I videogame soffrono di una forma tutta particolare di "cancellazione" rispetto a tutti gli altri manufatti culturali

Money quote: "Unless there’s imminently mineable gold in the hills of a remaster or re-release, the video game industry rarely displays interest in its own history. Last year, the Video Game History Foundation published a study showing that 87 percent of classic video games released in the US verge on inaccessible. That makes the archival work done by the VGHF all the more important, but the road to long-term preservation is full of potholes. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we talk to VGHF founder and director Frank Cifaldi about what those look like and how you can help."

https://aftermath.site/aftermath-hours-podcast-video-game-history-foundation

Uno degli aspetti più interessanti del dibattito sugli assetti industriali futuri nel settore dell'intelligenza artificiale, c'è quello che si interroga sulla natura di questo settore. È un mercato in cui chi vice prende tutto, come è più o meno accaduto negli ultimi anni con Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple? OpenAI o chi per lei dominerà tutto?

Money quote: "We believe this view is mistaken. There will be no single model that will rule the universe, neither next year nor next decade. Instead, the future of AI will be multi-model."

https://venturebeat.com/ai/despite-heated-ai-arms-race-were-in-for-a-multi-modal-future/

Il film "Here" è davvero molto bello ma combatte una battaglia pazzesca e non cattura la grandezza del fumetto da cui è tratto - Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2025/01/here-recensione-film-zemeckis/

Serve veramente un display in cucina? Sul forno a microonde? Da 27 pollici? Sul serio? E per cosa, per far vedere la pubblicità?

Money quote: "LG says the microwave’s display provides “an immersive entertainment experience” that’ll surely prevent the onset of buyer’s remorse at having overpaid for a potential advertising machine centrally located in your kitchen. And when paired with LG’s oven, it “conveniently shows the cooking progress of dishes in the range, eliminating the need to bend down and check the oven manually.”"

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/30/24331994/lg-microwave-27-inch-display-speakers

Una lettera d'amore a Windows su Snapdragon travestita da articolo

Money quote: "Of course, heading into this experience, I was more curious about how far the Windows on Arm platform has come. Before, even essentials like VPN apps refused to function at all on Arm-based Windows machines. That has, fortunately, changed with the arrival of the new Prism emulator. Most mainstream programs, including Google Chrome, Adobe Photoshop, Google Drive, and ExpressVPN, have added native support. Even the ones already compatible with Arm chips work better, thanks to Snapdragon X Elite. Web browsers, especially, would frequently stutter for me, and that’s no longer the case, barring a couple of incidents."

https://www.laptopmag.com/laptops/windows-laptops/ive-been-a-windows-on-arm-user-for-years-snapdragon-x-elite-has-changed-everything

Buona vecchia Mostly Weekly, che quasi ogni domenica porta tante cose da leggere. È la mia newsletter gratuita. Questa volta si parla un po’ di salute, invecchiamento dei paesi e di felicità, perché no.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/306/

Il Mac mini ha appena compiuto 20 anni!

https://techdale.it/ventanni-dopo-mini-e-sempre-bello/

È domenica. E leggere questo articolo mi ha fatto pensare a così tante cose diverse. Il tema è che i ragazzini tradizionalmente leggono cose diverse dalle ragazzine e questo ha un impatto tendenzialmente sul loro benessere mentale più avanti nella vita. Ma a me fa riflettere anche su quanto molti modi di essere e di esprimersi che riconduciamo all'essere maschi o femmine siano in realtà delle costruzioni culturali.

Money quote: "For me and my male friends in the 1980s and early 1990s, the social taboo which prevented us from reading fiction marketed at girls was infinitely more powerful than anything censorship achieved. My literary diet consisted of a lot of Three Investigators and Famous Five, superhero comics and genre fiction. The Point Horror series seemed acceptable, despite its female protagonists and popularity with girls, because they were sinister mysteries. If I ever occasionally wondered what on earth was in books like The Baby-Sitters Club, I never once mustered the courage to even pick one up, let alone open it.

It took me another 35 years to do so."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/18/as-a-middle-aged-man-i-wouldve-saved-loads-on-therapy-if-id-read-baby-sitters-club-books-as-a-kid

Dyson Swarm è uno di quei giochini che possono farvi passare parecchio tempo a cliccare sulla trackpad.

Money quote: "You are a game developer who dreams of building an O'Neill Cylinder, an idyllic spinning space habitat where you and your loved ones can live in utopia. The only way to accomplish your goal is to sell as many video games as possible, inspiring the public along the way."

https://compellingsciencefiction.com/games/dysonswarm.html

Altro giorno, altro giochino. Questa volta si gioca a Doom per risolvere il captcha.

Money quote: "Play DOOM® and kill at least 3 monsters"

https://doom-captcha.vercel.app

Stamattina è mancato Fausto Colombo, per me maestro e amico. Lo ricorda così Giovanni Boccia Artieri.

Money quote: “Per le ricercatrici e i ricercatori della mia generazione, Fausto è stato una sliding doors che ci ha mostrato come gli studi sulla comunicazione e sui media potevano evolvere in Italia dopo gli anni fondativi, parlo degli anni Sessanta e Settanta, che avevano visto al lavoro nelle sedi universitarie studiosi come Gianfranco Bettetini (suo “maestro”, capace di muoversi fra semiotica e televisione) e Francesco Casetti a Milano (che si muoveva fra semiotica, cinema e televisione), Umberto Eco a Bologna (semiologo), Mascilli Migliorini a Urbino (comunicazione e giornalismo), Alberto Abruzzese (mediologo) prima a Napoli poi Roma”

https://mediamondo.blog/2025/01/14/fausto-colombo-una-vita/

https://youtu.be/B4GAijo2UPQ?si=mL-EHZPr9Pa_9oM0

Mi era scappato, ma secondo me è ancora interessante vedere quali dei suoi stessi prodotti Google ha fatto fuori nel corso del 2024.

Money quote: "Google's no stranger to sunsetting products, even relatively popular ones: Google+, Hangouts, Stadia — the list goes on. This year's been relatively light on big-ticket Google projects petering out, with the more noteworthy shutdowns including the likes of the Google Podcasts platform and Dropcam connected security cameras. But with the year waning fast, we thought it'd be a good time to take a look at all the products Google killed in the past 12 months. Here's everything Google shut down in 2024".


https://www.androidpolice.com/google-killed-in-2024/

Servizi cloud: quando un'azienda che offre un servizio critico chiude o viene venduta all'improvviso i battenti, ci possono essere dei problemi notevoli per i suoi clienti.

Money quote: "Bench, the VC-backed accounting startup that left thousands of customers locked out of their accounts after it suddenly shut down last week, will be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute deal, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The San Francisco-based HR tech company Employer.com focuses on payroll and onboarding, in contrast to Bench, which specializes in accounting and tax. Employer.com’s chief marketing officer Matt Charney told TechCrunch the company will revive Bench’s platform and provide instructions for customers to log in and obtain their data.
Customers will be given the choice to port their data or keep their service under new ownership, Charney told TechCrunch. Bench’s previous recommendation to file for a six-month extension with the Internal Revenue Service to look for a new bookkeeper is no longer needed if customers decide to stay on, Employer.com confirmed."

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/30/bench-to-be-acquired-after-abruptly-shutting-down/

Chi sono i cinesi di DeepSeek e perché stanno rivoluzionando il mondo dell'AI con algoritmi e modelli innovativi addestrati in pochissimo tempo e con pochissimi soldi.

Money quote: "Deepseek’s strategy is grounded in their ambition to build AGI. Unlike previous spins on the theme, Deepseek’s mission statement does not mention safety, competition, or stakes for humanity, but only “unraveling the mystery of AGI with curiosity”. Accordingly, the lab has been laser-focused on research into potentially game-changing architectural and algorithmic innovations."

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/deepseek-ceo-interview-with-chinas

Un paragone tra ChatGPT oggi e la ricerca di Google nel 2000.

Money quote: "Open AI's ChatGPT search results have entered the scene. It's not perfect, but it's not Google.

The visual clutter is not there because it's a conversation, not a list. It's one answer instead of 10.

It's active intent searching, the thing that made Google successful. Plus, it's conversational. We are trained monkeys to be able to keep asking questions, with the context of the information that came before. It's simple because we are use to it."

https://chuckwnelson.com/blog/google-search-results-infested-open-ai-using-google-playbook

Letture per la domenica

Il senso della mosca di "C'era una volta il West", spiegato bene.

Money quote: "It is at this point that a fly lands on Elam's neck and Elam opens his eyes and tries unsuccessfully to blow the fly away, by directing his breath in its direction. After it has resettled near his lip, he finally shoos it off his face with a wave of his hand. He then turns to see where it has landed - on an adjacent wooden surface. With pistol now in hand, Elam slyly waits a moment, then rapidly turns and slamming the muzzle up against the wooden surface, captures the fly in the barrel of his gun. With an index finger blocking the muzzle so that the fly can't escape, Elam is visibly pleased with his exploit and holds the gun up to his ear, listening to the fly's desperate buzzing. He then looks down at the barrel of the gun with his one good eye, opening it exceptionally wide. And after holding the gun barrel to his ear once again to hear the buzzing of the imprisoned fly, he finally lets it go as the train approaches, by removing his finger from the muzzle and waving the gun in the air."

https://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_24/section_1/artc4A.html

Cose interessanti da sapere su quello che si vede di noi guardandoci negli occhi (la "finestra dell'anima")

Money quote: "You might have been taught that pupil-size changes are nothing more than a reflex response to changes in brightness. While it’s true that the pupils expand as it gets darker and constrict as brightness increases, they can give away much more information than that, subtly reflecting a person’s mental effort, their feelings – even the content of their imagination.

At a physiological level, the size of the pupil is determined by the two interacting muscles of the iris (the coloured part of the eye). These muscles are controlled by the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems – these are the two opposing branches of the body’s automatic control centre that manage relaxation and alertness, respectively."

https://psyche.co/ideas/the-pupil-of-the-eye-opens-a-remarkable-window-into-the-mind

Se a qualcuno non fosse arrivata l'edizione email, ricordate che la mia newsletter si legge anche sul web...

Dalla riforma della scuola alla fine del terzo luogo passando per l'immancabile AI, la mia newsletter Mostly Weekly è di nuovo in pista, come (quasi) ogni domenica

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/307/

A quanto pare ho iniziato questa serie di articoli scritti da altri sulla scrittura. Prima Kurt Vonnegut e adesso Ian Fleming. Chissà se vado avanti. Comunque, se volete scrivere un best seller, i consigli sono tutti qua.

https://antoniodini.com/come-si-scrive-un-best-seller/

L'Intelligenza artificiale in effetti produce valore per le aziende. Ma solo per poche, almeno per adesso. Chissà perché.

Money quote: "After years of investing, hiring talent, and launching pilots in artificial intelligence (AI), CEOs are now seeking tangible returns from the technology. But realizing its full value remains difficult. Even with the widespread implementation of AI programs across industries, only 26% of companies have developed the necessary set of capabilities to move beyond proofs of concept and generate tangible value, according to new research by Boston Consulting Group (BCG)."

https://www.bcg.com/press/24october2024-ai-adoption-in-2024-74-of-companies-struggle-to-achieve-and-scale-value

Jules Feiffer: 26/01/1929 - 17/01/2025