Il campione del mondo di decorazione dei cappuccini. Scusate, non ho resistito.

Money quote: "It was a frothy World Latte Art Championship at the World of Coffee in Copenhagen. Champions from around the world free-poured and etched for their lives. Over three days, we witnessed incredible works in the medium of latte art, and now, we have another World Latte Art Champion. Congratulations, Yi-Chen Xie!"

https://sprudge.com/yi-chen-xie-of-taiwan-is-the-2024-world-latte-art-champion-248310.html

In futuro viaggeremo in maniera diversa: i controlli di sicurezza degli aeroporti diventeranno tutta un'altra cosa, molto più personali. Questo non è detto che sia un bene. Comunque, questo è l'anno del passaggio.

Money quote: "This year could be the “tipping point” for widespread biometrics use in air travel, said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst for Atmosphere Research. Time-consuming airport rituals like security screening, leaving your luggage at bag drop and even boarding a plane may soon only require your face, “helping to reduce waiting times and stress for travelers,” Mr. Harteveldt said.

In the United States, major airlines have increasingly invested in facial recognition technology as have government agencies in charge of aviation security. Overseas, a growing number of international airports are installing biometrics-enabled electronic gates and self-service kiosks at immigration and customs.

The technology’s adoption could mean enhanced security and faster processing for passengers, experts say. But it also raises concerns over privacy and ethics."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/18/travel/facial-recognition-airports-biometrics.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/Dhth8

Abbiamo un problema con Internet, da tempo. Sta marcendo. Un articolo fondamentale del 2021 di Jonathan Zittrain.

Money quote: "This absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring, has long been celebrated as an instrument of grassroots democracy and freedom. It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization, with no easy gating points through which to remove or label malicious work not under the umbrellas of the major social-media platforms, or to quickly identify their sources. While both assessments have power to them, they each gloss over a key feature of the distributed web and internet: Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on. Links work seamlessly until they don’t. And as tangible counterparts to online work fade, these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/

Archivio: https://archive.is/qfM31

Il titolo dice già tutto: "I Peter Pan del Lego". La mania dei mattoncini è diventata un fenomeno completamente fuori scala. Le Monde prova a spiegarlo.

Money quote: "Entre Paris, Toulouse, Londres, Melbourne ou Miami, depuis 2007, l’exposition « Art of the Brick » présente une collection de sculptures et de reproductions de tableaux en Lego. Elle offre aussi une belle collection d’adultes qui ne s’embarrassent plus de la compagnie d’un enfant pour aller admirer ces installations. On y croise également des familles dont les parents traînent devant chaque œuvre en prenant note du nombre de briques utilisées et du temps de construction, tandis que leurs gamins chouinent comme dans une expo de peinture flamande en demandant quand est-ce qu’on va à l’Accrobranche".

https://www.lemonde.fr/m-le-mag/article/2024/04/27/les-peter-pan-du-lego-j-enregistre-toutes-mes-briques-dans-rebrickable-pour-avoir-une-vue-precise-de-mon-stock_6230254_4500055.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/27hRI

Intanto, è arrivata l'apocalisse per Windows

Money quote: "In questo momento un guasto del sistema di Microsoft starebbe causando numerosi problemi a varie aziende. Se il vostro computer Windows in questo momento vi sta restituendo una temibile schermata blu, non preoccupatevi. Siete in ottima compagnia. Sono migliaia, infatti, i pc Microsoft bloccati da un aggiornamento buggato rilasciato dal fornitore CrowdStrike, che sta impedendo il riavvio dei dispositivi in tutto il mondo."

https://www.wired.it/article/crowdstrike-bug-pc-windows-bloccati/

Il giapponese ha una parola per indicare la luce del sole tra gli alberi. Quella parola è "komorebi". Che meraviglia.

Money quote: "Puoi assistere al fenomeno della luce solare che colpisce le foglie degli alberi in qualsiasi periodo dell'anno o in qualsiasi luogo. Komorebi è particolarmente evidente quando il sole è basso e la nebbia o il fumo ne aumentano l'effetto, soprattutto in primavera."

https://skdesu.com/it/komorebi-sunshine-alberi/

Avete mai pensato che stanno donando soldi a Donald Trump? Che cosa buffa.

È di nuovo quel giorno della settimana in cui esce Mostly Weekly, la mia newsletter gratuita.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/281/

Letture per la domenica.

Ogni tanto torno a guardarla con nostalgia. Mi riferisco a Pinboard, la bacheca per organizzare i segnalibri. L'usavo, poi ho cominciato ad accumulare talmente schede del browser aperte che non ce la facevo più: ho dovuto fare questo canale Telegram per smaltirne almeno un po'.

(Pingobard, "social bookmarking per introversi": genio).

Money quote: "One reason might be to share links and lists of links with others. Many bookmark managers focus on this aspect of “social bookmarking”. However, this is not the most important aspect of Pinboard. Actually Pinboard even advertises itself as an an “antisocial site” or “social bookmarking for introverts” - over half our users don’t share any public content at all, and you can make private bookmarks the default setting. In any case you have full control over which links you want to make public and which should stay private. Pinboard is not mainly for discovering links, but for archiving them, kind of your personal treasure trove of links - or as the patron saint of introverts Gollum would call it, “my precious!”"

https://cito.github.io/blog/pinboard-review/

Soffrire di Alzheimer fa pagare un prezzo molto caro molto prima di quello che vi potete immaginare. E intendo "prezzo" in senso letterale.

Money quote: "Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows.

A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder.

What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/economy/alzheimers-disease-personal-finance.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/8zGgy

Stiamo lasciando il monopolio delle grandi dorsali digitali sottomarine ai big del tech, soprattutto per quanto riguarda l'Africa. E non è un bene.

Money quote: "L’Afrique serait-elle plus exposée que le reste du monde à ces péripéties ? La majeure partie du trafic de l’Internet mondial passe par des câbles de fibre optique posés sur les fonds marins. Les incidents sont fréquents tout autour du globe. Mais si les coupures semblent affecter plus particulièrement le continent, c’est que sa résilience est plus faible. Autrement dit, l’infrastructure y est moins étoffée qu’ailleurs, qu’il s’agisse du nombre de câbles ou de points de branchement qui desservent et relient chacun des pays."

https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/06/06/l-afrique-laissera-t-elle-les-big-tech-monopoliser-l-infrastructure-internet_6237614_3232.html

"Deadpool & Wolverine" è un gran film, divertente e politicamente scorretto - la
Mia recensione ironica e dissacrante del film ironico e dissacrante (oltre che massacrante i cattivi) per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/07/deadpool-e-wolverine-film-recensione-marvel/

Negli Usa Kaspersky è nei guai. Ma potrebbe presto esserlo anche in Europa?

Money quote: "Russian cybersecurity company and antivirus software provider Kaspersky Lab will start shutting down operations in the United States on July 20.

In a statement to BleepingComputer, the company also confirmed that it will lay off its U.S.-based employees. Independent cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter first reported that this will affect "less than 50 employees in the U.S."

This comes after the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned twelve Kaspersky Lab executives on June 21 for operating in Russia's technology sector, freezing their U.S. assets and preventing access to them until the sanctions are lifted."

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/kaspersky-is-shutting-down-its-business-in-the-united-states/

La più totale oscurità. Che sensazione disorientante. Che desiderio.

Money quote: "In retrospect, the memory of that evening became more and more impressive to me because it had been so rare. The experience of that dense darkness became an absolute against which I could now measure the partial darkness of some evenings and nights and the over-illumination of the roads and neighborhoods nearby—the hooded or unhooded lamps over so many outside doors, the street­lights at intersections, the floods of light in empty parking lots."

https://yalereview.org/article/lydia-davis-object-of-desire

Gli scienziati possono fare molte cose. Una di queste è torturare i bambini di otto mesi

Money quote: "Jenny Saffran and her colleagues had exposed infants to no more than two minutes of continuous speech that contained four three-syllable nonsense words, such as tupiro and padoti. These ‘words’ were repeated in random order by a monotone speech synthesizer that created a continuous sound sequence, such as bidakupadotigolabubidakupadotigolabubidakutupiro… The sequence contained no pauses, variations in stress or any other acoustic cues between word boundaries. The only cue available to the infants were the transitional probabilities (TPs) between syllables. Those within words were 1.0, because the first syllable was always followed by the second, and the second by the third, while the TPs of syllables between words was always 0.33. After a mere two minutes of listening, the infants were tested as to whether they differentiated between words (syllable strings that had TPs of 1.0) and non-words (syllable strings that contained TPs of 0.33). For this the infants were presented with words and non-words and found to have longer listening time for the nonwords. This indicated they had already become familiar with the words by listening to the continuous sequence of syllables within which they had been embedded. The only way that could have happened was by monitoring the TPs between syllables—the infants were capable of statistical learning."

Scherzi a parte, questo è un notevolissimo articolo su come nasce il linguaggio negli esseri umani, cioè come i bambini molto piccoli imparano a capire il linguaggio. Notevole davvero.

https://lithub.com/how-babies-and-young-children-learn-to-understand-language/


C'è anche il libro scritto sempre da Steven Mithen: The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-language-puzzle-piecing-together-the-six-million-year-story-of-how-words-evolved-steven-mithen/20664602

Far andare un Macintosh 128K su un Raspberry Pi Pico. Un'idea carina ma non particolarmente originale. Nel senso: sul MacBook Air con cui sto scrivendo adesso gira anche una emulazione di un Macintosh LC-III. Lui però rende il suo progetto più sexy perché oltre alla parte hardware ha scritto anche l'emulatore (io ovviamente no: ce ne sono vari in giro, perché perdere i prossimi 35 anni per imparare a programmare e poi magari non riuscirci?).

Comunque, chi sono io per giudicare? Potete bypassare tutta la parte hardware e far girare il primo Mac nel vostro browser preferito, se vi gusta, con un emulatore online che vi linko sotto.

Money quote: "The original Macintosh was released 40.5 years before this post, and is a pretty cool machine especially considering that the hardware is very simple. Insanely Great and folklore.org are fun reads, and give a glimpse into the Macintosh’s development. Memory was a squeeze; the original 128KB version was underpowered and only sold for a few months before being replaced by the Macintosh 512K, arguably a more appropriate amount of memory.

But, the 128 still runs some real applications and, though it pre-dates MultiFinder/actual multitasking, I found it pretty charming. As a tourist. In 1984 the Mac cost roughly 1/3 as much as a VW Golf and, as someone who’s into old computers and old cars, it’s hard to decide which is more frustrating to use.

So back to this £3.80 RPi Pico microcontroller board: The RP2040’s 264KB of RAM gives a lot to play with after carving out the Mac’s 128KB – how cool would it be to do a quick hack, and play with a Mac on it?"

https://axio.ms/projects/2024/06/16/MicroMac.html

L'emulatore online
https://infinitemac.org

Domande esistenziali nel nuovo numero di Mostly Weekly, la mia newsletter: e se il il software tornasse a misura d'uomo?

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/282/

Non trovo link di nessuno, né del fotografo Lars Ohlson, né del negozio "Foto di Milano" né dell'articolo nella newsletter del Post che lo racconta. Per far prima copio tutto, tanto nessuno ci guadagna niente (se non il fotografo, immagino). Poi quando la gente ricomincerà a mettere link da qualche parte che non sia Facebook, tornerà a essere tutto più facile. Comunque: ecco il "money quote" senza link di Mostly, I Write. (Così potete dire di aver visto tutto).

Money quote: "In vicolo dei Lavandai, sul Naviglio Grande, una delle vie più conosciute di Milano e molto frequentata dai turisti, c'è un negozio piccolissimo che ha aperto da poco ma non è nuovo. Si chiama "Foto di Milano" e vende ed espone solo foto storiche della città: è molto frequentato dai turisti, ma non solo. Fino a una settimana fa era all'interno di un cortile, sempre in vicolo dei Lavandai, ma a parte un cartello con una freccia che ne indicava la presenza non era così facile da vedere. È di Lars Ohlson, ex giornalista svedese arrivato in Italia 12 anni fa, che dice di averlo aperto «per potersi mantenere mentre provava a diventare uno scrittore»".

"Inizialmente vendeva foto fatte da lui, poi ha cominciato a vendere quelle dei fotografi della nota agenzia Getty Images. «Ne ho comprate così tante che ormai ho una licenza speciale, perché il negozio è considerato come un museo» dice Ohlson. Le pareti sono ricoperte di fotografie storiche e celebri della città divise per decenni, come in una galleria. Ci sono per esempio i Beatles sul Duomo (quando vennero in città nel 1965, per il loro concerto), Moira Orfei che cammina per corso Buenos Aires fotografata da Mario De Biasi nel 1954, o Georges Simenon con pipa e cappello sulla Darsena nel 1957, di Mario Carrieri. Ma anche quelle che raccontano com'era Milano all'inizio del secolo scorso, quando ancora si lavavano i panni nel Naviglio, quando in piazza Duomo c'era il pizzardone (il vigile urbano sulla pedana) e quando l'Olona esondando allagò completamente piazza De Angeli nel 1917. Sui tavoli ci sono pile di fotografie stampate a 5, 10 o 20 euro".

A quanto pare l'Fbi ha usato un nuovo software di Cellebrite per accedere al telefono Samsung del ragazzo che ha sparato a Trump.

Riportare la notizia nel modo che segue come fa Bloomberg, però, è come fare una pubblicità a Cellebrite. Che tipo di codice di accesso utilizzava Crooks sul suo telefono? Solo cifre o alfanumerico? Quanti caratteri? Hanno decifrato il codice di accesso o sono entrati in qualche altro modo?

Senza queste informazioni, tutto ciò che dovrebbe essere riportato è che l'Fbi è riuscita ad accedere al contenuto del telefono e che il telefono era di Samsung.

Tutto qui. Capisco perfettamente perché l'Fbi (e Cellebrite) non vogliano dire come sono riusciti a entrare, ma senza un contesto più approfondito non c'è motivo dal punto di vista giornalistico di lodarli per essere riusciti a "forzare" il telefono.

Money quote: "The local FBI bureau in Pittsburgh held a license for Cellebrite software, which lets law enforcement identify or bypass a phone’s passcode. But it didn’t work with Crooks’ device, according to the people, who said the deceased shooter owned a newer Samsung model that runs Android’s operating system.

The agents called Cellebrite’s federal team, which liaises with law enforcement and government agencies, according to the people.

Within hours, Cellebrite transferred to the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, additional technical support and new software that was still being developed. The details about the unsuccessful initial attempt to access the phone, and the unreleased software, haven’t been previously reported.

Once the FBI had the Cellebrite software update, unlocking the phone took 40 minutes, according to reporting in the Washington Post, which first detailed the FBI’s use of Cellebrite."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-18/fbi-used-new-cellebrite-software-to-access-trump-shooter-s-phone

In un discorso del 1983, appena pubblicato dallo Steve Jobs Archive, riemerge la genialità del fondatore di Apple, come spiega anche Jony Ive.

Money quote: "In the talk, Steve predicts that by 1986 sales of the PC would exceed sales of cars, and that in the following ten years, people would be spending more time with a PC than in a car. These were absurd claims for the early 1980s. Describing what he sees as the inevitability that this would be a pervasive new category, he asks the designers in the audience for help. He asks that they start to think about the design of these products, because designed well or designed poorly, they still would be made.

Steve remains one of the best educators I've ever met in my life. He had that ability to explain incredibly abstract, complex technologies in terms that were accessible, tangible and relevant. You hear him describe the computer as doing nothing more than completing fairly mundane tasks, but doing so very quickly. He gives the example of running out to grab a bunch of flowers and returning by the time you could snap your fingers -- speed rendering the task magical.

When I look back on our work, what I remember most fondly are not the products but the process. Part of Steve's brilliance was how he learned to support the creative process, encouraging and developing ideas even in large groups of people. He treated the process of creating with a rare and wonderful reverence."

https://stevejobsarchive.com/exhibits/objects-of-our-life

Se l'estate è il momento per recuperare un po' di calma e fare quelle cose che durante il resto dell'anno non si riesce, perché non prendere una vecchia Hasselblad 500 C/M a pellicola e cominciare a fare foto?

Money quote: "The Hasselblad 500 C/M has been my go to film camera since, at my side everywhere from the streets of my hometown to the craggy peaks of Scotland.

While I've discovered, like any camera, even the Hasselblad isn't perfect, it's been an absolute joy to use."

https://shootitwithfilm.com/hasselblad-500-cm-film-camera-review/

A differenza dei cento migliori libri di sempre con la Ferrante al top della categoria, questa lista dei 75 migliori libri di fantascienza fatta da Esquire non ha sorprese italiofone. Ma non per questo non va sfogliata per cercare spunti di lettura.

Money quote: "Sci-fi brings out the best in our imaginations and evokes a sense of wonder, but it also inspires a spirit of questioning. Through the enduring themes of sci-fi, we can examine the zeitgeist's cultural context and ethical questions. Our favorite works in the genre make good on this promise, meditating on everything from identity to oppression to morality. As the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing said, "Science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.""

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39358054/best-sci-fi-books/