Lettura della domenica

Il problema dell'attenzione sta diventato veramente grave per Millennials e Gen Z. Ma non c'è soluzione, se non forse qualche pratica faticosa che crei attrito e rimetta i neuroni in fila. Ad esempio, un "diario di lavoro".

Money quote: "Like everyone, I sometimes struggle to maintain focus. This was particularly true when I was a manager switching context all day long, this is also true as a dev working on three antagonistic projects, including one that’s very consultory in nature, and working with processes that sometimes take hours to complete."

https://fev.al/posts/work-journal/

Lunedì Linux - Linux Monday

Se vi siete mai chiesti come fare a leggere gli ebook "per bene" su macchine con Linux, ecco, non chiedetevelo più: c'è Foliate.

Money quote: "Read e-books in style. Open EPUB, Mobipocket, Kindle, FB2, CBZ, and PDF files. Read in paginated or scrolled mode. Adjust the font, spacing, margins, and color scheme. Window controls hide automatically to minimize distraction.

Navigate with ease. Turn the page with 1:1 touchpad and touchscreen gestures. View the table of contents, or use the find in book feature in the sidebar. Find your way through the book with the reading progress slider and navigation history."

https://johnfactotum.github.io/foliate/

Trovo che Reddit sia forse l'unica community molto ampia che ha senso frequentare, oggigiorno. Ma il suo ceo è un vero animale. Come la cosa che ha venduto tutti i conteniti a Google, per esempio. E solo a lei. Se altri li vogliono, devono pagare anche loro.

Money quote: "If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that “We would like to show you a denoscription here but the site won't allow us.” Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to “crawl” Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward. Searching for Reddit still works on Kagi, an independent, paid search engine that buys part of its search index from Google."

https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-that-works-on-reddit-now-thanks-to-ai-deal/

Nove libri di fantascienza da leggere questa estate 2024 - i miei consigli per la lettura su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/08/libri-di-fantascienza-da-leggere-estate-2024/

Siamo destinati alla estinzione. E probabilmente ce lo meritiamo. Perlomeno, i negazionisti del caldo e del colpo di sole sicuramente si. Che brutta gente.

Money quote: "Si generas callo solar puedes recibir el sol sin problemas como todos los animales de la tierra. No hay un solo animal al que el sol le haga daño y ninguno utiliza protector solar. El sol no causa cáncer, nunca lo ha causado y nunca lo causará"

https://elpais.com/smoda/bienestar/2024-08-13/el-callo-solar-no-existe-los-peligros-de-la-tendencia-viral-que-invita-a-tomar-el-sol-sin-proteccion.html

In effetti quasi dimenticavo di diverlo. C'era chi temeva che Mostly Weekly andasse in vacanza, ad agosto. Ma no, è sempre qui con voi. Domenica scorsa abbiamo parlato di identità e filtri, per esempio. E molte altre cose. Se volete, potete abbonarvi, tanto la mia newsletter è gratuita.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/284/

Ci sono quelli che gestiscono le loro famiglie come se fossero aziende: software, criteri e logiche di funzionamento: da Slack ai calendari su Google. Sembra folle a chi ha un'età, ma invece potrebbe avere molto, molto senso. Una sorta di "consumerization" al contrario: una "enterprisation"?

Money quote: "Priti, 46, says that she and her husband communicate about all home logistics through the project-management tool Trello. Stevie, 37, and her husband, Shawn, use Discord to talk about anything family-related: They have a channel for chores, grocery lists, each child’s medical info, date-night ideas, and even family values (also an intriguing one named #rats). Nedra uses OurFamilyWizard for messaging, shared expenses, updates, and tracking custodial days across two households, while other co-parents told me they are helped by Maia, Splitwise, and Skylight."

https://www.romper.com/life/marriage-slack-asana-trello

"Alien: Romulus", la mia recensione di un film che secondo me lascia una traccia. Di sangue sul muro, direi.

Lo spiego meglio (anzi, lo spiego bene) su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/08/alien-romulus-recensione-film/

Mostly, I Write vi augura un sereno Ferragosto. E, visto che di scrivere si parla, perché non celebrarlo con queste spettacolari "ultime parole"?

Personalmente non foro i paywall altrui e casomai cerco articoli archiviati altrove per il pubblico interesse. Ma nella infosfera anglofona ci sono vari tentativi di farlo. Questa estensione per Chrome (che non uso: né l'estensione mé Chrome) è uno dei più efficaci, mi dicono.

Money quote: "Extension allows you to read articles from (supported) sites that implement a paywall. You can also add a domain as custom site and try to bypass the paywall. Weekly updates are released for fixes and new sites."

https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

Science Projects

I lavori scientifici attorno agli LLM e a GPT sono spesso interessanti. Questo si interroga se gli LLM siano un simulatore di mondi basato sulle parole affidabile (avete capito cosa voglio dire, vero?)

Money quote: "Virtual environments play a key role in benchmarking advances in complex planning and decision-making tasks but are expensive and complicated to build by hand. Can current language models themselves serve as world simulators, correctly predicting how actions change different world states, thus bypassing the need for extensive manual coding? Our goal is to answer this question in the context of text-based simulators. Our approach is to build and use a new benchmark, called ByteSized32-State-Prediction, containing a dataset of text game state transitions and accompanying game tasks. We use this to directly quantify, for the first time, how well LLMs can serve as text-based world simulators. We test GPT-4 on this dataset and find that, despite its impressive performance, it is still an unreliable world simulator without further innovations. This work thus contributes both new insights into current LLM's capabilities and weaknesses, as well as a novel benchmark to track future progress as new models appear."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06485

Ti fanno ceo di un'azienda perché hai idee strategiche fuori dal comune, recitano i manuali di management, che evidentemente ha letto anche lui. Forse per questo Hanneke Faber, amministratore delegato di Logitech, ha recentemente discusso della possibilità di vendere un giorno un mouse che i clienti possano utilizzare "per sempre". Il dirigente ha dichiarato che un mouse di questo tipo non è "necessariamente molto lontano" e si baserà su aggiornamenti software, probabilmente forniti attraverso un modello di abbonamento.

Money quote: "To be clear, Logitech hasn't announced concrete plans to release such a product. But Faber seemed optimistic about the idea of a mouse that people never need to replace. The challenge, she admitted, is finding a business model that supports that idea without requiring an exorbitant hardware price. "Our stuff will have to change, but does the hardware have to change?" she asked. "I’m not so sure. We’ll have to obviously fix it and figure out what that business model is. We’re not at the forever mouse today, but I’m intrigued by the thought.""

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/logitech-has-an-idea-for-a-forever-mouse-thatrequires-a-subnoscription/

La calda estate di Mostly Weekly. Prima e dopo Ferragosto, sempre avanti tra Kowloon e la cattiveria dell'AI.

Leggete la newsletter online oppure abbonatevi. È gratuita.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/285/

Letture per la domenica

Ce l'ho aperto nel browser da tempo e mi incanta ogni giorno. È una sezione animata di Kowloon, la walled-city accanto ad Hong Kong. Ho letto libri, fumetti e decine di altre cose su Kowloon. Ho visitato il giardino che ne rimane. E sono sempre sotto shock quando ci penso.

Money quote: "Learning about the strange and extraordinary story of Kowloon Walled City feels like it was a rite of passage for my particular flavor of Internet nerd during the late oughts. It lurks in various footnotes as a trivia item, but these fail to convey its truly staggering scope. At its height, its roughly 35,000 inhabitants lived in what is almost certainly the most densely populated living arrangement that human beings have ever experienced in all our history, with about 1.3 human beings per square meter of a surveyor's map. That's over 115 times as dense as habitation in present-day New York City. That's about 29 times as dense as Manila, the world's most densely populated city at the time of this writing."

https://cohost.org/belarius/post/6677850-architectural-cross

I riferimenti sono a questo libro (nel sito ci sono altre immagini favolose)

https://www.spoon-tamago.com/detailed-cross-section-of-the-kowloon-walled-city-created-by-japanese-researchers/

Il libro di fotografie "City of Darkness" è un capolavoro

https://www.greggirardpictures.com/product/city-of-darkness-revisited-with-slipcase

L'ultimo fumetto a Kowloon

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Generic_Romance

Software Monday

Una introduzione al concetto di Local-first software, un'idea della quale ho anche parlato nella mia newsletter poche settimane fa. Non si tratta di software no-cloud, ma di software che sono locali prima e cloud dopo, se serve.

Money quote: "Cloud apps like Google Docs and Trello are popular because they enable real-time collaboration with colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from all of our devices. However, by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data created with that software is lost.

In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data."

https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

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

Viviamo tempi interessanti. Questa notizia, di un mese fa, ad esempio, sposa tre livelli diversi e li mette tutti assieme. Chissà quali saranno i risultati, se mai ne vedremo. Comunque, l'educazione e l'AI sono una cosa che in un modo o in un altro succederà per forza.

Money quote: "Computer scientist Andrej Karpathy announced on Tuesday that he was starting an AI-integrated education platform named Eureka Labs, leveraging years of experience at ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Tesla, opens new tab.

Education platforms have taken advantage of the boom in generative artificial intelligence since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 to improve and create digital learning content.

A teacher would design courses on the Eureka Labs platform, but they would be aided by an AI teaching assistant to guide students through the learning material, Karpathy said in a post on X."

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/former-openai-tesla-engineer-andrej-karpathy-starts-ai-education-platform-2024-07-16/

Hobby estivi. Io leggo e scrivo con i miei tempi e le cose che voglio io. Altri costruiscono una Wii grande come un portachiavi. È l'estate, baby.

Money quote: "Last summer, while Wesk was developing the Final Destination OMEGA, he and I discussed creating a Wii micro build even smaller than the GC Nano.

The first build to ever FULLY utilize the OMEGA trim. The smallest functional Wii ever made, barely larger than the outline of the OMEGA trim itself. A literal keychain Wii!"

https://bitbuilt.net/forums/index.php?threads/kawaii.6474/

Le bestioline di Hayao Miyazaki: decine e decine di tipologie diverse di cosette e cosine che popolano i suoi film. questa è una guida piuttosto completa.

Money quote: "With so many weird little guys running around Miyazaki’s filmography, it seems time to honor and celebrate them. Not every creature in a Miyazaki movie is a weird little guy. We love Totoros of all sizes and we had a fox-squirrel pet of our own, like Nausicaä’s Teto. But those are individual creatures. A key aspect of Miyazaki’s weird little guys is how numerous they are. They’re a swarm, frequently providing little moments of comic relief as they move coal or swim through the sea. Their designs are quite simple, but their meaning frequently is not."

https://www.vulture.com/article/miyazaki-weird-little-guys.html

Julia Evans ha fatto un'altra delle sue fantastiche Wizard Zines, questa volta dedicata a Git: "How Git Works!"

Money quote:

I wrote this zine for people who have been using git for years and are still afraid of it. As always – I think it sucks to be afraid of the tools that you use in your work every day! I want folks to feel confident using git.

My goals are:

- To explain how some parts of git that initially seem scary (like “detached HEAD state”) are pretty straightforward to deal with once you understand what’s going on
- To show some parts of git you probably should be careful around. For example, the stash is one of the places in git where it’s easiest to lose your work in a way that’s incredibly annoying to recover form, and I avoid using it heavily because of that
- To clear up a few common misconceptions about how the core parts of git (like commits, branches, and merging) work

https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/04/25/new-zine--how-git-works-/

Stiamo per fare un'altra, spettacolare cavolata ambientale, spinti dall'avidità, fondamentalmente. Se la evitiamo, però, è meglio: potremmo non morire asfissiati senza più ossigeno nell'atmosfera: sui fondali degli oceani ci sono dei noduli di metallo che avviano piccole realizoni elettrolitiche e separano l'ossigeno dall'idrogeno nell'acqua. È una cosa che ignoravamo, spettacolare, ma che rischiamo di far fuori molto rapidamente. E sarebbe un problema.

Money quote: "He and his colleagues carried out their research in an area of the deep sea between Hawaii and Mexico - part of a vast swathe of seafloor that is covered with these metal nodules. The nodules form when dissolved metals in seawater collect on fragments of shell - or other debris. It's a process that takes millions of years.

And because these nodules contain metals like lithium, cobalt and copper - all of which are needed to make batteries - many mining companies are developing technology to collect them and bring them to the surface.

But Prof Sweetman says the dark oxygen they make could also support life on the seafloor. And his discovery, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, raises new concerns about the risks of proposed deep-sea mining ventures.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c728ven2v9eo

Il punto sulle presidenziali americane e certi gattini spaziali dagli occhi inquietanti. Mostly Weekly sta scollinando anche agosto. È gratuita qui

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/286/