rj.ru/str/mostlyapple

Un viaggio affascinante, una ricerca fotografica nei villaggi abbandonati di Hong Kong (e no, la Cina per una volta non c'entra).

Money quote: "“These villages have existed in Hong Kong for hundreds of years, way before the colonial period,” explained Irvine. In the 1950s and ‘60s, as Hong Kong grew as an industrial hub, many people migrated to the rapidly expanding urban centers for better working opportunities. “It’s hard farming and fishing out there in these remote areas, so a lot of people moved to the city to work in the factories,” he added."

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/13/style/hong-kong-abandoned-villages-stefan-irvine-photographer-hnk/index.html

C'è voluto un po', in effetti, ma questa è una delle analisi più interessanti sul perché Nokia ha perso la guerra dei telefoni cellulari, un settore dove ha dominato indisturbata sino al 2007.

Money quote: "You can already see where the trouble started brewing. Tens of sub-divisions, each launching multiple models to capture specific segments of the market. While Nokia did invest heavily in R&D, it was impossible to produce cohesive research that could improve their phones in general; the crucial research that would pave the way for the iPhone in a few years. And the rest is history.

One of the first things that Jobs did after returning to Apple was to kill individual “business units” and reorganize the company based on functions. It’s interesting to see how Nokia succumbed to the bad strategy that had almost killed Apple in ‘97. Nokia perceived the smartphone market as composed of multiple categories, not as a whole. And that’s where it lost the battle."

https://textquery.app/2024/02/06/nokia-made-too-many-phones/

L'ultima volta che Mostly Weekly usa Tinyletter. Dalla prossima volta si cambia (chissà con cosa). Intanto, buona lettura.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/260/
https://antoniodini.com/weekly/260/

La scomparsa dei cugini è una cosa vera. E cambierà le generazioni future radicalmente.

Money quote: "Using demographic data, the researchers computed kinship structures for every country in the world from 1950 to present, and then calculated projections to the year 2100. The model is based on a hypothetical person from the population, in this case, a woman of a specified age.

A Canadian woman aged 35 would have had about 20 living cousins in 1950, while a woman the same age would have half that — 10 living cousins — in 2020. By 2095, a Canadian woman aged 35 is projected to have just five living cousins, according to the data."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cousins-decline-canada-1.7103338

C'è chi pensa che molta automazione aiuti e c'è chi pensa che pensare a quel che si fa molto aiuti. A giudicare dai risultati, è abbastanza chiaro come funziona in realtà.

Money quote: "André took on the job of design, implementation, and test of the VTOC manager. He started by sitting at his desk and drawing a lot of diagrams. I was the project coordinator, so I used to drop in on him and ask how things were going. "Still designing," he'd say. He wanted the diagrams to look beautiful and symmetrical as well as capturing all the state information. I was getting nervous about the schedule, so I was glad when he finally began writing code. He wrote in pencil, at his desk, instead of using a terminal. He declined offers of typing help, and just kept writing away in pencil. He rewrote parts, copied things over, erased and rewrote.

Finally André took his neat final pencil copy to a terminal and typed the whole program in. His first compilation attempt failed; he corrected three typos, tried again, and the code compiled. We bound it into the system and tried it out, and it worked the first time.

In fact, the VTOC manager worked perfectly from then on. Only one bug was ever found in it, and that was my fault: André had asked me the calling sequence for an error procedure, and I'd guessed instead of looking it up, so it crashed the first time it hit an error. Beyond that the program was perfect."

https://multicians.org/andre.html

La Gen Z legge. E legge sui libri di carta. E questo vuol dire tante cose, a partire dal fatto che forse c'è una possibilità (ma solo se si ripensano i libri).

Money quote: "“Books have always been the great love of my life,” she added. “Reading is so sexy.”

Gerber isn’t alone. Last year in the UK 669m physical books were sold, the highest overall level ever recorded. Research from Nielsen BookData highlights that it is print books that gen Z favour, accounting for 80% of purchases from November 2021 to 2022. Libraries are also reporting an uptick in gen Z users who favour their quiet over noisy coffee shops. In the UK in-person visits are up 71%."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/09/reading-is-so-sexy-gen-z-turns-to-physical-books-and-libraries

La rivoluzione dei processori per le AI realizzata dalla statunitense Tachyum è tanta roba. Ma si tratta comunque di una soluzione da mettere dentro i server nei centri di calcolo.

Money quote: "La statunitense Tachyum vuole trasformare l’economia dei carichi di lavoro di AI, HPC, cloud pubblico/privato e anche metaverso con Prodigy, il primo processore universale al mondo. Prodigy unifica le funzionalità di una CPU, una GPU e un TPU in un unico processore, o meglio in una soluzione multicore di ampie dimensioni, per questo definita “half-die” con contrapposizione al “full die” di Cerebras."

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tachyum-prodigy-arriva-il-processore-universale-leo-sorge-ukl5f/

Quel che non serve per fare un buon film d'animazione - la mia ricorda su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/02/film-animazione-digitale-mano/

La memoria del futuro? È il DNA.

Money quote: "The rate of information production is increasing faster than the storage density of tape. Using current technologies will mean that, in the coming decades, we will need exponentially more magnetic tape, disk drives, and flash memory - as well as the factories to produce the storage media. DNA is cheap, readily available, and stable at room temperature for millennia. Organizations around the world are already taking the first steps towards building a DNA drive that can both read and write DNA data."

https://spectrum.ieee.org/dna-data-storage

Affascinante quanto siano differenti le valutazioni sui vaccini in generale e su quelli basati su mRNA. C'è un movimento di senza-testa da una parte che sostiene che siano veleno, mentre dall'altra la realtà è siamo di fronte a una delle più grandi realizzazioni della scienza moderna.

Money quote: "Much of the fundamental groundwork needed to make mRNA vaccines a practical reality had been available years before it was used to fight COVID-19. That Operation Warp Speed was able to quickly resolve many issues of vaccine design and manufacturing within months is indicative. It suggests that the primary limitation to achieving mRNA vaccines was resourcing, rather than fundamental barriers of understanding or technology.

This paper reckons with this incongruity: post hoc, mRNA vaccines were clearly a major breakthrough. But for a long period, investigators like Karikó and Weissman and startups like Moderna and BioNTech languished in relative obscurity. Why were mRNA vaccines not developed and made practical for use significantly earlier?"

https://ifp.org/progress-deferred-lessons-from-mrna-vaccine-development/

Bere alcool vuol dire bere troppo. Negli Usa, così come nei paesi del nord e dell'est Europa, c'è infatti un problema sostanziale con l'alcool. Qualcosa di profondo e difficile da relativizzare, visto che la nostra tradizione alimentare lo vedeva integrato nella dieta mediterranea mentre i media lo hanno completamente sbilanciato con un approccio narrativo problematico tutto nordamericano. Che confusione. Ora siamo diventati mezzi alcolizzati anche noi. Però leggersi questo racconto sulla via della sobrietà con un notevole twist finale è tutta un'altra cosa.

Money quote: "You take various online quizzes about whether or not you drink too much. Your drinking doesn’t interfere with your work! You’re able to quit for three weeks every January! You never drink during the day! You don’t usually drink hard alcohol! You don’t drink secretly and most nights you only drink two beers even though they’re massive and strong and each one is really probably more like two. Plus, you love drinking! You’re funny when you drink and, when you’re not being belligerent, happy. Is this good or bad? You’re not sure. “If you’re taking a quiz about whether you drink too much, you probably drink too much” you read somewhere, unhappily."

https://cupofjo.com/2024/02/14/do-i-drink-too-much/

Una caratteristica di Franz Kafka era la fame. Una fame insaziabile per motivi diversi, cupi, profondi, esistenziali. Valerie Stivers, sulla Paris Review, ha preso spunto dalla sua opera e dai piatti che la attraversano per cucinarli e farci capire cosa è riuscito a saziare K. e cosa no (la maggior parte delle cose).

Money quote: "The tension in Kafka between appetite and its fulfillment is a crucial aspect of the writer’s work. Kafka’s characters are often hungry—the performer from “A Hunger Artist” has made starving himself into an art; Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis slowly stops eating and wastes away. But their hunger is often not for the foods of this world. Gregor refers to himself as hungering as for “an unknown nourishment.” The hunger artist’s last words are a confession that fasting was not difficult for him because, he says, “I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” Instead the characters seek the deeper forms of sustenance—emotional, societal, sexual, spiritual—and don’t find them."

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/02/22/cooking-with-franz-kafka/

Per la prima volta da cinque anni a questa parte il controvalore dei denti di latte pagato dalle fatine (o dai topolini) è in calo. Panico alle scuole elementari.

Money quote: "The tooth fairy's national average gift value for a single lost tooth dropped 6% to $5.84 from $6.23 last year, according to a Delta Dental survey.

It's still the second highest value for a lost tooth and a 349% increase from 1998 when a lost tooth fetched $1.30 on average."

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/22/tooth-fairy-going-rate-2024-lost-tooth

In Spagna stanno pestando sul fenomeno delle influencer che mettono bambini nei video, aggirando così i vincoli di età, per i prodotti cosmetici.

È tutto un discorso complicato ma da capire secondo me. Il nome del fenomeno è quello dei “Sephora Kids”

Money quote: “El fenómeno se ha extendido principalmente entre las mujeres y en rango de edad hasta alcanzar a las más pequeñas. Las tiendas de belleza ahora están inundadas de niñas y preadolescentes enganchadas a cosméticos que no necesitan, y esa práctica no solo altera las conductas esperables de esta edad, sino que puede tener efectos en la salud. Los expertos de la piel advierten de un aumento de casos de irritación, acné y dermatitis entre los más jóvenes, como reacción a los potentes principios activos que contienen los productos que utilizan para imitar a los influencers.”

https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2024-02-21/la-explosion-de-los-sephora-kids-la-obsesion-por-las-rutinas-cosmeticas-alcanza-a-los-ninos.html
https://archive.is/6oiyC

La cosa divertente di questo tipo di "incidenti" è che capitano sempre dove meno te lo aspetti. Sono come delle slabbrature nel tessuto sociale che lasciano immaginare un altrove, un dietro le quinte dove succedono cose che neanche ci immaginiamo. Altro che teoria del complotto: è puro e semplice controllo sociale spesso a fini di lucro.

Money quote: "Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent.

The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campus vending machine error message, "Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe," displayed after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/vending-machine-error-reveals-secret-face-image-database-of-college-students/