L'obiettivo è creare un universo virtuale persistente in cui praticamente andremo tutti ad abitare. Il piano di Epic fa paura.

Money quote: "Unreal Engine 6 is meant to let developers “build an app once and then deploy it as a standalone game for any platform,” Sweeney says. Developers will be able to deploy the work that they do into Fortnite or other games that “choose to use this technology base,” which would allow for interoperable content."

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/5/24262376/epic-unreal-engine-6-fortnite-metaverse-plans

Intanto, una riflessione: Joe Biden e Kamala Harris sono sconfitti. I Clinton sono in pensione da molto tempo. La coalizione di Barack Obama è morta. Per la prima volta da quando John Kerry ha perso contro George W. Bush, il Partito Democratico non ha una leadership evidente. Mentre la seconda amministrazione Trump sta per iniziare, chi riempirà il vuoto?

Lo sto provando ma ancora non ho deciso come va. Invece il Guardian ha un'idea molto chiara: l'iPhone 16 Pro è una piccola bomba.

Money quote: "The iPhone 16 Pro strikes the best balance of size and capability with a big-enough screen and all the high-end trimmings squeezed into a relatively small frame.

The addition of the 5x optical zoom brings Apple’s smaller Pro up to parity with its monster 16 Pro Max, so the choice for iPhone buyers is now simply about size and price, not capability. The faster chip and camera upgrades, such as the fun photographic styles, are welcome."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/08/iphone-16-pro-review-apple-levels-up-its-smaller-pro-phone-screen-camera-zoom

Tizio scrive libro per dire: il buddhismo ha ragione.

Money quote: "I buddhisti occidentali avevano capito ancora prima di vedere Matrix che il mondo da loro conosciuto era una sorta di illusione: non un’allucinazione vera e propria, ma una versione deformata della realtà che, a sua volta, deformava il loro approccio alla vita, con conseguenze negative per loro e per le persone che li circondavano. Grazie alla meditazione e alla filosofia buddhista, invece, avevano l’impressione di vedere le cose con più chiarezza. Matrix sembrava un’allegoria perfetta per il cambio di prospettiva che avevano attraversato, e divenne ai loro occhi un «film dharma». La parola dharma ha diversi significati, che comprendono gli insegnamenti del Buddha e il percorso che i buddhisti dovrebbero seguire per metterli in atto. Dopo Matrix, invece di «seguo il dharma», si cominciò a dire: «Ho preso la pillola rossa»."

https://www.ilpost.it/2018/10/19/buddhismo-ha-ragione/

Stanno spendendo di più per le AI che non per la fame nel mondo, la pace e per salvare l'ambiente. La speranza è che l'AI permetta di risolvere il problema della fame nel mondo, della pace e salvi l'ambiente, ovviamente.

Money quote: "The capital expenditures of the four largest internet and software companies — Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc. — are set to total well over $200 billion this year, a record sum for the profligate collective. Executives from each company warned investors this week that their splurge will continue next year, or even ramp up.

The spree underscores the extreme costs and resources consumed from the worldwide boom in AI ignited by the arrival of ChatGPT. Tech giants are racing to secure the scarce high-end chips and build the sprawling data centers the technology demands. To do so, the companies have cut deals with energy providers to power these facilities, even reviving a notorious nuclear plant."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-01/tech-giants-are-set-to-spend-200-billion-this-year-chasing-ai

Archivio: https://archive.is/7M6PX

Il sapore delle razioni militari. Una breve storia di come il cibo ha cambiato gusto a causa delle gavette dei militari durante la Seconda guerra mondiale. Prospettiva americana ma poi ci riguarda tutti anche in Europa. Fa parte di una serie di articoli decisamente interessanti.

Money quote: "World War II brought several changes to what and how we eat. For example, members of the military traveled the globe during World War II, encountering different cuisines. When they returned, they brought back memories of those dishes. French, Italian, and Chinese food soon became popular in America beyond immigrant neighborhoods like Chinatowns and Little Italys.[1]

Other changes were spurred by foods included in military rations and food produced using technologies developed during the war. There are also recipes born from rationing and Victory gardens that “stuck.”"

https://www.nps.gov/articles/post-wwii-food.htm

Letture per la domenica

Perché gli Usa sono contro l'ambiente? Ha a che fare con i coloni e il modo con il quale i figli degli europei vedono la natura: un bene da conquistare.

Money quote: "For many Indigenous peoples, gathering firewood is central to their livelihoods, identities, and survival. On some parts of tribal lands in the U.S. Four Corners region—where present-day Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet—around 90 percent of people surveyed depend on wood harvested from nearby forests for ceremonial use, to generate household energy, and for building materials. Many Diné people, for example, live in remote areas where basic utilities, including clean water and electricity, are inaccessible. In addition to providing needed heat, wood-hauling practices are an essential part of cultural identity.

However, Indigenous practices do not always fit neatly with U.S. conservation techniques because of the settler-colonial values that underpin environmental and land management policies. These values rest on the belief that humans are apart from natural systems rather than a part of these systems, creating tensions for federal land managers and residents."

https://www.sapiens.org/culture/bears-ears-comanagement-tribal-sovereignty-justice/

È domenica! E come sempre, Mostly Weekly, la mia newsletter. Questa volta con una domanda facile facile: a cosa serve l'arte?

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/298/

Praticamente, per via della legge sul copyright americana non era possibile riparare le macchine che fanno il gelato nei negozi McDonald. Adesso si può, ed è una grande vittoria per il movimento Right to Repair.

Money quote: "We’ve been fighting for years to challenge the digital locks that manufacturers like Taylor (which makes McDonald’s ice cream machines) use to keep repair information out of reach, forcing expensive service calls for simple fixes. Digital locks blocking repair come from an archaic 1998 copyright law, and every three years, we get a chance to ask the Copyright Office to give us exemptions to that law. Last time, we won exemptions for basically all consumer equipment, vehicles, and medical devices. The time before that, we won smartphones and home appliances. This time, the FTC and DOJ even weighed in to support our petition."

https://it.ifixit.com/News/102368/victory-is-sweet-we-can-now-fix-mcdonalds-ice-cream-machines

Per quelli che adorano i multi-monitor: perché non usare un televisore 8K? Costa meno di due monitor ad alta definizione. Controindicazioni?

Money quote: "Currently 8K TVs are found in 55” and above. This is about the same width as getting two 27” monitors or two 32” monitors, both common setups for programmers and other professionals. This is also the same physical width as ultrawide screens, but with a superior resolution of 7680 px wide instead of the common upper limit of 5120 px for ultrawide screens."

https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/y2023m12d15/

Il mio progetto indipendente va avanti su Mostly, I Write (questo canale Telegram), Mostly Weekly (la newsletter), Mostly Here (il sito).

Se volete supportarlo questa è la vostra occasione!

https://ko-fi.com/mostlyantoniodini

Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo di colonizzare Marte. Ci sono modi di pensare le cose legati alle parole che usiamo, ma in realtà le opzioni sono di più.

Money quote: "First cognitive bias on the chopping blog: the word "colony" usually implies a self-sufficient settlement, that can "live off the land" and reproduce almost anything the humans living there need, including more human workers raised from infancy. We don't, for example, talk of McMurdo Station in Antarctica as a colony even though it has a population of up to 1500 people at different times of year because it's entirely resupplied from other land masses and nobody is born there (and hopefully nobody dies there either). McMurdo Station doesn't have kindergartens, schools, universities, retirement homes, farms, factories, and a resident political apparatus to set policy."

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/10/conceptual-models-of-space-col.html

Una delle fisime ricorrenti di chi scrive è con che cosa scrivere. Lo strumento perfetto, che alle volte diventa lo strumento a cui siamo abituati e non vogliamo cambiare a prescindere dal suo valore (Georges Simenon usava sempre la stessa marca di matite copiative, per dire) e altre volte diventa quello che ci toglie le distrazioni presenti oggi nei computer (i social eccetera). C'è chi usa addirittura le macchine per scrivere, perché quelel non hanno i social dentro. Ora, ho scoperto che c'è anche tutta una nicchia che adora un tipo particolare di macchine elettroniche giapponesi, le tastiere-computer Pomera. Sono delle soluzioni di scrittura elettronica e presa di promemoria dedicate e senza distrazioni. In Giappone, questi apparecchi sono comprati da scrittori, giornalisti, traduttori e anche da chiunque scriva molto nelle riunioni. Perché in Giappone si scrive molto nelle riunioni.

Money quote: "I have been using a Pomera (an older DM30 model) for a few years now, like it a lot, and reviewed it HERE, so I was ecstatic to see that the updated, all-new DM250 finally restored the option to change the interface language to English which was sadly missing from the DM200 for some reason. I bought the new model straight away for all the writing I had planned and got to work setting it up!"

https://artvsentropy.wordpress.com/2023/08/12/retro-writing-15-pomera-dm250/

"Voyager": quando Star Trek finì per perdersi nello spazio - la mia rubrica per Fumettologica questa volta va nel Quadrante Delta...

https://fumettologica.it/2024/11/voyager-quando-star-trek-fini-per-perdersi-nello-spazio/

L'arrivo dell'intelligenza artificiale negli ultimi anni ha colto tutti di sorpresa, nonostante il settore sia nato negli anni Cinquanta e la tecnologia avesse fatto già grandi progressi negli anni Ottanta. Ecco una spiegazione di come è andata a questo giro.

Money quote: "So the AI boom of the last 12 years was made possible by three visionaries who pursued unorthodox ideas in the face of widespread criticism. One was Geoffrey Hinton, a University of Toronto computer scientist who spent decades promoting neural networks despite near-universal skepticism. The second was Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, who recognized early that GPUs could be useful for more than just graphics.

The third was Fei-Fei Li. She created an image dataset that seemed ludicrously large to most of her colleagues. But it turned out to be essential for demonstrating the potential of neural networks trained on GPUs."

https://www.understandingai.org/p/why-the-deep-learning-boom-caught

Quando scriviamo codice lo facciamo per la CPU, ovviamente. Ma non dovrebbe essere sempre così. Bisogna poter ottimizzare il codice anche per la GPU, quando serve. E quando serve? E perché? E come si fa?

Money quote: "Over the past decade, GPUs have become incredibly important because of their pervasive use in deep learning. Today, it is essential for every software engineer to possess a basic understanding of how they work. My goal with this article is to give you that background."

https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/gpu-computing

Lettura per la domenica

Secondo Paul Graham (quello dietro Y Combinator) ChatGPT e gli altri chatbot ammazzeranno la capacità di scrivere, riducendo il mondo a poche persone che sanno ancora scrivere e il resto che non sa più scrivere. E questo sarà un problema perché, secondo Graham scrivere è fondamentale per pensare.

Money quote 1: "The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write."

https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html

Secondo Dan Shipper, che ha una rivista online fenomenale, Every, le cose non stanno così, perché non c'è solo la scrittura come modo di pensare. Ad esempio, ci sono quelli che pensano parlando. Molto interessante.

Money quote 2: "To test PG's prediction, we can look at people who already operate the way he imagines everyone will in an AI-powered allocation economy: managers. Managers are not the ones doing all of the work—instead, they’re directing other people to do it for them, just like people in the future might direct an AI.

On some accounts of the world, managers are simply there to take credit for what other people do. (And certainly, some managers are like this.) But as any good manager will tell you, even though you may not be doing all of the work yourself, it requires a great deal of thinking.

As a manager, you need to clearly communicate the problem you want to solve and the vision you have for solving it. You have to decide who should work on it and how. You need to know what to delegate and what to do yourself—and how to tell the difference."

https://every.to/chain-of-thought/writing-as-a-way-of-thinking

Bonus. Shipper usa ChatGPT in modalità conversazionale per dare contesto ai libri che legge. Mah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU2AYrBHq-w

Si avvicina la cifra tonda. Mostly Weekly è arrivata a 299 numeri. Come sempre, quasi tutte le domeniche

antoniodini.com/weekly/299/

Piccoli incidenti nei mari del Nord: pescatori norvegesi a caccia di halibut hanno preso nelle loro reti un sottomarino nucleare statunitense.

Money quote: "The USS Virginia, a US naval ship, was sailing near the surface when its propeller snagged a part of the fishing net. The fishermen were unaware of it until they were contacted by the US Coast Guard. They were on the way to a new spot hoping to catch more halibut, all the while blissfully ignorant to the fact that their net was now being dragged away by the setting for several excellent ’90s military thrillers."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/fishermen-hunting-for-halibut-caught-a-us-nuclear-sub/

C'è un problema nel mercato più strategico del mondo: quello dei programmatori bravi. Li stanno tritando.

Money quote: "Let’s talk about tech interviews – specifically, the ones that go overboard with unrealistic coding assignments. If you’re a developer who’s been asked to debug legacy PHP or build a mini-app from scratch in just a few hours, you know what I’m talking about. It’s becoming a trend, and it’s not helping anyone.

These high-stress, solo coding assignments don’t reflect the actual job. Instead, they put developers in situations they’d never face in the workplace, where collaboration and support are standard. When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team? Yet companies claim this somehow measures “problem-solving” skills."

https://blackentropy.bearblog.dev/please-stop-the-absurd-coding-challenges/

Non sapevo neanche che esistessero. Invece, le "rane di legno" sono meravigliose.

Money quote: "This is the winter world in which the wood frog must survive. Remember, frogs are cold blooded, so their body temperature is about the same as the surrounding air. How do these delicate little creatures endure the intense, protracted, iron-cold subarctic winter?

This mystery has intrigued scientists for a long time. Biologists have studied wood frog hibernation and what they’ve learned is truly astonishing.

Most frogs survive northern winters by hibernating deep under water, in ponds, lakes and streams—they are cold and dormant but their body temperature never falls below freezing.

Wood frogs have a different strategy. They hibernate by nestling down into the leafy litter on the forest floor. The leaves, duff and overlying snow give some insulation from extreme cold, but the frogs are not protected from subfreezing temperatures as they would be if they chose the underwater strategy."

https://www.nps.gov/gaar/learn/nature/wood-frog-page-2.htm