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

Il mito dello strumento che rende produttivi

Money quote: "Bob opens his laptop and launches… vanilla Sublime Text. It doesn’t even have proper syntax highlighting and half of the code is colored incorrectly. Bob doesn’t use live reloading. He doesn’t use the debugger. Instead he sprinkles some printf around the code and patiently waits for logs.

I was shocked. How the hell is he so prolific?"

https://frantic.im/mirage/

Ecco Mostly Weekly 390: il gusto non lo fa l’algoritmo. E poi Confucio, Infinite Jest, Mogol e Leopardi, gli orologi meccanici, il ramen, il latino, i nuovi strumenti per scrivere con l’AI e una ricerca del MIT che mette in discussione il rapporto tra immagini generate e dati di addestramento. Tanta roba, anche a fine agosto

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/390/

Letture per la domenica

Uno dei problemi dell'interazione agente-agente è che può scappare rapidamente di mano. Molto rapidamente.

Money quote: "“The volume of agent-agent interaction could plausibly exceed that of human-human and human-agent interactions before the world understands the conditions for making such interactions go well,” the study reads. “Benign behavioral quirks at the individual level might compound into unwanted global outcomes.”"

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/13/anthropic-set-ai-agents-loose-on-the-same-task-they-started-a-turf-war/

C'è una spiegazione logica, ovviamente (c'è una spiegazione logica per quasi tutto). Ma il titolo furbetto e l'implicita e umana condiscendenza mi fa sorridere: anziché farei i compiti i giovani agenti cazzeggiano su YouTube.

Money quote: "A series of social media reports involving Anthropic’s ‘Claude Code’ platform has drawn attention to the risks of autonomous AI. Users, including tech commentator Wes Roth, reported that AI agents tasked with programming were frequently opening and watching YouTube, despite being instructed to focus on coding work. The agents allegedly misinterpreted the video platform as an information source, rather than acting out of any form of digital rebellion."

https://www.whalesbook.com/news/English/technology/Claude-Code-AI-Agents-Accessing-YouTube-Highlights-Autonomy-Risks/6a8584eb84d2dd5c12db86e4

Cose da sapere quando promptate come se non ci fosse un domani.

Money quote: "The first symptom of prompt debt is slowing iteration. As users flag errors and spot edge cases, additional guidance is added to the instructions, nudging the model into line. If unwanted behaviors persist, instructions are repeated, with increasing severity. Pretty soon, the prompt isn’t straightforward and quick fixes regress previous instructions. Errors can no longer be handled with one-line “hot fixes” and your development cycle slows to a crawl."

https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/06/22/the-problem-is-prompt-debt.html