Letture della domenica

Tre cose da leggere (forse) sul futuro dell'AI e dintorni.

Money quote: "Two months ago, I posted some big questions about AI. We had 600 essays submitted for this contest. Below is a bit of information of the 3 winners, followed by all 3 full essay. Thanks to everyone who participated!"

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/blog-prize-winners

Insomma, i grandi scrittori russi dell'Ottocento sono una figata. Tosti per i contenuti, lunghi per numero di pagine, ma scrivono da dio e scorrono alla grande. Sort of.

Money quote: "The Russians are hilarious. And the prose is easier to read than Dickens, let alone Joyce. Yes, the content is often difficult, and disturbing. But the prose? The prose is clear as water! English translated from Russian has a glorious clarity, and, I think, an inherent dry wit. It’s totally different from the interminably-meandering frankenparagraphs of, say, Michel de Montaigne."

https://www.autodidacts.io/dostoyevsky-isnt-difficult/

Oggi è l'anniversario della presa della Bastiglia. Un simbolo potentissimo per noi Europei. Diventa un po' più difficile articolare il perché sia importante, di solito. Qui lo spiegone facile facile.

Money quote: "Costruita nel XIV secolo come parte delle fortificazioni difensive della città, la Bastiglia è originariamente una torre fortificata destinata a proteggere la Porta di Saint-Antoine. Nel corso dei secoli, però, perde la sua funzione difensiva e diventa un carcere di Stato per volere dei re di Francia."

https://cultweb.it/cultura/storia/cosera-la-bastiglia-e-perche-la-sua-presa-fu-simbolica-per-la-rivoluzione-francese/

Un'idea simpatica nel modo di rapportarsi ai propri superiori. Non fare domande che portino a un sì, fare domande che portino a un no. Ha una sua logica, altro che.

Money quote: "Now, let’s take the alternative approach.”Hey, boss, I am going to install action X, which should solve the XYZ problems we’ve been having. Will take care of this on Monday unless I hear differently from you.”

Do you see the change in tone?"

https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3518

Perché così tanti libri di fantascienza diventano introvabili - la mia rubrica per Fumettologica tocca un tema piuttosto sentito nel settore

https://fumettologica.it/2026/07/libri-fantascienza-introvabili/

L'idea è fantastica: prendere il flusso di dati in tempo reale di una partita di baseball e usarlo per ricrearla con la grafica 8-bit.

Money quote: "This is kind of fantastic: Ribbie lets you watch actual MLB baseball games “rendered pitch by pitch in a cozy 8-bit view while they happen”."

https://kottke.org/26/06/watch-baseball-games-in-realtime-in-8-bit-view

Una teoria un po' radicale ma che ha senso, in un certo qual modo. Cambiare solo il 3% di tutto quanto. Può essere un'idea.

Money quote: "At the beginning of my career, I believed I’d be rewarded for the originality of my ideas. The truth is that you’re rewarded for identifying and solving problems efficiently. And odds are, smarter people before you have already done both. So, turn stealing into a skill: spend your days identifying what you ought to steal, why you ought to steal it, and how much you’ll steal of it."

https://ben-mini.com/2026/stealing-is-a-skill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qie5VITX6eQ

Letture per la domenica

Intervista un po' tecnica ma molto interessante a Doug Brooks, senior product manager di Apple silicon, i processori di Apple. Viene fuori veramente tanta roba, a partire dal perché i Mac mini e Studio sono gli strumenti preferiti da chi vuole lavorare con l'AI in locale.

Money quote: "Jason Hiner: Tell us where Apple silicon is today when it comes to AI.

Doug Brooks: We're seeing tremendous momentum with how people are using Apple products and Apple silicon, particularly in on-device AI workflows. We're really proud of that fact and of the way Apple silicon provides a strong foundation for AI. It really highlights the tent poles of Apple silicon. It's a very balanced architecture that provides CPU, GPU, unified memory, and the Neural Engine all contributing to performance across the chip. That's particularly important for these evolving agentic workflows. It's not just about the GPU crunching on an LLM anymore. It's about the whole chip contributing to different parts of the task, tool-calling, and the things that are happening around those workflows. It really plays to the strengths of Apple silicon."

https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/how-apple-s-decade-long-bet-on-chips-won-ai

È bello leggere i libri sui lettori come il Kindle e il Kobo (o il mio X3). Il problema è che ogni tanto i file epub non funzionano bene. Ma ci sono dei motivi e delle cure, se siete un po' tecnici.

Money quote: "And so I threw my book into Adobe Digital Editions. As expected, it failed to load. But how! Without an error message, without the slightest whimper. The book just wouldn’t load. The only sign that it had even tried was that when loading it again ADE told me: “you can’t import that book, you already added it”. While showing a white screen.

Classic Adobe."

https://andreklein.net/your-epub-is-fine-kobo-disagrees-blame-adobe/

Un'altra cosa un po' tecnica. Come si fa a salvare una pagina web in locale? Ecco qua kage, facile facile. (Scherzo, ovviamente).

Money quote: "You already know the problem. You hit "Save As" on a page you want to keep, and six months later you open it to find a blank screen, a spinner that never stops, or a copy that still tries to phone home to an analytics server that no longer exists. The page was never really yours. It was a thin client for someone else's JavaScript.

kage takes the other road. It drives a real browser, lets the page finish doing whatever it does, grabs the finished result, and then rips every script out of it. No tracking, no network calls, no surprises. Just .html files you can open straight off disk, hand to a friend, or pack into a single file and forget about for a decade."

https://github.com/tamnd/kage

Tutto sul complesso sistema iconografico per comunicare concetti senza usare le parole scritte. In Giappone. Oh yeah. Strati su strati di complessità.

Money quote: "A place where symbols without words naturally arise is in the world of vehicles. Every manufacturer of cars around the world puts a logo at the front of their car as a symbol of who made it. What’s interesting is that Japan takes things a little bit further with their police and fire services.

The police system in Japan is sort of a hybrid national-local system, where there is a national organization that oversees all the police, but most of the actual work is still done and organized locally. Fire systems, just like a lot of other places in the world, are mostly local.

And yet both of these systems have established some national standards. For police cars, one of those is a golden badge depicting the rising sun with rays radially around it. It is placed on police cars in lieu of the standard front badge."

https://arun.is/blog/japan-symbols/

Per le nuove generazioni: la storia di Calvin e Hobbes e il prezzo che il loro creatore, Bill Watterson, ha pagato per mantenere la propria integrità.

Money quote: "This is how he likes it. The simpler things are, the more control he has over the work — which is the hill on which he’ll die and take everyone with him if he has to. For Watterson, it’s a question of maintaining artistic integrity. He derives an enormous amount of pride from the fact that he can say, “I write every word, draw every line, color every Sunday strip, and paint every book illustration myself.” The strip is a “one-man operation” because he’s convinced it’s the only way to preserve the integrity of his craft.

For Watterson, craft has never been a side dish to the main course. It’s inextricable from the truths he wants to express and the meaning he hopes his work might have for its readers. It’s his belief that half a century ago, the best comics were more than amusing to look at; they were beautiful and undoubtedly counted as capital-A Art. Here in the mid-nineties, he “can’t think of a single strip today that comes close to that standard of craftsmanship”."

https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/calvin-and-hobbes-and-the-price-of

Alla fine, tutto torna.

Money quote: "arry and Sergey’s 2004 letter to investors said “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” However, laying off 12,000 workers, despite having a $114B war chest, $60B in 2022 profit and growing revenue[1], was a conventional act of a company complying with minority investor demands and copying other companies, even down to their PR wording.

I was one of the workers laid off."

https://david.newgas.net/my-google-epitaph/

L'esplosione dei datacenter in Lombardia

Money quote: "Un data center, infatti, è un’infrastruttura digitale ma anche un prodotto immobiliare. Può diventare redditizio per società che fanno da “veicolo”, cioè comprano terreni, istruiscono la pratica urbanistica con i comuni e poi rivendono ad altre società del digitale prima ancora della costruzione. L’obiettivo è realizzare guadagni sulla mediazione. È un fenomeno che non può essere definito speculativo in senso stretto, ma è confermato dagli studiosi e dagli amministratori locali sentiti per questo articolo."

https://www.ilpost.it/2026/07/05/data-center-espansione-italia/

Arriva Mostly Weekly 386. Le lingue non muoiono da sole: qualcuno le rende inutili. E poi: gli agenti AI imparano a barare, i Bronzi di Riace, la città-spugna di Carlo Ratti, l'open source nell'era del vibe coding e i data center nello spazio. Tanta roba

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/386/

Letture per la domenica

Un articolo che è semplicemente geniale (ma dopotutto è Paul Graham: il Gorgia di Lentini dei nostri giorni)

Money quote: "Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I've spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have, but there are many more in the pipeline.

So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible.

She wasn't saying, of course, that it's impossible to become a billionaire. Obviously that's possible. Nor was she talking about the distinction between income and capital gains. She wasn't making a point about accounting. What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way."

https://paulgraham.com/earn.html

Fare impresa in Italia si dice sempre che è problematico fra le altre cose per via dei costi e della lentezza burocratica. E in Germania?

Money quote: "I started founding my second company in Germany in late January. It is now late June.

In that time, the state, two courts, a notary, a law firm, a tax firm, and software vendors have all found a way to bill me. Every single one of them, on time.

I have spent more than 9,600 euros to start a company: a little over 7,600 in fees and bills, plus 2,000 in share capital frozen in an account I am not allowed to touch. And after five months, here is what I have to show for it:

I have not been able to send a single invoice of my own.

Not one."

https://paolino.me/founding-a-company-in-germany/

Film da vedere gratuitamente su YouTube. Nove, per la precisione.

Money quote: "They say creativity flourishes in the gaps between resources, which might explain how one comes to type “full movie free” into the YouTube search bar in the first place. Once there though, you’ll find the same can be said for the goldmine (slash cesspit) of a movie archive this summons. Parading a motley crew of low-budget stoner spoofs, rogue 80s naval movies, and wayward sci-fi blockbusters – the sort Morgan Freeman would prefer to forget – YouTube’s listing of costless flicks is unmatched.

In the spirit of “nothing worth having comes easy”, there’s a graft involved: sifting through clickbait, realising the movie you’ve pressed play on is a well-known title coined something elusive to evade copyright infringement. All that said, it’s part of the ride. With less pop-ups than pirate websites and far more cheap thrills."

https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/70466/1/best-films-movies-you-can-watch-on-youtube-for-free

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, la recensione - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2026/07/spider-man-brand-new-day-recensione-film-marvel/

Poul Anderson coltivava mondi di fantascienza - il mio racconto su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2026/07/poul-anderson-fantascienza/