Letture per la domenica\
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Stili di vita. La Francia si sta innamorando delle coppie aperte.

Money quote: "S’il reste marginal, ce modèle semble tout de même prendre de l’ampleur. En 2017, seuls 1 % des interrogés se déclaraient en couple libre. Ils sont aujourd’hui 5 %. Et beaucoup plus (15 😵 à avoir déjà été concerné une fois au cours de leur vie, sans que ça ne soit toujours le cas lors de l’étude – réalisée de mars à avril 2025 (1), en partenariat avec Gleeden, un site de rencontre extraconjugal. Un chiffre qui grimpe significativement (23 😵 chez les Parisiens et Parisiennes."

https://www.liberation.fr/lifestyle/intimites/intimite-en-france-le-couple-libre-seduit-de-plus-en-plus-20250423_EOBT4CCDFJDW7CN4P3SVFPNYHU/

Certi articoli non passano mai di moda. ChatGPT ha ribaltato completamente il sistema scolastico non solo americano. Solo, non ce ne siamo ancora resi conto.

Money quote: "Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College. ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html

archivio: https://archive.is/ofxzl

Un meravigioso personaggio minore iraniano: il traduttore creativo Zabihollah Mansouri. Molto creativo.

Money quote: "One of the show’s characters is a translator named Zabihollah Mansouri. He appears suddenly, talks about something he calls his “philosophy of expansionism” in translation, has an awkward interaction with another character, and then vanishes, never to be seen again. The screenwriters didn’t bother to provide an introduction for him because they knew it wasn’t necessary. Most people in Iran, even those who rarely crack open a book, know who Mansouri is, though he died almost forty years ago."

https://yalereview.org/article/amir-ahmadi-arian-zabihollah-mansouri

L'opera struggente di un solitario genio dei trasporti pubblici.

Money quote: "Albert Guillaumes Marcer

Sóc enginyer tècnic d'obres públiques, especialitzat en transports i mobilitat. Dibuixo mapes de transport públic des que tenia 5 anys. Programo com puc."

https://www.albertguillaumes.cat

Milionesimo articolo su: "L'AI può prendere il mio posto di lavoro oppure no?". Forse sì, o forse no.

Money quote: "LLMs can give you answers to precise questions, but they don’t necessarily understand how to land on tone, style, tension or originality, nor do they have the power to benefit from serendipity, all of which are components of good writing.

ChatGPT took about 48 hours to churn out a first chapter after gobbling up several samples of my own 33-year body of work, a detailed book proposal with footnotes, a chapter outline of where I wanted to go, taped interviews with sources and plentiful background reading selected by me.

Sadly, what I got back was a kind of Muzak version of myself — predigested, relatively accurate, but thoroughly uninspired. This result was both amusing and depressing."

https://www.ft.com/content/0b56a85d-e71e-49c4-802f-316ed83cb386

archivio: https://archive.is/BBL7C

Money quote: "How, players wondered, did the life simulation game get so lifeless? That the world of The Sims resembled its raw, offline counterpart was important to its creator, Will Wright, who saw in it a tool for real-life education. Owing to his Montessori schooling, he viewed games as “software toys” capable of imparting practical lessons. Wright envisioned a virtual dollhouse where players faced an ever-expanding set of choices, as they navigated life and its random disasters: pranks, burglaries, electrocutions, house fires, social worker assessments — even infectious guinea pig bites. Wright hoped that through these trials, players of The Sims would learn a valuable, imaginative form of problem-solving."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/magazine/the-sims-easy-mode.html

archivio: https://archive.is/Mzl5K

Adesso i turisti stanno sfondando Jimbocho, il quartiere di Tokyo delle librerie dell'usato. Perché è stato raccontato in qualche libro, è finito su Instagram grazie a qualche influencer e adesso è diventato virale. Solo che Jimbocho è minuscolo, piuttosto pissero e francamente poco attraente dal punto di vista librario se non siete fluenti nella lingua locale. L'unica cosa che se ne ricava è che il Giappone ha un problema con il turismo.

Money quote: "A visitor exiting Jimbocho Station onto the main thoroughfare of Yasukuni Street will find the south side lined with secondhand bookstores. Most have piles and stacks of their offerings outside, creating an overall effect that is part-shopping street, part-museum of an analog era. The area is also home to countless curry stores — from Japanese to Sri Lankan — and coffee shops for every taste and mood. Saboru, a 70-year-old retro kissaten (cafe) popular for its pizza toast, is only a stone’s throw from newcomers Cafe Ataraxia, playing classical music on a gramophone, and Dill Coffee Parlor, which serves one of the best carrot cakes in town."

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2025/10/18/lifestyle/jimobocho-coolest-neighborhood-in-the-world/

Un viaggio tra le guglie della Sagrada Familia, i vecchi software che scompaiono, la cultura digitale che non decolla e le parolacce che raccontano chi siamo: Mostly Weekly 348 è online

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/348/

Salman Rushdie fa il suo monumentale ritorno alla narrativa il 4 novembre con "The Eleventh Hour". È la sua prima opera di narrativa dall'accoltellamento del 2022.

Money quote: "According to Random House, Rushdie's new book will include such "unforgettable characters" as a "musical prodigy with a magical gift," the ghost of a Cambridge don who helps a student "avenge the tormentor of his lifetime" and a literary mentor who has mysteriously died. "The Eleventh Hour" is set in three parts of the world where Rushdie has lived: India, England and the U.S."

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/salman-rushdie-the-eleventh-hour-release-date/

Money quote 2: "The Eleventh Hour will consist of a collection of stories from around the world, set across India, England and the US."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04zw0qvergo

Il sogno dell'umanità nello spazio non è andare su Marte, bensì creare le isole nello spazio, cioè i Cilindri di O'Neill. Ma cosa sono?

Money quote: "Gerard K. O’Neill era un fisico che insegnava all’università di Princeton, una delle più prestigiose accademie americane. Negli anni Sessanta, in piena corsa spaziale, mentre gli Usa e l’Unione Sovietica si sfidavano (spoiler alert: vinsero gli americani portando per primi due uomini sulla Luna), lui decise di fare un laboratorio con i suoi studenti universitari. Tema per tutti: costruire le migliori strutture spaziali abitabili."

https://techdale.it/ecco-a-voi-le-colonie-nello-spazio/

Momento woke a San Pietro. Il Vaticano restituirà manufatti indigeni al Canada.

Money quote: " The Vatican is expected to soon announce that it will return a few dozen artifacts to Indigenous communities in Canada as part of its reckoning with the Catholic Church’s troubled role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas, officials said Wednesday.

The items, including an Inuit kayak, are part of the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, known as the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has been a source of controversy for the Vatican amid the broader museum debate over the restitution of cultural goods taken from Indigenous peoples during colonial periods."

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-10-22/vatican-will-return-dozens-of-artifacts-to-indigenous-groups-in-canada-as-gesture-of-reconciliation

Arriva il Booker Prize per bambini. Un po' come se facessero il Pulitzer per l'infanzia.

Money quote: "Like its sister prizes, the children’s award comes with a 50,000 pound ($67,000) purse.

The prize will open for submissions early next year and the inaugural award will be handed out in 2027, with the winner picked by a jury of children and adults led by writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Britain’s current children’s laureate."

https://wtop.com/entertainment/2025/10/the-new-childrens-booker-prize-aims-to-reward-quality-fiction-for-kids/

diario del capitano Picard e la finzione necessaria della fantascienza - ne ho scritto con gusto su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2025/11/diario-picard-star-trek-the-next-generation/

A quanto apre il robottino che pulisce la casa e ha un LLM dentro il cervelloetto digitale, ha più problemi che pregi.

Money quote: "Andon Labs concluded that while LLMs show promise in robotic applications, significant development is still required. Embodied AI remains far from achieving human-level reliability, and the vacuum robot’s comedic meltdown underscores the complexity of translating language understanding into effective physical action."

https://slguardian.org/ai-powered-vacuum-robots-struggle-existential-crises-ensue/

C'è chi critica i big dell'AI. E, ascoltando le parole di Sam Altman (vedi sotto) come dargli torto?

Money quote: "Dobbiamo agire saggiamente ma con convinzione. L’alba dell’Età dell’Intelligenza è uno sviluppo epocale che pone sfide molto complesse e dalle grandi implicazioni. Non sarà una storia completamente positiva, ma i vantaggi sono così enormi che dobbiamo a noi stessi e al futuro capire come affrontare i rischi che abbiamo davanti. Credo che il futuro sia così radioso che nessuno possa rendergli giustizia cercando di scriverne ora; una caratteristica distintiva dell’Età dell’Intelligenza sarà una prosperità enorme."

https://www.rsi.ch/cultura/societa/La-pericolosa-filosofia-dei-giganti-dell’IA--2423004.html

https://tinyurl.com/29saykxs

Una settimana di storie fra treni, memorie di volo, tecnologia e qualche sorpresa: è uscito Mostly Weekly 349. Buona lettura

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/349/

Letture per la domenica

"Con-fliggere". La complicità dei litiganti. Il conflitto personale come discorso.

Money quote: "The shape of the conflict this article explores is the one which normally takes place in the realm of language, when two or more individuals face one another in what is commonly identified as a “quarrel”. Redefining quarrel as personal conflict, and distinguishing it from differring opinions is the premise on which my article rests, so that personal conflict may be conceptualized as a discourse, i.e., a reality that is not to be found behind or beyond the words of the conflicting parties, and not in their “real motives” or “real interests”, but rather in their discursive coming together (inter-esse). We will not start from asking “why” two or more individuals come into conflict, but “what” they do with words while they quarrel. Taking as its background the Weberian sociology of the sense of action, my article tries to answer this question by taking cues from Austin’s speech act theory, Barthes’s semiotics, Bakhtin’s polyphonic theory, and Wittgenstein’s philosophical grammar, as well as some recent contributions made by analysts and professional “mediators”’ of personal conflicts."

https://journals.openedition.org/qds/350

Tra le altre cose che ci sono in questo sito, Doom 64 che va (anche in emulazione) su Mac.

Money quote: "A source port project called Doom64 EX came out, whose goal was to recreate the game using the N64 ROM image for data. In the runup to DOOM Eternal, id and Zenimax decided to resurrect the game and the creator of the source port worked with Nightdive Studios to make a version that ran on PC as well as consoles. In the years since, the Doom 64 EX+ project came out which enhances the original source port as well as gives it the ability to use the data from the PC port of the game. The commercial release did not come to the Mac, but working with the author we're able to offer a Mac release here.

So fire it up and pretend like you're playing on your big CRT having just rented it from Blockbuster Video. It's definitely a unique experience."

https://www.macsourceports.com/game/doom64

Ma c'è anche Carmageddon

https://github.com/dethrace-labs/dethrace

Gli anni passano. Ho appena compiuto dieci anni di Backblaze, il servizio di backup nel cloud che mi pago da un decennio. Toccando ferro, non l'ho mai dovuto usare. Il suo scopo è proprio quello: non averne bisogno, ma intanto tenerlo pronto.

Ci metto la faccia e ve lo consiglio. Questo è il mio referral, vuol dire più mesi di prova per voi e un mese gratuito per me. Per qualche giorno (fino al 13) gli omaggi sono raddoppiati.

Se poi vi abbonate al servizio, ovviamente costa uguale.

https://secure.backblaze.com/r/01ti3i

Allarmi allarmi, se gli dai delle fake news gli LLM vanno fuori di testa.

Money quote: "For the test, researchers fed AI a constant stream of posts from X. The posts were selected based on virality, high-engagement posts and posts that contained phrases that may be clickbait, such as “TODAY ONLY,” and “WOW.”

The researchers used existing benchmarks such as ARC and RULER to evaluate the results.

The results were shocking to say the least. On ARC, a benchmark for reasoning, there was a drop in the total score from 74.9 to 57.2. While on RULER, a long context understanding benchmark, the score fell from 84.4 to 52.3.

Researchers found that the LLMs were ‘thought skipping.’ The model would simply give inaccurate information without following proper steps to give results to the user."

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/ai-gets-brain-rot-too-study-finds-feeding-chatbots-junk-posts-makes-them-dumb-and-mean-2806199-2025-10-21

Una cosa molto americana ma sarebbe divertente da fare anche in Italia: i libri letti alle superiori che hanno modellato la nostra vita da adulti.

Money quote: "We're sharing your thoughts here. This list reflects a time when fewer female authors and writers of color were being published and assigned in high schools — and many of you expressed hope that today's syllabuses are more varied and diverse.

So, at the start of a new school year, with gratitude to English teachers past, present and future, here's what you told us about the books that shaped you.

Readers' responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity."

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/28/nx-s1-5468462/best-books-read-high-school