Prima che arrivi la censura in rete e la scelta degli argomenti che vogliamo approfondire o solo incrociare venga limitata, ecco un breve corso su come hackerare un'automobile. Perché è parecchio semplice, sapete? E ci sono più modi diversi per farlo.

Money quote: "The following is by no means an exhaustive tutorial. It instead aims to provide just enough information to get you up and running. If you want to dig deeper you can checkout the must-reads at the end."

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/hacking-cars-a-guide-tutorial-on-how-to-hack-a-car-5eafcfbbb7ec

Nella sua "monday note" Jean-Louis Gassée, ex prodigio di Apple, saluta la lunga carriera di Walt Mossberg, che coincide con la rivoluzione tecnologica della nostra epoca e l'ha raccontata in maniera unica

Money quote: "I’m taken back to my early days in the Valley and the miraculous sound of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Mercury News, and San Francisco Chronicle landing on my doorstep in the early morning. (Miraculous isn’t an exaggeration: There are no newspaper routes in Paris.) For a voracious reader, four news papers with coffee on the kitchen counter, this was heaven. For a geek it was doubly so: From 1991 on, it was an opportunity to revel in the wisdom of Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology column in the WSJ."

https://mondaynote.com/a-salute-to-walt-mossberg-e3c562288f03

Breve storia del jailbreaking, ieri e oggi

Money quote: "The world's first jailbreaking step-by-step procedure, discovered in 2007, was posted online for all to see. Subsequent jailbreaks were used by millions of people. At one point, there was even a website—called jailbreakme.com—that was free for all to use and jailbroke your phone simply by visiting it."

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xa4ka/iphone-jailbreak-life-death-legacy

La parabola di Spotify: cresce veloce (non come Netflix ma insomma) e si prepara alla quotazione. Apple sembra molto indietro, ma in realtà cresce rapidamente.

Money quote: "Spotify now has 60 million subscribers, compared to Apple Music’s 27 million (as of June)."

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/31/spotify-vs-apple-music/

Per tutti voi che siete intrappolati in qualche ufficio o in rapporti lavorativi gerarchizzati, una storia interessante su come emanciparsi ed evitare di commettere il peggiore errore che un neo impiegato possa commettere: cercare di sconfiggere il proprio capo (che ti ha detto che ti odia) al suo stesso gioco.

Money quote: "I endured a whole year’s worth of passive-aggressive power games, micromanagement, white-anting, factionalism, gaslighting, procedural pivots, bizarre performance measurements, and faint praise. It was like Westworld, only set in an open plan office, and instead of dying, you just had another performance review."

https://medium.com/@chrismayhap/i-quit-my-career-and-wrote-a-bad-novel-8be6b4005acb

Ah, poi la storia piega sul desiderio di scrivere un romanzo fantasy, che viene fuori davvero tremendo. Ma nella vita non tutte le ruote sono tonde, no?

Il mito dei nativi digitali. Cioè: i nativi digitali non esistono, e anzi sono pippe come quelli che li hanno preceduti. Disperatamente incapaci di fare multitasking, oltretutto.

Questa secondo me è una tesi molto interessante, degna di nota. E viene fuori per di più da un paper di ricerca, che la motiva in maniera abbastanza convincente. Per la scuola potrebbe essere una piccola rivoluzione, visto che l'approccio oggi è sempre basato su filosofie e non sulla ricerca.

Money quote: "Education policy is particularly vulnerable to political whims, fads and untested assumptions. From swapping evolution for creationism to the idea that multiple types of intelligence demand multiple approaches, generations of children are schooled according to dogma, not evidence. Surveys show, for example, that teachers and education experts subscribe to dozens of different and opposing ‘learning styles’. Under these, children can be categorized as activists or theorists, organizers or innovators, non-committers or plungers, globalists or analysts, deep or surface learners, and so on. Could the latest example be altering access to, and the provision of, technology in the classroom, simply because a new cohort is believed to be more familiar with it?"

http://www.nature.com/news/the-digital-native-is-a-myth-1.22363

Un audio/video che spiega Socrate, anzi il discorso di Diotima di Mantinea e la scala che porta dal desiderio carnale alla bellezza e alla moralità: tutto preso ovviamente dal Simposio di Platone. È una riduzione fatta da Radio 4 della Bbc.

Money quote: "Can sexual desire lead us to something that transcends the physical act? Socrates seemed to think so. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates recalls the words of his apparent teacher of erotics, the priestess Diotima of Mantinea, who instructed him that lust was the first rung on a ladder leading upwards towards an appreciation of the form of beauty itself and, further, to morality and virtue."

https://aeon.co/videos/why-socrates-believed-that-sexual-desire-is-the-first-step-towards-righteousness

Vodafone ha messo online una bella mappa interattiva che permette di vedere la sua infrastruttura tecnologica e capire che tipo di connessione potete trovare dove siete, ovunque siate

http://globalnetworkmap.vodafone.com/

Dragonero n. 50, il (buon) fantasy italiano che ho rischiato di perdermi - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

http://www.fumettologica.it/2017/08/dragonero-50-recensione-bonelli/

La seconda vita di iPad - il mio articolo per Macitynet.it

https://www.macitynet.it/la-seconda-vita-ipad/

IBM è in difficoltà anche perché il suo futuro è apparentemente legato a Watson. La piattaforma di intelligenza artificiale è stata spinta con tanta enfasi e tante ambiguità rispetto a cosa siano veramente le intelligenze artificiali che adesso IBM rischia di pagarne il prezzo.

Perché marketing e spinning hanno forzato e falsato il concetto di AI, che vive una forte hype dettata da una notevole ignoranza sul tema e aspettative "magiche" sia da parte del pubblico che dei giornalisti. E Watson ovviamente non è all'altezza delle aspettative magiche.

Money quote: "the only intelligent thing about Watson is their PR department."

https://www.wired.com/story/ibm-watson-won-jeopardy-but-is-it-smart-enough-to-spin-big-blues-ai-into-green/

Prima della pigrizia c'era l'accidia. Che però era proprio un'altra cosa: la negligenza nel fare il bene. Oggi invece è diventata il tedio e la neghittosità che porta a non fare in generale.

L'accidia invece nasce nel deserto, sotto il sole del meriggio che spacca le pietre, fra i monaci eremiti, e si nutre dei loro sogni (per questo smettevano di dormire: per non desiderare più) e li fa urlare e piangere a lungo, da soli, fino a che non abbandonavano l'eremitaggio peggio che morti: vinti.

Ma era un'altra epoca, senza social media e senza poliamore.

Money quote: "To Evagrius of Pontius, acedia was the most noteworthy of the eight vices that he felt could tempt monks to abandon their religious lives. The Greek monk listed gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, vainglory, pride, and acedia as threats to devout monasticism in Of the Eight Capital Sins, but argued that acedia was “the last of the sins to conquer.” Overcoming the other seven didn’t mean a monk was safe, but overcoming acedia, according to Evagrius, brought one closer to God."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/desert-fathers-sins-acedia-sloth

Déjà Vu e il nostro senso della realtà. Più un altro paio di cose

Money quote: "For the past five years I have been suffering epileptic seizures resulting from the growth and eventual removal of a lemon-size tumor from the right-hand side of my brain. Before my diagnosis I appeared fit and healthy: I was in my mid-30s and displayed absolutely no symptoms. Until, that is, the afternoon that I woke up on the kitchen floor with two black eyes after suffering my first recorded seizure"

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/article/when-extreme-dj-vu-destroys-your-sense-of-reality.html

Cattive madri, maternità sotto scrutinio, conflitti di potere tra maschi e femmine. Avere figli dopo la prima guerra mondiale ha aperto una fase completamente differente rispetto alla storia sociale dei secoli precedenti.

Money quote: "Note the double-edged sword of motherhood here. Attracting the praise of being a ‘good mother’ was always accompanied by the threat that you might fall from the perch at any moment and cause devastating harm to your child. Hence the amplification of mechanisms of control, censure and punishment that go hand in hand with the valorisation and surveillance of parenting. Deep within the medical and psychological frameworks promoting motherhood in this period, there lurks male anxiety over female power and influence"

https://aeon.co/ideas/fatal-nurture-what-a-rare-disorder-says-about-bad-mothers

Qual è la strategia giusta quando non ce la fai più a cavalcare l'onda? Aspettare la prossima.

Money quote: "He did not attack my argument. He didn’t agree with it, either. He just smiled and said, “I am going to wait for the next big thing.”"

http://quibb.com/links/waiting-for-the-next-big-thing-richard-rumelt-on-apple-1997

E se gli smartphone avessero bruciato una generazione? Una cosa mai vista prima, ma che sta succedendo ai Millennials? Altro che "generazione digitale"...

Money quote: "I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

Sono andato in piscina, ho nuotato male e adesso ho mal di schiena: è partita come una contrattura e poi è diventata lombalgia a cui si è aggiunta anche un po' di sciatica, tanto per non farci mancare niente.

In questo articolo Vox spiega che probabilmente curiamo i nostri mal di schiena nel modo sbagliato. Perché non sono le medicine o le terapie anche chirurgiche la soluzione, bensì la meditazione e la psicoterapia. Teoria del complotto o forse dovremmo tutti rilassarci di più?

Money quote: "The big takeaway: Millions of back patients like Ramin are floundering in a medical system that isn’t equipped to help them. They’re pushed toward intrusive, addictive, expensive interventions that often fail or can even harm them, and away from things like yoga or psychotherapy, which actually seem to help. Meanwhile, Americans and their doctors have come to expect cures for everything — and back pain is one of those nearly universal ailments with no cure. Patients and taxpayers wind up paying the price for this failure, both in dollars and in health."

Money quote 2: "What I found surprised me: Many of these alternative approaches really do seem to help, though often with modest effects. But when you compare even those small benefits with the harm we’re currently doing while medically “treating” back pain, the horror of the status quo becomes clear. “No one dies of low back pain,” one back pain expert, University of Amsterdam assistant professor Sidney Rubinstein, summed up, “but people are now dying from the treatment.”"

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/4/15929484/chronic-back-pain-treatment-mainstream-vs-alternative

Noi siamo la nostra memoria e le nostre esperienze? Facciamo un esperimento mentale: immaginiamo di essere su Marte, prossimi alla morte perché stanno finendo viveri e aria. Per fortuna abbiamo il teletrasporto: un potentissimo scanner che crea una immagine digitale del nostro essere precisa fino all'ultimo atomo, la teletrasmette sulla Terra e qui viene usata per creare da zero un altro noi.

Se dopo il teletrasporto abbiamo la possibilità di distruggere l'originale su Marte, moriamo oppure continuiamo a vivere sulla Terra? Chi è veramente noi, il marziano, il terrestre, entrambi, nessuno?

Money quote: "A residual conservatism in my nature prompts me to think that I would stay the old me, and the new me – whoever he is – would be like a twin to me, indeed more similar to the old me than any natural twin could possibly be. He would feel all the things I would feel, have the same memories, and be so very glad that he’s not starving on Mars. But, for all that, he would not be me: I would not be thinking or experiencing the things he is, nor would he be aware of my own increasingly desperate experience. But if this line of thinking is correct, I am suddenly very reluctant to turn the toggle over to the ‘destroy’ setting. For then it would seem that I would simply be annihilated on Mars, and some new guy on Earth, some guy a lot like me, would falsely believe he had survived the trip."

https://aeon.co/ideas/if-i-teleport-from-mars-does-the-original-me-get-destroyed

Letture lunghe: come è nato l'algoritmo per vincere agli scacchi

Money quote: "Contemporary accounts played the story as a Man vs. Machine battle, the quick wits of a human versus the brute computing power of a supercomputer. But Tinsley and Schaeffer both agreed: This was a battle between two men, each having prepared and tuned a unique instrument to defeat the other. Having been so dominant against humans for so long, Tinsley seemed to thrill at finally having some entity that could give him a real game. He had volunteered to play friendly matches against the computer in the run-up to their two world championship matches. And Schaeffer, though he was a bull-headed young man, had become the most effective promoter of Tinsley’s prowess and legacy"

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/marion-tinsley-checkers/534111/?single_page=true

Come giornalista che si occupa di mercati della tecnologia il pezzo sul costo della memoria l'avrò scritto almeno sette od otto volte in quindici anni. Non sono il solo, comunque. Anche negli Usa è un classico stagionale, un po' come la foto di quelli che con il gran caldo d'estate fanno il bagno nella fontana in mezzo alla piazza della città.

La novità è che adesso il prezzo è livellato, forse siamo al costo puro per gigabyte: più sotto non si può andare.

Money quote: "For hard drive prices, the race to zero is over: nobody won. For the past 35+ years or so, hard drives prices have dropped, from around $500,000 per gigabyte in 1981 to less than $0.03 per gigabyte today. This includes the period of the Thailand drive crisis in 2012 that spiked hard drive prices. Matthew Komorowski has done an admirable job of documenting the hard drive price curve through March 2014 and we’d like to fill in the blanks with our own drive purchase data to complete the picture. As you’ll see, the hard drive pricing curve has flattened out."

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

Un grafico che spiega velocemente il calo con l'appiattimento della curva decrescente

http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update