Un resoconto del Guardian sulla prima conferenza dedicata allo AI Warfare. Lo Schmidt citato è Eric Schmidt, ex ceo di Google (nonché prima cofondatore di Sun) e adesso lobbysta per la corsa ai cyberamarmenti intelligenti. Quello che emerge è uno di quegli articoli da ritagliare e conservare, per ritrovare tra qualche anno le conseguenze di quanto qui scritto.

Money quote: "Swarms of people migrated across the hall to see the main panel, where Karp and Schmidt spoke alongside the CIA deputy director, David Cohen, and Mark Milley, who retired in September as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, where he advised Joe Biden and other top officials on war matters. When Schmidt tried to introduce himself, his microphone didn’t work, so Cohen lent him his own. “It’s always great when the CIA helps you out,” Schmidt joked. This was about as light as things got for the next 90 minutes."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/17/ai-weapons-palantir-war-technology

Non sapevo neanche che questa collezione esistesse, figuriamoci che fosse gratuita e open. Sono icone per il web (ma non solo) molto belle, se piace lo stile.

Money quote: "Welcome to Hugeicons React Icons, your premier destination for free React icons. Our expansive collection features over 3,800 stroke React icons, available at no charge and crafted to meet a diverse array of design requirements. These icons are perfect for devs and designers seeking top-quality, customizable options for enhancing their digital product.

Hugeicons Pro is trusted and utilized by thousands of designers, devs, and content creators for unlimited personal and commercial projects, establishing it as one of the most versatile and user-friendly React icons libraries in the market."

https://github.com/hugeicons/hugeicons-react

Qui il sito del progetto

https://hugeicons.com

Letture per la domenica. Una storia del mondo anglosassone che nel sud dell'Europa non è stata neanche intravista sia perché precedente alla guerra sia perché tagliata su quel pubblico: cento libri di 100 pagine ciascuno che spiegava tutto, dalla monogamia alla religione e alla scienza, passando per società e cultura. È iniziato con "Daedalus, or Science and the Future" ed è andato avanti con la collana "To-day and To-morrow".

Money quote: "Following Daedalus's success, its publisher Kegan Paul ended up publishing more than 100 additional volumes about the future of anything and everything, in a series called "To-day and To-morrow". Running until the early 1930s, an array of writers, thinkers and intellectuals imagined the future of science and technology, but also so much else: women, religion, clothes, family, humour, justice, censorship, leisure, sleep, alcohol and even swearing. Anything that seemed to have a future was eligible.
On the 100-year-anniversary of Haldane's Daedalus, what can we learn from his influential work, as well as the ambitious To-day and To-morrow series that it inspired?"

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231212-to-day-and-to-morrow-the-100-year-old-series-that-predicted-a-wild-and-wonderful-future

Supplemento culturale della domenica.
È uscito il nuovo romanzo di Michael Crichton, che però è morto da 16 anni. Era a metà, poi l'ha finito James Patterson, altro esperto di best seller. Lo stanno pompando tanto, forse non è un capolavoro però (Patterson è uno che tira molto via quando scrive e Crichton invece riscriveva le sue cose più volte, quindi ci sta che sia un mezzo limone).

Money quote: "Eruption is based on an unfinished manunoscript left by Michael Crichton. The Chicago-born writer, who died of cancer in 2008 at the age of 66, was one of the most successful novelists of all time, selling 200m books, among them noscripts that became blockbuster franchises, from Jurassic Park to Westworld and ER. The manunoscript was discovered by his widow Sherri and has now been completed by the no-less-successful writer James Patterson, renowned for several thriller series of his own, from Alex Cross to Women’s Murder Club.

Patterson challenges readers of Eruption to spot where he took over. “There is a definite moment,” he says. “Wonder if your readers can spot it?” Is it when hunky Mac and sexy demolition expert Rebecca Cruz start flirting? “I’m not going to tell you!” snaps Patterson".

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/03/michael-crichton-eruption-jurassic-park-westworld-james-patterson

Javanoscript, il linguaggio che ha praticamente creato un modo per sviluppare applicazioni alternativo a quelli tradizionali, è notoriamente un po' bastardo, almeno rispetto ad altri linguaggi di noscripting come Lua (semplice, pulito, potente). Beh, se vi consola, una volta era anche peggio.

Money quote: "However, I’m also very fortunate because while there’s been a lot of improvements made to JavaScript since then, the fundamental way the language works is still the same, so having a deeper understanding of the new syntax (sans sugar) is useful when it comes to debugging, working with legacy projects, or digging deeper into lower-level code. I’m also able to better appreciate just how good us JS devs have it these days."

https://jonbeebe.net/2024/05/javanoscript-got-good/

Un sito che fa fare un viaggio nella storia del Macintosh e del modo con il quale si possono organizzare le informazioni. Usando la metafora del vecchio Finder, c'è da rinfrescarsi gli occhi. È un uso intelligente di un template che fa sentire noi vecchi utenti un po' più a casa.

Money quote: "I was inspired by Stuart Brown‘s Retro MacOS Theme, and modified it for my use. Brown’s original design magnifies pixel elements 2x, for a post-modern take on the original look-and-feel. For this project, I wanted to see what the original artwork would look like on a 1:1 scale."

https://32by32.com

Il precedente non più in linea:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110706075807/http://retromactheme.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk:80/
fatto da
https://web.archive.org/web/20140327135059/http://stua.rtbrown.org/

Aurora è un'azienda americana che vuole trasportare merci su gomma usando camion senza autisti. Volvo è uno dei partner di questa idea. Cosa potrebbe mai andare male?

Money quote: "The reveal of the Volvo VNL Autonomous truck comes as Aurora continues to push towards its stated goal to commercialize self-driving trucks by the end of 2024. The company initially plans to carry freight between Dallas and Houston using up to 20 driverless Class 8 trucks — this time with no human behind the wheel. Aurora declined to share whether trucks made by Volvo, or its other partner Paccar, would be in that inaugural driverless fleet."

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/20/aurora-volvo-unveil-self-driving-truck-driverless-future/

Ma i tecno-boss sognano davvero pecore elettriche? - la mia rubrica per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/06/ma-i-tecno-boss-sognano-davvero-pecore-elettriche/

Milano aspira disperatamente a diventare una meta turistica e rompere il triangolo "Roma-Firenze-Venezia". Al tempo stesso, non vuole pagare il prezzo di chi trasforma una città in Disneyland.

Money quote: "When Milan’s authorities embarked years ago on plans to promote the city as a buzzy destination by building on its reputation as Italy’s hip fashion and design capital, the resulting noise and rowdy overcrowding were perhaps not quite what they had in mind.
Now, after years of complaints and a series of lawsuits, the city has passed an ordinance to strictly limit the sale of takeaway food and beverages after midnight — and not much later on weekends — in “movida” areas, a Spanish term that Italians have adopted to describe outdoor nightlife. It will go into effect next week and be in force until Nov. 11."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/world/europe/milan-nightlife-crowd-control.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/PaiOO#selection-7073.0-7077.353

Articolo di Elisabetta Povoledo

https://www.nytimes.com/by/elisabetta-povoledo

L'AI è senziente? Una spiegazione sul perché no, non lo è.

Money quote: "If the LLM were to say, “I have a sharp pain in my left big toe,” would we conclude that it had a sharp pain in its left big toe? Of course not, it doesn’t have a left big toe! Just so, when it says that it is hungry, we can in fact be certain that it is not, since it doesn’t have the kind of physiology required for hunger.

When humans experience hunger, they are sensing a collection of physiological states—low blood sugar, empty grumbling stomach, and so forth—that an LLM simply doesn’t have, any more than it has a mouth to put food in and a stomach to digest it. The idea that we should take it at its word when it says it is hungry is like saying we should take it at its word if it says it’s speaking to us from the dark side of the moon. We know it’s not, and the LLM’s assertion to the contrary does not change that fact.

All sensations—hunger, feeling pain, seeing red, falling in love—are the result of physiological states that an LLM simply doesn’t have. Consequently we know that an LLM cannot have subjective experiences of those states. In other words, it cannot be sentient."

https://time.com/collection/time100-voices/6980134/ai-llm-not-sentient/

Era uscito per la festa della mamma, ma me l'ero perso. Un bell'articolo per celebrare tutte le madri.

Money quote: "I don’t believe in a fixed definition for a “good mother.” Doesn’t it depend a lot on who a kid is and what they need? But I do believe there is something universal about being a good friend. I think it has to do with freely given care and acceptance. So go ahead and “spoil Mom” or whatever, take her to brunch, buy her a candle. But what the day is really about, to me, is the mothering we give one another and how it holds all of us together."

https://www.thecut.com/article/mothers-day-celebrate-mom-friends.html

La domanica succedono tante cose. Una di queste è (quasi sempre) Mostly Weekly, la mia newsletter. Tutto sugli effetti collaterali della meritocrazia e le invasioni dei libri orribili

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/276/

Le AI possono percepire le emozioni "guardando" il volto delle persone? Microsoft e altri ci stanno provando. E quindi? Molto semplicemente: no, non funziona.

Money quote: "In 2019, the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest engaged five senior scientists, including me, to examine the scientific evidence for the idea that people express anger, sadness, fear, happiness, disgust and surprise in universal ways. We came from different fields—psychology, neuroscience, engineering and computer science—and began with opposing views. Yet, after reviewing more than a thousand papers during almost a hundred videoconferences, we reached a consensus: In the real world, an emotion like anger or sadness is a broad category full of variety. People express different emotions with the same facial movements and the same emotion with different facial movements. The variation is meaningfully tied to a person’s situation.

In short, we can’t train AI on stereotypes and expect the results to work in real life, no matter how big the data set or sophisticated the algorithm. Shortly after the paper was published, Microsoft retired the emotion AI features of their facial recognition software."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/think-ai-can-perceive-emotion-think-again-2b4c7d29

Quei fantastici test giornalistici che non hanno niente di scientifico ma diventano più popolari dei risultati del telescopio Hubble. Ecco a voi qual è l'intelligenza artificiale discorsiva più affidabile (rullo di tamburi)

Money quote: "With the help of Journal newsroom editors and columnists, we crafted a series of prompts to test popular use cases, including coding challenges, health inquiries and money questions. The same people judged the results without knowing which bot said what, rating them on accuracy, helpfulness and overall quality. We then ranked the bots in each category.

We also excerpted some of the best and worst responses to prompts, to give a sense of how varied chatbots’ responses can be."

Money quote 2: "What did these Olympian challenges tell us? Each chatbot has unique strengths and weaknesses, making them all worth exploring. We saw few outright errors and “hallucinations,” where bots go off on unexpected tangents and completely make things up. The bots provided mostly helpful answers and avoided controversy.

The biggest surprise? ChatGPT, despite its big update and massive fame, didn’t lead the pack. Instead, lesser-known Perplexity was our champ. “We optimize for conciseness,” says Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer at Perplexity AI. “We tuned our model for conciseness, which forces it to identify the most essential components.”"

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-gemini-copilot-perplexity-claude-f9e40d26

Archivio: https://archive.is/jxENy

4 ore e 40 minuti di documentario, con diverse interviste mai tradotte prima, sullo sviluppo e la commercializzazione di Sega Rally Championship per Saturn. Devo aggiungere altro?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CEdmZ5P0jA&t=2224s

Per chi vuole cambiare lettore di ebook oppure usarne uno nuovo per questa estate, ho testato il Kobo Libra Colour con la penna. Non super economico ma permette di fare un paio di cose interessanti, tipo scrivere e tipo leggere i fumetti a colori

https://www.italian.tech/2024/06/18/news/la_prova_di_libra_colour_il_nuovo_lettore_di_ebook_a_colori_di_kobo-423248585/

Un modo per spiare il traffico di informazioni del pianeta? Infilare un sondino da qualche parte nelle migliaia di migliaia di chilometri di cavi in fibra ottica sottomarini. A quanto pare sta succedendo.

Money quote: "U.S. officials have told companies, including Google and Meta, about their concerns that Chinese companies could threaten the security of U.S.-owned cables, a person familiar with the briefings said. In some cases, the conversations have included discussion of Shanghai-based S.B. Submarine Systems, the person said.

Senior Biden administration officials have also received briefings in recent months about the risks posed by Chinese companies, including SBSS, working on repairs to undersea cables, according to the person."

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/china-internet-cables-repair-ships-93fd6320

Cosa ne penso della nuova serie di Star Wars, The Avolyte, spiegato bene per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/06/the-acolyte-la-seguace-serie-tv-recensione-star-wars/

Certo che abbiamo un modo tutto nstro per cercare di risolvere i problemi, noi esseri umani. Si va per tentativi. Alle volte tremendi e faticosi. Come i 100 anni passati cercando di fare le bottiglie di carta.

Money quote: "The paper-bottle push comes as paper is growing in popularity as a substitute for plastic packaging, with companies already using it to sell chocolate, ice cream, chewing gum and chips.

“People have a very good perception of paper,” said Ron Khan, head of drinks packaging at PepsiCo decrease, which has run tests to gauge consumers’ appetite for a paper bottle. “The minute consumers saw it we didn’t have to explain the sustainability credentials.”"

https://www.wsj.com/business/the-100-year-quest-to-make-a-paper-bottle-6670bc8c

Archivio https://archive.is/z2tjV

In Giappone, ma anche negli Usa, vanno tutti pazzi per queste retro fotocamere digitali. Fatte su licenza Kodak, sono praticamente nate vecchie di vent'anni o quasi. Ma nella folle ossessione della "memoria", le vogliono tutti. Anche perché le punta e scatta di oggi o non si trovano o costano un rene.

Money quote: "The FZ55 is a blast from the past. It features a small 16-megapixel sensor and a five-times zoom lens that is 28mm at its widest. Small and compact, it is reminiscent of the point and shoot camereas from the mid-2000s through the early 2010s — and it very well could be. It looks remarkably similar to multiple Sony CyberShot cameras from the early 2010s, including the Cyber-Shot W650, although the case is slightly different as are the internals (it might be using the sensor from the inside of an old Minolta). The retail price of this and the other two cameras that lead sales charts can best be described as “dirt cheap,” so the actual components inside have to be very old."

https://petapixel.com/2024/05/29/kodak-branded-cameras-with-decade-old-tech-are-outselling-all-others-in-japan/

Se n'è andato Donald Sutherland, star di ‘M*A*S*H’ e molti altri film. Aveva 88 anni.

- The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/20/movies/donald-sutherland-dead.html