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

C'è un motivo se le vecchie tecnologie analogiche hanno ancora senso e un certo valore di scambio economico. Un motivo legato a come siamo fatti e a come stiamo vivendo la nostra epoca.

A me queste storie di gente che colleziona le cose di quando ero ragazzino mi fanno impazzire. Fortissime!

Money quote: "You never know what treasures may be sitting in your attic. A classic yellow “sports” Walkman, for example, is a popular item among collectors. The WM-F5 from 1983 was the first designed to be “splash-proof” and came with a built-in FM radio. The sharp colour and weather-proofing led to sales soaring, Walkman collector Mark Ip tells me. “I have many of them,” he adds."

Money quote 2: "Walkman-collecting, it seems, conforms to most tech-collector stereotypes: men in their 40s, 50s and 60s, recalling their youthful encounters with a then-nascent, exciting technology. As Ip says, “When you have a Walkman, and you have a cassette to play on it, you can go out to the street to listen to the music, and all the memories come back.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/17/walkman-memories-still-in-love-with-old-tech

Lettura per la domenica. Il segreto per capire l'arte.

Money quote: "“If you tried to reimagine your life without art ... it would look radically different,” says Karen K. Ho, a writer for ARTNews. “Art intersects with more things than people think.” It’s not just the van Goghs and Monets that hang on museum walls. It’s in works like Anish Kapoor’s innovative Cloud Gate (a.k.a. “The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium Park, or the spiral architecture of the Guggenheim building in New York. It’s the murals along the bike path or on the side of the school. Art adorns movie posters and storefront signage. Artists influence the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, the products you consume. Simply put, art is everywhere.

If art’s such a central tenet of our culture, though, why do so many of us feel like we just don’t get it?"

https://www.vox.com/even-better/24071171/how-to-look-at-art

“Midnight”, il film ispirato al manga di Tezuka, girato con l’iPhone da Takashi Miike - Il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/03/midnight-film-takashi-miike-osamu-tezuka-iphone/

Per cercare di campare di più bisogna mangiare meglio, fare esercizio, avere una vita attiva. E una buona genetica, ovviamente. Per arrivare a qualche veneranda età con un cervello che funziona ancora bene bisogna, oltre alla genetica, lavorarci sopra anche un po'. Come si fa? Ecco qui un po' di consigli: imparare cose nuove, ad esempio. Non importa cosa e non importa quanto bene.

Money quote: "The other key piece of this is making sure that your new hobby involves some amount of challenge. “It has to be something a little new that’s a little hard,” Dr. Marcuse says. Passively watching the latest episode of The Bachelor won’t cut it, because you need your brain to be active, take in new information, digest it, and then put it back out there.

While you might feel that learning a new skill feels daunting, that’s the point! According to Dr. Marcuse, you don’t have to be good at the activity to protect your brain: “I never took music lessons as a kid. I’m not really good at it. I never will be,” she says.

And despite not being the next Mozart, she says that playing the piano adds some color and levity to her days, in addition to protecting her brain. “I really need that in my life—I have a very stressful job,” she says. “It makes me feel that the world is sort of full of beauty and hope.”"

https://www.self.com/story/brain-health-neurologist-tip

In teoria dovrebbero essere animali e padroni che si assomigliano. Almeno, secondo il detto comune. Ma a quanto pare il vero rapporto specchio, simbiotico e mimetico, imitativo quasi, è quello che si realizza nelle coppie. Si chiama "convergenza".

Money quote: "Convergence could be driven by a few different things. One camp of researchers thinks that it can largely be explained by selection, the finding that we tend to date people we’re similar to in the first place. Partners commonly come from comparable backgrounds and cultures, are of similar ages, and have watched the same TV shows, Matthew Hammond, a psychologist at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, told me. If they already have a lot in common, it makes sense that couples might keep changing in similar ways over time."


https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/02/relationship-convergence-similar-personality/677534/

Archivio: https://archive.is/NuBl5

Ho scoperto una società tedesca, Tuta (già Tutanota), che vende servizi di email e calendario privati e basati su software open source, come alternativa concettuale oltre che pratica a Google con i suoi. Libertà per non essere monetizzati dal capitalismo della sorveglianza. E stanno avendo pure un discreto successo. Interessante.

Money quote: "Do you know the saying: It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy? In a way that's how we feel at Tutanota.

Of course, we do not break the law. To the contrary, we are freedom fighters passionate about our human right to privacy. While governments as well as large tech companies constantly try to undermine our right to privacy, we work hard to provide an encrypted online eco-system (email, calendar, contacts, and more – watch out for our announcements later this year!) that protects your privacy - and the privacy of the people you communicate with.

This passion for privacy has been our main pillar for success from the start, and remains so to this day."

https://tuta.com/blog/10-million-users

Ma voi non avete fame? Si? Beh, è meglio se cominciate a bere e dormire di più e meglio.

Money quote: "In one study, University of Chicago researchers found that sleep-deprived participants were unable to resist “rewarding snacks,” (think candy, chips, cookies) even though they’d eaten a meal two hours prior. On average, they ate nearly twice as much fat when they were exhausted (4.2 hours sleep versus eight hours) versus well-rested. “Making your sleep a priority can help regulate your appetite all day long,” says Zanini, who suggests getting better sleep quality by hitting the sheets in a cool room (under 70 degrees), using a white noise machine, and keeping the TV off."

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/4-reasons-why-you-re-always-hungry

La prende un po' lunga, è un articolo di tre anni fa, ma nel complesso dice cose sensate. Cioè? Gli ebook sono l'abominio. O no?

Money quote: "Whatever a book might be, all of the things that an average person might name a “book” evolved from an invention more than two millennia old, called a codex. Prior to the codex, reading and writing took place on scrolls—long, rolled sheets of paper (or vellum or papyrus)—and then on wax tablets, which a sharp stylus could imprint and its tapered end could erase. The ancient Romans sometimes connected wax tablets with leather or cords, suggesting a prototype of binding. Replacing the wax with leaves allowed many pages to be stacked atop one another, then sewn or otherwise bound together. Codices were first handwritten or copied, then made in multiples when the printing press emerged. I’m skipping over a lot more detail—a whole field, called book history, addresses this topic—but the result connects today’s best seller to hand-gilded illuminated manunoscripts, the earliest records of the Gospels, and more. Two thousand years after the codex and 500 after the Gutenberg press, the book persists. If something better were to come along, you’d expect it to have done so by now. In other words, as far as technologies go, the book endures for very good reason. Books work."

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/09/why-are-ebooks-so-terrible/620068/

Archivio https://archive.is/74oTh

"Il problema dei 3 corpi", la fantascienza cinese riconfezionata da Netflix - la mia intro-recensione per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/03/il-problema-dei-3-corpi-serie-tv-netflix-recensione/

Sempre più autori stanno usando l'AI per fare cose. Anzi, sempre più persone lo stanno facendo, alcune di queste sono autori e altri lo saranno, in qualche modo perlomeno. Cosa sta succedendo? Chi sta rischiando? C'è chi pensa che quella della AI sia una vera nuova rivoluzione industriale che automatizzerà tutto.

Money quote: "Still, industrial automation did not entirely abolish handicraft. It seems hyperbolic to claim that large language models will swallow up literature. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine in November, the literary agent Andrew Wylie said he didn’t believe the work of the blue-chip authors he represents — Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Bob Dylan, among many others — “is in danger of being replicated on the back of or through the mechanisms of artificial intelligence.”
Since his job is to make money for human authors, Wylie is hardly a disinterested party, but history supports his skepticism. Mass production has always coexisted with, and enhanced the value of, older forms of craft. The old-fashioned and the newfangled have a tendency to commingle. The standardization of mediocrity does not necessarily lead to the death of excellence. It’s still possible to knit a sweater or write a sestina."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/books/review/writers-artificial-intelligence-inspiration.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/algd6

Ci risiamo, è quel giorno della settimana.

È domenica, tempo di Mostly Weekly: a proposito di fotografia e altre immagini

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/264/

Lettura per la domenica.

Una ipotesi matta: che siano finite le generazioni? Cioè che Gen Z e Millennials siano la stessa cosa? Beh, non lo so. L'ultima volta che qualcuno ha detto che la storia era finita poi c'è stato l'11 settembre e la storia è tornata dalla finestra sfondando tutta la parete, già che c'era. E le generazioni? Veramente sono finite?

Money quote: "How did “the war among the generations” come to be so peaceful? Why do zoomers seem so unlikely to ever contradict the culture of millennials? You might say it’s simply too early to assess the cultural integrity of a cohort that’s just now entering the workforce. The childhoods were a bit different, but barely so: Zoomers grew up in the dawn of streaming music and social broadcasting, a series of technological advancements that have scrambled the whole notion of genre and reinvented the whole notion of celebrity. These shifts began with millennials, and zoomers are better understood to be partners, not rivals, in these transformations. The transformation from three-network broadcast television (baby boomers) to cable TV (Gen X) is much larger than the difference between Vine and TikTok."

https://www.theringer.com/year-in-review/2021/12/31/22860610/millennials-zoomers-gen-z-same-generation-olivia-rodrigo

Visto che ne parliamo proprio qui su Telegram: è davvero così brutto come lo racconta quest'articolo? A me non pare, però boh, magari sbaglio.

Money quote: “Telegram is social media for organised criminals,” says Haywood Talcove, chief executive of LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ government division, who has been tracking new means of fraud targeting US government systems that he says have gone “viral” on the platform among some hacker communities. “It’s virtually the wild west out there.”

https://www.ft.com/content/c70ef7d6-230a-4404-b854-2e75fe0f2e0a

Le parole indicano concetti che la mente è in grado di esprimere perché sa come formalizzarli. In Italia abbiamo preso "burnout" per indicare uno stato che non è solo affaticamento o esaurimento, ma qualcosa di più specifico in senso tecnico (riguardava il personale ospedaliero, all'inizio) e, per estensione, anche le persone che vanno in bomba. Gli olandesi hanno un'altra parola, "niksen", che vuol dire "non fare niente apposta" (mia libera traduzione) e a quanto pare è il perfetto antidoto alla cultura del "burnout". Solo che ci vuole una certa intenzione.

Money quote: "It’s very common, says Mecking, to struggle to define niksen. “The definition I use in the book is: to do nothing, without a purpose. Not watching a movie, not scrolling social media, not reading emails. We always have in mind some kind of outcome. When we prepare meals, we think, ‘This meal will help me lose weight or will make me healthier.’ If we go for a walk, it has to be part of our 10,000 steps. So we lose that fun of just eating or just walking. So it’s about letting go of the outcome.”"

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-art-of-doing-nothing-have-the-dutch-found-the-answer-to-burnout-culture

Il ragionamento è molto semplice: tutti, anche se vogliono avere solo una normalissima carriera, devono farsi un personal brand a causa dei social. Soprattutto se sono artisti o creativi. E questo è un problema per tutta la società.

Money quote: "The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from 9-to-5 middle managers to astronauts to housecleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. For some, it looks like updating your LinkedIn connections whenever you get promoted; for others, it’s asking customers to give you five stars on Google Reviews; for still more, it’s crafting an engaging-but-authentic persona on Instagram. And for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record, it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist.

We like to think of it as the work of singular geniuses whose motivations are purely creative and untainted by the market — this, despite the fact that music, publishing, and film have always been for-profit industries where formulaic, churned-out work is what often sells best. These days, the jig is up.

Corporate consolidation and streaming services have depleted artists’ traditional sources of revenue and decimated cultural industries. While Big Tech sites like Spotify claim they’re “democratizing” culture, they instead demand artists engage in double the labor to make a fraction of what they would have made under the old model. That labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too."

https://www.vox.com/culture/2024/2/1/24056883/tiktok-self-promotion-artist-career-how-to-build-following

L'importanza di Deep Space Nine, forse la più bella serie di Star Trek mai fatta. Ne parlo nella mia rubrica per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/03/deep-space-nine-star-trek-serie-tv/