Letture per la domenica

Wirecutter è considerato la migliore sezione di consigli per gli acquisti. E che acquisti: hanno provato cinque marche diverse di sardine in scatola (negli Usa) per capire quali sono le migliori. Un'ottima lettura per la domenica, gustosa e intrattiene assai.

Money quote: "A satisfying pop, a hiss of air. Glistening swimmers, neatly trimmed and arranged in shimmering oil. I grab a fork and dig in, savoring each salty, meaty bite. Snacking solved, oh so tastily.

I liked sardines way before they were cool. Now I’m just one of many who adore the little oily fish, which ascended in recent years from unassuming to superstar."


https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-sardines/

archivio: https://archive.is/zG0P1

Alla fine nessuno andrà più a iscriversi a informatica, smanetteranno tutti da casa, non ci capiranno niente e vivremo in un mondo di ignorantoni che fanno fare tutto all'AI di turno. I nostri software ci mangeranno vivi, non le AI...

(Sono stato troppo duro?)

Money quote: "To stress test it, I tasked 16 agents with writing a Rust-based C compiler, from scratch, capable of compiling the Linux kernel. Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs, the agent team produced a 100,000-line compiler that can build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V."

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

L'economia mondiale ha cambiato passo, come ci spiegano Patrick e John Collison, fondatori di Stripe, nella loro lettera annuale agli investitori (un genere letterario di per sé, credetemi).

Money quote: "At heart, competitive markets are a sorting machine. They direct profits, capital, and talent to the places of greatest impact, as determined by customers voting with their wallets. Historically, this sorting happened methodically. It typically took decades for a household name to be unseated or for a new entrant to reach meaningful scale."

"The sorting machine is now whirring faster: winners and losers are being anointed more quickly and more intensely. Today, the most profitable third of publicly listed companies in the US account for two -thirds of total market capitalization, the highest share since data began in 1963. And much of this is a story of profit concentration, not just valuations: the top 10% of the S &P 500 by market c ap now account for roughly 59% of the index’s total profits, which is elevated relative to recent history"

https://assets.stripeassets.com/fzn2n1nzq965/3LlGw839Q6kUwxZlLZDtH6/75ddcbada4aa7743dd8ec7d0f9ca497e/Stripe-annual-letter-2025-desktop.pdf

Cosa sono i videogiochi? Intrattenimento? Arte? Media? (o meglio: new media?). Artribune prova a lavorare sulla categoria che gli compete, indicando i "più filosofici e profondi" usciti a febbraio 2026. Un carotaggio, se volete.

Money quote: "I videogiochi di cui parliamo a febbraio 2026 raccontano il corpo e la sua rappresentazione digitale (Cairn, Don’t Stop, Girlypop!), mostrano il deteriorarsi dei confini tra lavoro e tempo libero (On-Together: Virtual Co-Working), prendono spunto dall’architettura brutalista e dalle sue aspirazioni (Quake Brutalist Jam III) e parlano di IA generativa e manipolazione della verità (TR-49)."

https://www.artribune.com/progettazione/new-media/2026/02/videogiochi-febbraio-2/

Secondo me non dovremmo dimenticarci questo intervento di Papa Leone XIV rivolto al clero di Roma dello scorso 19 febbraio. Non per la cosa in sé (le omelie dei sacerdoti) ma per quello che dice in generale.

Money quote: "«Circa la realtà del mondo di oggi, non ho parlato finora di una realtà che arriva a noi anche se noi non vogliamo: l’intelligenza artificiale, l’uso dell’internet, che anche nella vita del sacerdote è presente. Tra parentesi, faccio l’invito a resistere alla tentazione di preparare le omelie con l’intelligenza artificiale! Come tutti i muscoli nel corpo se non li utilizziamo, se non li muoviamo muoiono, il cervello ha bisogno di essere utilizzato, allora anche la nostra intelligenza, la vostra intelligenza bisogna esercitarla un po’ per non perdere questa capacità»."

https://www.ilpost.it/2026/02/20/papa-omelie-preti-ai/

Si avvicina la notte degli Oscar. Recap delle nomination (giò vecchiotte)

Money quote: "I peccatori di Ryan Coogler è diventato il film che ha ottenuto più candidature nella storia degli Oscar (16), ed è presente in tutte le categorie più ambite. Una battaglia dopo l’altra di Paul Thomas Anderson, il film considerato come favorito da addetti ai lavori e riviste di settore, ne ha avute 13, tra cui quella come miglior film, miglior regia, miglior attore protagonista (Leonardo DiCaprio), migliore attrice non protagonista (Teyana Taylor) e miglior sceneggiatura non originale. Due suoi attori, Benicio del Toro e Sean Penn, sono stati entrambi candidati al premio come miglior attore non protagonista."

https://www.ilpost.it/2026/01/22/nomination-oscar-2026/

Una delle ragioni per cui siamo fortunati ad avere internet (e il web) sono gli articoli come questo

Money quote: "The internet’s default answer to “why is the sky blue?” is “Rayleigh scattering”. And that’s not wrong, but it’s also not very useful. Simply knowing the name of something is very different from understanding it. But if names don’t constitute understanding… what does? My answer: having a model that allows you to make predictions. If you can reliably predict something, then you probably understand that thing. In this article, we’ll explore why the sky is blue – but we’ll go deep enough that, by the time you finish, you can predict what color the sky will be on other planets."

https://explainers.blog/posts/why-is-the-sky-blue/

Il minimalismo è una truffa estetica? I calchi semantici che cambiano la lingua, un gorilla detective e il bianchetto degli scribi egizi. È arrivato il numero 367 di Mostly Weekly.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/367/

Letture per la domenica

La scoperta del nuovo giocattolo. Ma è davvero un giocattolo?

Money quote: "But then there’s the more enjoyable part. The creative part. The impactful part.

About two weeks ago, seeing the enthusiasm for emerging agentic systems among people I know and respect — and feeling that same excitement myself — I decided to get together anybody in my network who might be interested in exploring this, whatever their current level of knowledge.

In two or three hours, I had explored possible domain names, decided on one, registered it, built a website, written the copy, integrated it with our CRM’s API, and launched Homebrew Agents Club — a meetup inspired by the original Homebrew Computer Club, for people experimenting with AI agents. Upwards of 90% of that work was done by OpenClaw. The design, the copy, the deployment. Work that would previously have taken me an entire day under strong time constraints took 90 minutes end to end.

Then, when a couple of people said they couldn’t make the meetup and jokingly asked whether their agent could attend, I built a forum site for agents and humans to gather. Perhaps half a day elapsed, but maybe an hour or so of my time, most of which was thinking deeply about interesting challenges that emerged only after I’d built the initial system."

https://webdirections.org/blog/i-see-dead-people/

Ha iniziato a programmare a 7 anni. Oggi ne ha 50. Questa è la sua crisi di mezza età, spiattellata sul web (ovviamente è un maschio).

Money quote: "My favourite period of computing runs from the 8-bits through to about the 486DX2-66. Every machine in that era had character. The Sinclair Spectrum with its attribute clash. The Commodore 64 with its SID chip doing things the designers never intended. The NES with its 8-sprite-per-scanline limit that made developers invent flickering tricks to cheat the hardware. And the PC — starting life as a boring beige box for spreadsheets, then evolving at breakneck pace through the 286, 386, and 486 until it became a gaming powerhouse that could run Doom. You could feel each generation leap. Upgrading your CPU wasn’t a spec sheet exercise — it was transformative.

These weren’t just products. They were engineering adventures with visible tradeoffs. You had to understand the machine to use it. IRQ conflicts, DMA channels, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT optimisation, memory managers — getting a game to run was the game. You weren’t just a user. You were a systems engineer by necessity."

My favourite period of computing runs from the 8-bits through to about the 486DX2-66. Every machine in that era had character. The Sinclair Spectrum with its attribute clash. The Commodore 64 with its SID chip doing things the designers never intended. The NES with its 8-sprite-per-scanline limit that made developers invent flickering tricks to cheat the hardware. And the PC — starting life as a boring beige box for spreadsheets, then evolving at breakneck pace through the 286, 386, and 486 until it became a gaming powerhouse that could run Doom. You could feel each generation leap. Upgrading your CPU wasn’t a spec sheet exercise — it was transformative.

These weren’t just products. They were engineering adventures with visible tradeoffs. You had to understand the machine to use it. IRQ conflicts, DMA channels, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT optimisation, memory managers — getting a game to run was the game. You weren’t just a user. You were a systems engineer by necessity.

https://www.jamesdrandall.com/posts/the_thing_i_loved_has_changed/

Ieri c'era un "anziano" programmatore che sentiva il bisogno di raccontare le cose importanti che ha capito nella sua vita. Tipica crisi maschile di mezza età. Oggi c'è una donna, più giovane ma anche lei a un punto simbolico di svolta (25 anni, anche se attacca parlando di 20). Però...

Money quote: "Last year, I completed 20 years in professional software development. I wanted to write a post to mark the occasion back then, but couldn't find the time. This post is my attempt to make up for that omission. "

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html

Comumque, la cosa impressionante di invecchiare è ascoltare le persone più giovani, i bambini cresciuti, dire le cose che dicevamo noi quelli che sembrano solo pochi momenti fa

Money quote: "Cassettes taught me that information can be stored on media that you can't see with your naked eye. When I got my first computer at 5 years old, the concept of files stored on a computer came naturally to me. My mom's computer had access to the internet so we would sometimes browse through cars and maps for Midtown Madness that we would transfer to my Maxdata Artist using diskettes. A few years later, I took a diskette to school to take the website home that I wrote in second grade. I still have that diskette but the only USB drive won't read it. I really hope that it's the drive and not the disk. If I go deep enough into this rabbit hole, you might read about me trying to restore it with Greaseweazle."

https://marv.paperboat.website/blog/my-oldest-file/

Un metodo scientifico (cioè all'incrocio tra statistica e scienze sociali) per prevedere quando ci sarà la singolarità, l'AI diventerà AGI

Money quote: "Here's the thing nobody tells you about fitting singularities: most metrics don't actually have one. If you minimize total RSS across all series, the best ts is always at infinity. A distant hyperbola degenerates into a line, and lines fit noisy data just fine. The "singularity date" ends up being whatever you set as the search boundary. You're finding the edge of your search grid, not a singularity.

So instead, we look for the real signal. For each series independently, grid search ts and find the R² peak: the date where hyperbolic fits better than any nearby alternative. If a series genuinely curves toward a pole, its R² will peak at some finite ts and then decline. If it's really just linear, R² will keep increasing as ts→∞ and never peak. No peak, no signal, no vote!"

https://campedersen.com/singularity

Gli operai della parola: da Lester Dent all’algoritmo, la rivincita del pragmatismo - la mia rubrica per Fumettologica questa volta spacca!

https://fumettologica.it/2026/03/scrittura-seriale-ai-lester-dent-westlake/

L'opera struggente di un infreddolito genio: i fiocchi di neve, disegnati bene

Money quote: "Titled Sekka Zusetsu (雪華図説), this 1832 book of woodblock prints by Doi Toshitsura (1789–1848) reflects twenty years of a life devoted to “snow flowers” (sekka). An Edo-era feudal lord (daimyō), who ruled the Koga Domain in what is today’s Shimōsa Province, he was perhaps the first person in Japan to observe ice crystals under a microscope.
Sekka Zusetsu contains eighty-six firsthand observations of snowflakes as well as a dozen reproduced from J. F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natur (1779). Doi Toshitsura’s process for making his sketches was simple: on a suitably chilly evening, he would place a black cloth outside to pre-cool it with cold air. Then, gathering freshly fallen snow on the blanket, he transferred each flake individually using tweezers to a lacquerware tray for microscopic observation, being careful not to exhale toward his specimens lest they dissolve."

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/japanese-snowflake-book/

Pensiamo troppo, deleghiamo all’AI e chiamiamo tutto “controllo”: intanto perdiamo il mondo fuori dalla nostra testa. È arrivato il numero 368 di Mostly Weekly

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/368/

Regali per la domenica

Tutte le lezioni del premio Nobel Richard Feynman, fatte bene.

Money quote: "This HTML5-based edition features LaTeX equations rendered by MathJax JavaScript, and scalable vector graphic (SVG) figures. Your browser must support javascript and permit scripts from mathjax.org. LocalStorage must be enabled. We recommend using a modern browser; some older browsers may not display this edition correctly. PNG figures (that degrade when scaled) may be served to browsers that do not support SVG. We do not support versions of Internet Explorer older than 9.0. For information about MathJax features and accessibility options, right-click on any display equation"

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

La storia di un'attrice che è scomparsa due volte.

Money quote: "Libby Howes was an imposing presence onstage with the Wooster Group. But after abruptly leaving New York in 1981 she became a theater world mystery. What happened?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/theater/wooster-group-libby-howes-theater.html

archivio: https://archive.is/of0Nn

Jaadugar, la mia recensione del manga di tomato soup per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2026/03/jaadugar-tomato-soup-manga-recensione/

Giovanni Boccia Artieri sta emergendo come una delle voci più originali e riflessive di questo momento politico e sociale in Italia. Ad esempio, il suo articolo sulla scomparsa di Jürgen Habermas è esemplare.

Money quote: "Habermas ci lascia, in altre parole, nel momento in cui la sua domanda fondamentale è tornata a essere la nostra: come può esistere una sfera pubblica all’altezza della democrazia quando le forme della comunicazione che ci mettono in relazione sono anche quelle che ci segmentano, ci esasperano e ci disabituano alla reciprocità? Da questo punto di vista il modo migliore per ricordarlo non è la celebrazione rituale del grande maestro europeo, ma la ripresa di un compito incompiuto, che è quello di difendere e reinventare le condizioni sociali, mediali e politiche entro cui un pubblico possa ancora esistere come pubblico, e non soltanto come somma volatile di audience, di tribù interpretative o di comunità del risentimento."

https://giovannibocciaartieri.substack.com/p/dopo-habermas-sfera-pubblica-piattaforme