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/

Una storia da paura: due "uomini d'affari" irlandesi sono quasi riusciti a rubare 11 miliardi di dollari alla Nigeria. Così, uno scam al contrario (tipo "uomo morde cane"). Pazzesco.

Money quote: "Quinn was an Irish oil-and-gas man with warm eyes and a mustache; Cahill was his longtime partner, an accountant by training. The two had been working in Nigeria since the 1970s, doing small-time deals in the energy and defense sectors, like fixing tanks and siting oil wells. But in the mid-2000s, they spied a bigger opportunity. They knew that Nigeria’s refineries were burning off most of the gas that was recovered during oil drilling — a practice that poisoned the atmosphere and deprived the country of a source of electricity. Quinn and Cahill proposed a “gas leaning” plant, which would take in the “wet” gas that would otherwise be flared and spit out “lean” gas that could actually power the grid. It would transform waste into fuel."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/magazine/nigeria-corruption-michael-quinn-brendan-cahill.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/NEh2L

Fra le tante mode che tornano, c'è la passione per il buon vecchio web (e la rete) degli anni Novanta. Alcuni videogiochi lo stanno usando per ricreare quell'ambiente. È una fiction molto interessante, sia nei motivi che nei contenuti. E con tante difficoltà.

Money quote: "Games like last year’s Videoverse, 2019’s Hypnospace Outlaw and the upcoming Darkweb Streamer use chat interfaces akin to AIM or MSN, as well as fake websites that greet people with MIDI songs and text written in bold fonts. Each experience has its own nostalgic lens but is a snapshot of lost expression, creativity and independence.

Chantal Ryan, an anthropologist and the lead developer of Darkweb Streamer, a horror simulation game that merges the perils of modern streaming with the ’90s internet, bemoaned how high-quality independent services were often cannibalized by corporate interests. She pointed to sites like Goodreads and AbeBooks, both bought by Amazon.

“It reminds me of forest clearing,” said Ryan, who studied at the University of Adelaide. “You have this habitat with sustainable ecosystems, and communities of beings living harmoniously. And then the bulldozer comes in and destroys literally everything in its path with no regard to who’s being affected.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/arts/video-games-internet.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/Wf7Wm

Incapace di stare fermo a casa, son andato anche a vedere "Godzilla e Kong - Il nuovo impero": ecco la mia recensione (diciamo: mazzata sulla nuca, così soffre meno) per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/03/godzilla-kong-nuovo-impero-recensione-film/

Questo è uno di quegli articoloni con dentro tantissimo da spacchettare. C'è un bel po' di roba per gli appassionati di volo civile, ci sono un po' di tecnicalità da iniziati, un po' di filosofia e un po' di punti di vista e modi di ragionare sulle cose. E poi la legge, il caso, la razionalità. Tanta roba semplicemente per dire che volare non è mai stato così sicuro come adesso.

Money quote: "In the aftermath of a disaster, our immediate reaction is often to search for some person to blame. Authorities frequently vow to “find those responsible” and “hold them to account,” as though disasters happen only when some grinning mischief-maker slams a big red button labeled “press for catastrophe.” That’s not to say that negligence ought to go unpunished. Sometimes there really is a malefactor to blame, but equally often there isn’t, and the result is that normal people who just made a mistake are caught up in the dragnet of vengeance, like the famous 2009 case of six Italian seismologists who were charged for failing to predict a deadly earthquake. But when that happens, what is actually accomplished? Has anything been made better? Or have we simply kicked the can down the road?

It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition. In the mid-20th century, when technical investigations of aircraft accidents were first being standardized, an understanding emerged that many crashes were not the result of any particular person’s actions. Most famously, in 1956, the Civil Aeronautics Board’s Bureau of Aviation Safety, the predecessor to today’s NTSB, concluded that no one was at fault in a collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon because the two crews likely could not have seen each other coming until it was too late. The cause of the accident, they determined, was the lack of any positive means to prevent midair collisions."

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/why-you-ve-never-been-in-a-plane-crash

Intanto, buona Pasqua a tutti gli iscritti al canale.

Poi: vi siete ricordati di rimettere l’ora?

E infine: anche oggi come al solito è uscita la mia newsletter. Eccola qua:

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/265/

Moltiplicare le matrici è un casino semplicemente perché, a differenza delle moltiplicazioni tradizionali, se si cambia l'ordine delle cifre il risultato cambia.

Money quote: "Now, three researchers — Ran Duan and Renfei Zhou of Tsinghua University and Hongxun Wu of the University of California, Berkeley — have taken a major step forward in attacking this perennial problem. Their new results, presented last November at the Foundations of Computer Science conference, stem from an unexpected new technique, Le Gall said. Although the improvement itself was relatively small, Le Gall called it “conceptually larger than other previous ones.”"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-breakthrough-brings-matrix-multiplication-closer-to-ideal-20240307/

Questo articolo quando è uscito, l'altro giorno, è diventato rapidamente virale. Perché è uno spettacolare assolo di una donna giovane che riflette in maniera molto libera sulla sua scelta di stare con un uomo più vecchio e come questo abbia sostanzialmente creato un equilibrio che non si trova in altre coppie e che è benefico anche per il modo con il quale donne e uomini si trasformano con il passare del tempo. E tutto questo nonostante gli attacchi o quantomeno le considerazioni delle altre donne della stessa età del suo compagno, che l'autrice Grazie Sophia Christie, ha sentito commentare piuttosto acidamente.

Money quote: "We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her. I think back to the women in the bathroom, my husband’s classmates. What was my relationship if not an inconvertible sign of this unfairness? What was I doing, in marrying older, if not endorsing it? I had taken advantage of their disadvantage. I had preempted my own. After all, principled women are meant to defy unfairness, to show some integrity or denial, not plan around it, like I had. These were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down? If I hadn’t, would it really have made any difference?"

https://www.thecut.com/article/age-gap-relationships-marriage-younger-women-older-man.html

Archivio: https://web.archive.org/web/20240329070214/https://www.thecut.com/article/age-gap-relationships-marriage-younger-women-older-man.html

Le luci della macchinina, sì, ma fatte con il legno. Quando uno è un artista bello marcio.

Money quote: "“I immerse myself in a creative game where shapes, dimensions, and perspective intertwine to challenge expectations,” Miyares says."

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/02/kiko-miyares-headlights/

La tocco piano: l'impatto delle auto sul pianeta spiegato dal National Geographic. (O forse la battuta migliore era: "Duro ma giusto"?)

Money quote: "Cars can convey a sense of freedom and movement, not to mention style and status. But they also can have a big impact on the planet. Here's a few key areas to consider."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/environmental-impact