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/

È morto Akira Toriyama

https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/live/2024/03/08/mort-d-akira-toriyama-auteur-de-dragon-ball-partagez-vos-souvenirs-nos-journalistes-repondent-a-vos-questions_6220861_4408996.html

Dopo dieci anni forse siamo qualche centimetro più vicini a risolvere il mistero di dove sia finito il volo MH370 di Malaysian Airlines, scomparso dai radar l'8 marzo 2014. Grazie a dei piccoli molluschi.

Money quote: "Better still, the flaperon carried with it evidence that may help locate the plane and solve the mystery once and for all: a population of gooseneck barnacles called Lepas anatifera. Like the rings of a tree, their shells contain a record of their life. Decode that information and it may be possible to trace their path on the flaperon backward to the impact site and the mystery would be solved."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mh370-search-debris-barnacles.html

Ancora non è disponibile, ma se fa davvero quel che promette, è un passo enorme verso la programmazione zero code.

Money quote: “Similar to Sora, Genie's creators call it a "world model," but unlike Sora, it's an "actionable-controllable world model." Trained on over 200,000 hours of publicly available 2D platformers that exist across the internet, Genie can take prompts, sketches, and other images and create virtual worlds for users to play around in — creating assets from scratch and generating pixels based on player actions.”

https://mashable.com/article/google-genie-can-create-video-games-2d-platformers

È domenica, ho appena mandato Mostly Weekly. Da domenica scorsa ho un nuovo provider email. Se ci sono problemi, segnalatemelo. Se invece non sapete cos'è e volete iscrivervi, ecco qua:

https://antoniodini.com/iscrizione/

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/262/

Le conseguenze del Vision Pro potrebbero essere "interessanti" (certo che per tirare su due click in più un povero tizio che gestisce un sito di news business deve proprio inventarsele tutte).

Money quote: "That, unfortunately, could have some very weird and very messy consequences for the human brain. Researchers have found that widespread, long-term immersion in VR headsets could literally change the way we perceive the world — and each other. "We now have companies who are advocating that you spend many hours each day in them," says Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. "You've got many, many people, and they're wearing it for many, many hours. And everything magnifies at scale.""

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-vision-pro-experiment-brain-virtual-reality-side-effect-2024-2

Non ci sono solo i deepfake e il revenge p*rn fatto con le foto simulate delle compagne di scuola, le colleghe di lavoro o delle vicine di casa. Ci sono anche quelli che invece le donne le rivestono quando "sono sconce" grazie all'AI. È il movimento «DignifAI». Mah

Money quote: "L’idée est née sur 4chan, un forum anonyme parmi les plus populaires – et les moins modérés – du Web. « Nous allons leur montrer la vie qu’elles n’auront jamais. Nous les forcerons à contempler l’image de la vraie beauté, que nous avons rétablie à partir de leurs visages dépravés. Nous ramènerons la décence dans ce monde », peut-on lire dans un message anonyme. DignifAI s’est ensuite répandu sur d’autres espaces, comme X, et un site Internet créé spécialement fournit un mode d’emploi pour trafiquer par IA les images de son choix."

https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2024/03/09/dignifai-des-internautes-rhabillent-les-femmes-en-utilisant-l-intelligence-artificielle_6221059_4408996.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/EBAqe

Bill e Hillary Clinton hanno ricominciato a fare politica, dietro le quinte. La vittoria di Donald Trump si fa sempre più certa.

Money quote: "Hillary wasn’t part of that conversation, but she was on the plane, too — along with Michelle Obama and Jill Biden — and she had plenty of her own thoughts as Biden entered 2024 running behind her old foe in the polls. In recent months, the former secretary of state has begun convening groups of friends and political allies for private dinners to talk through the coming election season and to drum up badly needed support for Democratic candidates, starting with the president. The sessions are occasionally at the Clintons’ primary home in Chappaqua, but more often at their house in Washington, not far from the residence of Vice-President Kamala Harris, with whom she has quietly been keeping in touch."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bill-clinton-hillary-clinton-joe-biden-2024-election.html

Una bella riflessione su uno dei temi che è epidemico nel mondo occidentale: la fine dell'amore. E se ne facessimo a meno sin dal principio? Intrigante. Mi chiedo però quanto controllo sociale ci voglia perché questi matrimoni organizzati anziché frutto dell'amore spontaneo non siano solo delle facciate. Forse funzionano in India (ammesso che funzionino) perché ci sono caste e rigidità culturali che da noi non esistono? Sempre più intrigante.

Money quote: "In India, in those days and even now, almost all marriages are arranged. Parents select potential mates for their children, taking great care to find someone from within their religious, socioeconomic, and cultural circles, so that there will be little cause for disharmony. Growing up in India, I remember always telling my friends with some pride that my parents instead had a “Love Marriage,” sickeningly enthusiastic that this would put all their parents’ “Arranged Marriages” to shame. All through my teenage years and beyond, I was fascinated by this idea of the love marriage. Seeing someone across a room, maybe even falling in love at first sight. And that is what my parents had done. They became smitten with each other in their College faculty room. And now he was telling me that perhaps he should have had an arranged marriage after all".

https://www.thesmartset.com/arranging-love/

Purtroppo è mancato Giuseppe Granieri, persona squisita e amico sempre troppo lontano. Dal 1996, quando aveva fondato bookcafe.net (uno dei primi siti letterari italiani) aveva cominciato a vivere oltre che a spiegare l'evoluzione digitale del nostro tempo.

https://www.repubblica.it/cultura/2024/03/11/news/giuseppe_granieri_e_morto_pioniere_della_cultura_digitale_aveva_56_anni-422292194/

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Granieri

In Irlanda ci sono 82 dacenter, che consumano circa il 18% della corrente elettrica di quel Paese. Questo articolo è molto interessante perché fa il punto non solo sul presente (piuttosto critico) dell'Irlanda, ma anche sul suo passato e su come siamo arrivati sino a questo punto. La "tigre celtica" deve tutto a una politica di incentivi fiscali che ha due anime, non troppo positive.

Money quote: "Since the 1960s, Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency has had a policy of aiming to attract international investment through low corporate tax rates, starting with an initial rate of 0%. Ireland has long been home to tech companies: IBM and Ericsson offices opened in the 1950s, and factories owned by Dell, Intel, HP and Microsoft followed in the 1970s and 1980s. The focus of these operations was hardware. The pivot to software development coincided with the boom years of the early 2000s, when Ireland became known as the “Celtic Tiger”. Google’s European headquarters opened in Dublin in 2004, and since then, the country has become home to 16 of the 20 largest global tech companies."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/15/power-grab-hidden-costs-of-ireland-datacentre-boom

Come si leggono i fumetti con il Vision Pro? Ve lo spiego nella mia rubrica su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/03/apple-vision-pro-leggere-fumetti-tex/

Due cose: da un lato la PSP, la PlayStation Portable, che mi piaceva tantissimo e con la quale mi sono divertito un sacco. Il formato proprietario dei dischi ottici era delizioso (oltre che costoso). A un certo punto è stata travolta dalla pirateria, ma era comunque una delizia.

Dall'altra la Playstation Portal, che non serve sostanzialmente a una mazza. Almeno, sino a ora.

Money quote: "Now, two Google engineers have managed to get the PPSSPP emulator running natively on the PlayStation Portal, allowing a Grand Theft Auto PSP version to run on the Portal without Wi-Fi streaming required. “After more than a month of hard work, PPSSPP is running natively on PlayStation Portal. Yes, we hacked it,” says Andy Nguyen in a post on X."

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/20/24078024/sony-playstation-portal-hack-mod-psp-emulator

Alla fine, con l'intelligenza artificiale potremmo fare cose utili, anziché deepfake. Imparare la lingua delle balene è piuttosto alta, nella mia lista delle priorità.

Money quote: "How should we even approach these strange and beguiling creatures? If we drop a speaker into the water, they might assume that our clicks are coming from an unseen clan member. A robotic whale that makes clicking sounds would perhaps fool the sperm whales’ eyes, but their echolocation beams would reveal its synthetic innards. It would be most honest to communicate in person, but whoever we’d send would need to be careful not to corner a lone whale. They would want to approach a whole unit, so that if the whales felt threatened, they could fall into their protective rosette formation: heads in, flukes out, calves in the middle. Then we’d know to back off."

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/02/talking-whales-project-ceti/677549/

archivio: https://archive.is/VlDSq

Meraviglioso

Money quote: Had "the talk" with my mom