Letture per la domenica

Forse l'interlocutore tra i più lucidi, in questo momento, per inquadrare il tema dell'intelligenza artificiale: padre Paolo Benanti.

Money quote: "«Chi controlla il software controlla tutto», osserva Benanti. È il potere della software-defined reality, della realtà definita dal software. Per spiegare quanto questo tema riguardi la vita quotidiana, il professore di Etica della tecnologia alla Luiss Guido Carli, a Roma, e alla Seattle University, negli States, ricorre a un’altra immagine. «Se domani volete entrare all’aeroporto di Fiumicino con un’arma, non potete farlo. Con l’Intelligenza artificiale, invece, potenzialmente sì. Con tre righe di codice si potrebbe trasformare perfino uno smartphone in un’arma, modificando il funzionamento della batteria fino a provocarne l’incendio»."

https://www.vita.it/padre-benanti-intelligenza-artificiale-contro-i-nuovi-algoritmi-del-potere-serve-una-governance-condivisa/

Argomento scivoloso: le bibite di Gesù

Money quote: "It is notable that while Christ has apparently been putting energy drinks on people’s hearts lately, he has not been putting it on many of their hearts to donate part of the proceeds to feeding the poor. Apparently, the main mission here is brand awareness.

Unfortunately, after trying the Yahweh energy drink, I don’t feel especially compelled to convert. If the goal is evangelism, Blessed Berry, with its heavy, medicinal notes, may not be the strongest missionary. In fact, the aftertaste lingered with some insistence, like Jehovah’s Witnesses evangelizing at your door even after you told them you were agnostic.

If you want a better-tasting first Christian energy drink, I recommend Preachin’ Peach from Agape."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/04/jesus-christian-energy-drink

Un ragionamento sul "nostos", l'idea del ritorno, quello omerico, bellamente mischiato alla "saudade" per tenere assieme un improbabile percorso sulla nostalgia della gioventù. Potenza del marketing dell'Odissea.

Money quote: "Because English has only a few words for nostalgia-adjacent emotions — like heartache, homesickness, or sorrow — English speakers tend to grasp thirstily for what other languages have to say. And other languages certainly seem to have richer accounts of a complex emotion.

In Portuguese, you have “saudade,” which is a deep, melancholic longing for something or someone now lost. The Germans have “Sehnsucht” for that visceral ache that comes on when you yearn for the past, or something lost. In Welsh, “Hiraeth” is a more geographical kind of nostalgia that pines for a certain land and home country. And, of course, you have the Japanese. That sense of drifting pathos for a world that’s left behind is very Japanese. And you’ll find a cottage-industry obsession with the concept of “mono no aware,” or “the pathos of things.”"

https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/how-the-wrong-kind-of-nostalgia-can-endanger-a-society/

Le alternative ai magnifici tre (Linux, macOS e Windows). Perché ci sono almeno 4 alternative (io preferisco Haiku)

Money quote: "Most people who step outside of Windows and macOS assume Linux is the only alternative worth taking seriously. That's understandable, since Linux has a loyal community and many different distros. The operating systems covered here each exist because they solve something Linux can't. They also do it on hardware you already own without handing data to Microsoft or Apple."

https://www.howtogeek.com/linux-isnt-your-only-escape-from-windows-and-macoshere-are-4-alternatives/

Avete presente l'eclisse di sole? Iberia ha auto una bella idea e ha portato un po di giornalisti e altre persone in volo per vederla. Qui il servizio video di El Pais. Divertente e veloce.

Money quote: "Este 12 de agosto, 99 personas sabían que las nubes no iban a impedirles ver el eclipse solar total en España, porque iban a poder observarlo por encima de ellas. Todos ellos viajaban en el vuelo especial que Iberia ha fletado para contemplar este fenómeno a 10.000 metros de altura."

https://elpais.com/videos/2026-08-13/vivir-el-eclipse-solar-desde-un-avion-no-se-puede-explicar-con-terminos-cientificos-es-un-sentimiento.html

Hugh Howey, l'autore dei libri da cui è tratta Silo, la serie di Apple Tv, fa un ragionamento interessante sulla carriera di uno scrittore di genere. In pratica, a parità di talento e determinazione, la fortuna del periodo storico. Lui ha iniziato quando scrivere era ancora difficile ma pubblicare e vendere era diventato facile (Amazon con il self publishing), e ha fatto il suo prima dell'arrivo dell'AI che sta rendendo facile anche scrivere.

Senza stigmatizzare l'uso delle AI per scrivere, fa anche delle previsioni sul futuro (molto interessanti, vi lascio leggere l'articolo e non le spoilero).

Money quote: "I’ve always felt bad for authors who lived and worked before 2007. The choices unavailable to them made life harder than it needed to be. Getting their work out into the world was brutal. After KDP, that brutality became a choice, not a necessity.

I now feel awful for anyone who wants to tell a story post-2026. You will forever be doubted. If you love an em dash the way I do, or you like flowy run-on sentences like I do, if you grew up reading Proust to let the words flow over you in all their glory, if you memorized sonnets so the iambic pentameter would soak into your bones, you’re gonna sound like a fucking bot.

Less than 20 years. More like 10, honestly. You can argue that 2014-ish was when self-publishing became legit and 2024-ish was when the tools made AI writing viable. A decade where it was easy in the ways it should be and hard in the ways it should be. That’s insane. Ten years across the one-hundred-thousand years of language."

https://hughhowey.com/the-end-of-an-era/

Ma quali vacanze! Ecco Mostly Weekly 389: fa caldo, i ragazzini giocano e i computer diventano sempre più piccoli. Poi James Bond, il doppio in letteratura, la differenza tra teorico e teoretico, l'AI locale e Ceuta. Tanta roba, insomma, anche a Ferragosto

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/389/

Letture per la domenica

Parte come un articolo di tecnologia media, una provocazione intellettuale stimolante e un po' nerd, ma dopo un attimo si trasforma in un paper di ingegneria creativa del software. Tanta roba.

Money quote: "Let's design the successor to email on top of HTTP, fixing the design flaws SMTP has been dragging along for 40 years. Piece by piece. The goal is not to replace the current mail system, heaven forbid!, but to learn, have fun and discover current technologies to swap out every element: sending, receiving, gateway, keys, and so on. The system will never talk to Gmail or any classic email provider: it only talks to itself. The only thing we are going to keep is the shape of the addresses, user@domain. Everything else gets reinvented."

https://en.andros.dev/blog/d7ed8b07/modern-email-can-be-built-from-borrowed-parts/

Le parodie Disney, il cinema di Nolan e la fortuna dei classici - alcune cose che ho scritto per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2026/08/parodie-disney-odissea/

I punti di vista nella narrazione. E varie altre considerazioni. Interessante.

Money quote: "When I teach intro to literature classes to undergraduates, I open the first class going over the five types of POV. (This may seem overly basic, but most of my students are not humanities majors and are unfamiliar with such things.) Each time I teach the traditional POV taxonomy, I feel it isn’t the most useful one from a fiction writing, uh, point of view.

Here’s a quick refresher. The alleged five forms of POV are as follows: First-person (“I do this”), second-person (“you do that”), and third-person (“he/she/they/it do the other thing”). However, third-person POV is broken down into three types: third-person objective (no interiority), third-person limited (one character’s interiority and perspective), third-person omniscient (unlimited interiority and perspective). Those are your five."

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/there-are-more-than-five-povs

Giochini alternativi

Money quote: "I always felt a little bad for the ghosts in Pac-Man. They patrol the maze, they corner the guy, and then he eats a glowing pellet and suddenly they're the ones running for their lives. So I built a small game where you finally get to play the other side.

Pac-Man has its own AI, and your job is to catch him before he clears the maze. The twist is the same one that always ruined my day as a ghost: if he eats a power pellet, the tables flip and he hunts you for a few seconds. Then you run."

https://garrit.xyz/posts/2026-06-13-pac-man-but-you-re-the-ghost

E se, anziché di "felicità" parlassimo più semplicemente di "gratificazione"? Cioè di una forma di contentezza derivata dalle esperienze sensoriali nella vita quotidiana, al contrario i sensazioni ben più sfuggenti e basate su un territorio impossibile da dominare?

Money quote: "My hippy ex-boyfriend used to call that "taking a picture with your heart". We made fun of it then, but I find myself taking pictures with my heart all the time: some of it's trying to root myself in the present, but it's also often about trying to feel the world around me: the smell, the touch, the sounds, all the little stuff that makes a moment gratifying."

https://www.patreon.com/CultureStudy/posts/how-to-fall-back-164373561