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

Come sentirsi meno a disagio nelle situazioni sociali. Adam Mastroianni descrive l’imbarazzo come una «cipolla» a tre strati: goffaggine sociale, timidezza ossessiva e una profonda «fobia delle persone». Attingendo a ricerche e aneddoti carini, offre consigli pratici per accettare i propri passi falsi, rivolgere l’attenzione verso l’esterno ed esporsi al rischio sociale.

Money quote: “So if you find yourself fixated on your own flaws, perhaps its worth asking: what makes you so worthy of your own attention, even if it’s mainly disapproving? Why should you be the protagonist of every social encounter? If you’re really as bad as you say, why not stop thinking about yourself so much and give someone else a turn?”


https://www.experimental-history.com/p/how-to-be-less-awkward

Ci si può mantenere facendo l'artista? Ecco, forse sì

Money quote: "I first wrote down these ideas in early 2017, just after I started to make a living as an artist. I came to them over time, but I wanted to document them at that specific moment in my career. The moment when I was finally sure that what I was doing was working. I had just finished a year with $54k in sales and was about to have one with $150k. A few years later I would sell over $1M in art. I figured that whatever I was thinking at that moment of transition would be the most relevant to other aspiring artists.

I didn't get into art to make a living — I got into it as a creative outlet while feeling trapped in my job. But as I continued to want to make more art, I developed theories on how to earn enough money to buy the remainder of my time so I could work exclusively on art.

I have shared these writings with artists who have come to me for advice. I have not before now published them due to some combination of busyness and fear of criticism."

https://essays.fnnch.com/make-a-living

Salve a tutti! Domanda irrituale: per un articolo che sto preparando devo sentire una persona che abbia lavorato come "schiavo delle AI", cioè come persona sottopagata che aliementa i sistemi di intelligenza artificiale facendo cose per qualche servizio online di correzione dati.

C'è qualcuno di voi che posso sentire? O conoscete qualcuno con cui posso parlare?

Come si dice in questi casi: "astenersi perditempo"

I giornali online? Sono bravissimi a sabotarsi, è praticamente il loro modello di business: una interruzione via l'altra. Questo e altro nel numero 369 di Mostly Weekly

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/369/

E dopo una domenica di riposo, per voi che amate i podcast: questa miniserie di podcast vi permette di andare alla scoperta della ricerca scientifica dell'università degli studi di Bergamo. Disclaimer: sono coinvolto anche io.

Money quote: "UniBg x Grins è il podcast in 10 puntate (più una introduzione) che esplora le grandi sfide della transizione contemporanea attraverso le voci, gli studi e le scoperte dei docenti e dei ricercatori dell’Università di Bergamo."

Money quote 2: "Prodotto da UniBg OnAir, la web radio dell’ateneo, con un team composto da Mattia Lucchini e Nicola Betti (project manager), Antonio Dini (conversation designer) e Benedetta Aroldi (creative producer), il podcast ci introduce ai percorsi del progetto Grins (Growing Resilient, Inclusive and Sustainable), un ambizioso partenariato esteso, che raccoglie 12 atenei italiani, finanziato dal Pnrr e dedicato alla sostenibilità economica, sociale e ambientale dei nostri territori."

https://www.unibgonair.it/showcase/unibg-x-grins-il-podcast/

Tutti i particolari in cronaca:

https://www.bergamonews.it/2026/03/30/unibg-x-grins-organizzare-il-presente-e-immaginare-il-futuro/879297/

Un po' di musica. La tecnica della mano destra del mitico bassista Larry Graham.

Money quote: "Larry Graham tells the story of his right hand technique"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lIbvj2EBqM

È un po' di tempo che non lo faccio ma oggi è il backup day quindi ne vale la pena. Premessa: questo canale non ha promozioni né referral. Tuttavia, di quando in quando suggerisco uno dei due-tre servizi che uso. Sono anni che utilizzo BackBlaze, backup online sicuro per Mac (e Pc). È una delle poche cose che mi sento di consigliare mettendoci la faccia.

Come dicevo, qui non ci sono referral. In questo caso lo faccio, metto il referral, perché sono convinto che abbia valore e perché i backup off-site sono fondamentali. Con il mio referral avete uno sconto sul periodo iniziale (and so do I). Se avete un portatile è l'ideale.

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