Prendetela con un po' di spirito. L'idea è che siamo tutti devastati dall'eccesso di interruzioni e micro-cose da fare (cose di "manutenzione") e non si riesce più a trovare il tempo per concentrarsi e fare le cose che servono veramente e che richiedono parecchia attenzione: il cosiddetto "Deep Work". Ecco, questo articolo cerca di affrontare questo problema suggerendo alcune soluzioni. La chiave di lettura secondo me è che non siamo solo noi a essere nelle peste: è un fenomeno reale ed è diventato epidemico: è davvero difficile lavorare sul serio.

Money quote: "Accessing that kind of deep work zone can feel nearly impossible. If you’re busy with multiple tasks, finding a solid chunk of time for uninterrupted productivity may be utterly unrealistic. Fortunately, there are methods to optimise the limited ‘deep work’ time we have, plan for interruptions and produce meaningful work despite competing demands for our attention."

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-the-busiest-people-get-deep-work-done

Il modo in cui sono fatti i complessi per appartamenti di New York è sempre la stessa minestra sciapa e priva di personalità. Magari la facciata (qualche volta) è interessante, ma dentro no, sono sempre cubi su cubi su cubi collegati da porte. Fino ad ora, perlomeno. Perché c'è chi cerca di fare le case diversamente.

Money quote: "I don’t know whether this hodgepodge of references was conscious, but it’s surely not coincidental. SO-IL has been working for years to deconstruct a building’s mass to make it seem less like a monolith and more like a town. If that still qualifies as a radical move, it’s because the typical New York apartment building is a closed box crisscrossed by hollow passages. Even architecturally ambitious towers, like those by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and David Adjaye, work essentially the same way before the surfaces go on, reserving innovation for the final fit-out."

https://www.curbed.com/article/architecture-review-so-il-brooklyn-chapel-warren-vanderbilt.html

Stanisław Lem è un autore notevolissimo e molto celebrato tra chi ama la buona letteratura. Trascende il genere della fantascienza, anche se non ne fuoriesce completamente. Forse per questo alcune delle sue traduzioni in italiano sono problematiche?

Money quote: "Qualcuno potrebbe pensare che questa mia postilla alle prefazioni/postfazioni italiane di Solaris nasca da una petulante pignoleria filologica più o meno fine a sé stessa, quindi di natura nevrotico-masturbatoria. Ma non è così, perché purtroppo la stessa storia delle traduzioni italiane di Solaris si rivela teatro di inesattezze, per non dir peggio, francamente inaccettabili."

https://www.indiscreto.org/storia-indiscreta-di-solaris-in-italia/

Chi ha dato il volto a James Bond? È il tema della mia rubrica per Fumettologica.

https://fumettologica.it/2024/06/james-bond-volto-fumetti/

Lo sapevate che fine ha fatto la città dei pirati per definizione, cioè Porth Royal? Io no. Ma qui l'ho scoperto. E vorrei andarla a vedere, un giorno.

Money quote: "Located on the southeast coast of Jamaica, the natural harbor at Port Royal became the center of English life in Jamaica. By the late 1600s it had become one of the largest European cities in the new world, second only to Boston. It had also become the infamous home of pirates, sex workers, and Englishmen on the make. Far from home, they made their livings off of the slave trade, slave labor in plantations, and the money that the pirates brought in from their looting forays against the Spanish."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/sunken-pirate-stronghold-at-port-royal

Il dietro le quinte dell'ultimo special project per il primo di aprile di xkcd: The Machine

Money quote: "This is the story of how we built Machine in 3 weeks, and what I learned along the way."

https://chromakode.com/post/xkcd-machine/

E ovviamente The Machine:

https://xkcd.com/2916/

(Se volete farvi divorare la ram del computer da una singola pagina web, non c'è niente di meglio).

Letture per la domenica.

I piccoli leggono, leggono tantissimo. Poi, tutto a un tratto, fra gli 8 e i 9 anni, smettono. Alcune riflessioni e dati che aiutano a capire un fenomeno più complesso di quel che sembra.

Money quote: "Most alarmingly, kids in third and fourth grade are beginning to stop reading for fun. It’s called the “Decline by 9,” and it’s reaching a crisis point for publishers and educators. According to research by the children’s publishers Scholastic, at age 8, 57 percent of kids say they read books for fun most days; at age 9, only 35 percent do. This trend started before the pandemic, experts say, but the pandemic accelerated things."

https://slate.com/culture/2024/05/kids-reading-fun-books-decline-by-nine-crisis.html

Il Decline by 9 spiegato bene:

https://www.scholastic.com/readingreport/navigate-the-world.html

Le cose che devi sapere per fare un buon viaggio e altre amenità: Mostly Weekly è appena uscita.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/278/

I Raspberry Pi sono piccoli e utilissimi, sia per progetti specifici che per fare amicizia con Linux. Si usano con una molteplicità di distribuzioni (io uso DietPI, per tenerli leggeri). Ma volendo si può usare anche il sistema operativo sviluppato da Arm, l'azienda che ha progettato i processori omonimi: il RiscOS.

Money quote: "RISC OS 5.30 is the latest release of Acorn's original native operating system for its Arm processors. Original, but not first: As Acornsoft project lead Paul Fellows told the Reg in 2022, what was then called "Arthur" supplanted a far more ambitious project called ARX, which never shipped. ROS 5.30 is the first stable release from the RISC OS Open (aka ROOL) project since version 5.28 in 2020. (If you have that, you can upgrade in place.)"

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/02/rool_530_is_here/

La storia del design di Braun, e dei suoi eroi come Dieter Rams e adesso Oliver Grabes, è cosa nota. Che ci sia una mini fiera per appassionati e collezionisti, la Braun+Design Börse, molto meno.

Money quote: "Because of this, since 1982, there has been an annual event at the Braun HQ (Kronberg, Germany) for these people to come together. Initially, it was held multiple times per year, but it was later decided that once per year was better."

https://arslan.io/2024/05/05/braun-borse-2024/

Una chicca su Grabes:

https://www.untappedjournal.com/issues/issue-7/oliver-grabes-braun-design-philosophy

Il design è un modo intelligente di esplorare il mondo e la nostra realtà, quando è fatto bene. In questo caso chiedersi quanto debbano durare le cose è una domanda di ricerca molto interessante.

Money quote: "My recent research has been looking into the issue of longevity and how long objects in our material world should last. I want to understand our disposable consumer culture better, but also try to define what techniques and materials suit which application. 'Conditional Longevity' is a project that maps out the gains and losses of strategies that designers use to extend or shorten the life of the physical items that furnish our lives. In equal parts, research into this longevity is both reassuring and bewildering. It proves that solutions to our problems are diverse and imperfect. Every object we bring into the world has a contextual backdrop, and every design decision is a compromise. The challenge is finding which compromises are the best to make."

https://www.core77.com/posts/132088/Fantastic-Industrial-Design-Student-Work-How-Long-Should-Objects-Last

Qualche giorno fa ho rivisto al cinema Lupin III - La pietra della saggezza , il primo film del ladro creato da Monkey Punch. La mia retro-recensione per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/07/lupin-iii-la-pietra-della-saggezza-film-recensione/

La memoria cos'è? A me, che ne ho pochissima, la questione affascina molto. In quest'epoca di continue interruzioni sembra che abbiamo tutti la mente come un budino, anche quelli che ricordavano tutto. Io a scuola ero una frana nell'imparare a memoria ma ho sempre avuto una discreta presenza mentale ("nel momento"). Sono meccanismi complicati, sto mescolando cose diverse.

Tuttavia, la fascinazione di chi era capace di imparare tutta la Divina Commedia a memoria non è mai venuta meno. Come facevano? Dovevano viverla.

Money quote: "This same process of learning and remembering lines by deep understanding enabled a septuagenarian actor to recite all 10,565 lines of Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost.” At the age of 58, John Basinger began studying this poem as a form of mental activity to accompany his physical activity at the gym, each time adding more lines to what he had already learned. Eight years later, he had committed the entire poem to memory, reciting it over three days. When I tested him at age 74, giving him randomly drawn couplets from the poem and asking him to recite the next ten lines, his recall was nearly flawless. Yet, he did not accomplish this feat through mindless repetition. In the course of studying the poem, he came to a deep understanding of Milton."

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-actors-remember-their-lines/

Ci sono il Deck di Steam e poi il Rog Ally di Asus. E poi c'è questo Claw di MSI che pare sia una ciofeca epoca. Tant'è vero che è stato stroncato da The Verge. Non capita spessissimo.

Money quote: "I didn’t start my MSI Claw journey by running benchmarks. My expectations were already at rock bottom, so I began with an easier test: making the Claw my daily driver for the not-particularly-intensive games I’d already been playing on other handhelds. I fired up the PC port of Studio Ghibli’s Ni No Kuni, Dave the Diver, and Fallout New Vegas — a game that’s nearly 14 years old.

Every one of them runs smoothly on a $549 Steam Deck OLED. Not one ran smoothly on the $749 MSI Claw."

https://www.theverge.com/24105991/msi-claw-review

"Horizon: An American Saga", il kolossal western di Kevin Costner - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/07/horizon-an-american-saga-capitolo-1-recensione-film/

In generale la fantascienza classica non è riuscita ad anticipare i social media. Ma un autore c'è stato: J.G. Ballard. Lui c'è riuscito in pieno e ci ha preso di brutto.

Money quote: "Ballard was a brilliant futurist and his dystopian novels and short stories anticipated the 80s cyberpunk of William Gibson, exploring with a twisted sense of humor what Jean Lyotard famously dubbed in 1979 The Postmodern Condition: a state of ideological, scientific, personal, and social disintegration under the reign of a technocratic, hypercapitalist, “computerized society.” Ballard had his own term for it: “media landscape,” and his dark visions of the future often correspond to the virtual world we inhabit today."

https://www.openculture.com/2016/03/j-g-ballard-predicted-the-rise-of-social-media-and-youtube-celebrity-in-1977.html

Mostly Weekly non si ferma, anzi si arricchisce di qualche nuova idea, come la poesia (ma c'è sempre tanta tecnologia)

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/279/

Letture per la domenica.

Viviamo in una cultura in cui restare con le mani in mano è visto malissimo. Bisogna sempre darsi da fare. Anche quando non c'è niente da fare. Ecco un pensiero divergente sull'argomento: è più saggio non far niente.

Money quote: "Before advancing my own arguments for laziness, I must dispose of one which I cannot accept. Whenever a person who already has enough to live on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct takes the bread out of other people’s mouths, and is, therefore, wicked. If this argument were valid, it would only be necessary for us all to be idle in order that we should all have our mouths full of bread. What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income he puts just as much bread into people’s mouths in spending as he takes out of other people’s mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do not give employment. If he invests his savings the matter is less obvious, and different cases arise."

https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

Come ci si sente a ricevere una email che il mittente ha fatto scrivere dall'AI? Male.

Money quote "It felt like getting a birthday card with only the prewritten message inside, and no added well-wishes from the wisher’s own pen. An item off the shelf, paid for and handed over, transaction complete."

https://mrgan.com/ai-email-from-a-friend/

Un anno di programmazione e costruzione di prodotti usando le AI. Ecco cosa hanno imparato (molto interessante).

Money quote: "We’ve identified some crucial, yet often neglected, lessons and methodologies informed by machine learning that are essential for developing products based on LLMs. Awareness of these concepts can give you a competitive advantage against most others in the field without requiring ML expertise! Over the past year, the six of us have been building real-world applications on top of LLMs. We realized that there was a need to distill these lessons in one place for the benefit of the community."

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/what-we-learned-from-a-year-of-building-with-llms-part-i/

Fly Me to the Moon - la mia recensione del film "vecchio stile" per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/07/fly-me-to-the-moon-le-due-facce-della-luna-film-recensione/