Mostly, I Write
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Storie e pensieri suoi e di altri, raccolti da Antonio Dini http://www.antoniodini.com
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Un progetto ambizioso che rischia di finire nel niente (causa sottovalutazione della sua complessità) ma che ha una vocazione eroica e meritevole. Un programmatore di Seattle ha deciso di creare un videogioco in rete in maniera collaborativa. Lo scopo è quello di insegnare alle giovani generazioni di programmatori tecniche avanzate per la creazione di forme di intrattenimento videoludico. Attenzione, niente di legato a interfacce o gameplay, bensì tecnicalità sulle tecniche di programmazione che non vengono mai insegnate a scuola e che tengono il settore sotto scacco. Interessante, utopico e al tempo stesso faticoso.

Money quote:

Game programmers need to start creating high-quality teaching materials for their trade. While most game programmers frequently post about specific algorithms they've discovered, few ever post about the programming methodologies they have found to be effective, nor about how they approach the general problems inherent in developing a large, complex game codebase. As a result, novice game programmers looking to learn the basics of programming must rely on materials from other industries that are often of dubious quality.

Personally, I have found most resources that purport to teach people how to "program properly" actually teach primarily bad programming practices. The copious emails I received from college students around the world in response to a post I made about compression-oriented programming confirmed for me that there are many young programmers out there whose progress is being hamstrung by bad learning materials. This project is an attempt to provide one high-quality alternative, and perhaps to convince other experienced game programmers to think about what they could do to help teach the next generation of game programmers how to program well.

https://handmadehero.org

In ogni caso il video è piacevole:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=A2dxjOjWHxQ
Per quelli che credono che "all that glitters is gold", il lavoro nelle HR di Google, azienda in cui è più difficile entrare che ad Harvard.

Money quote: "HR “specialists” don’t participate in second-round interviews. We merely collect times of availability from candidates and then wait for the results. If a second interview goes well, we hand off the candidate to another recruiter. If it doesn’t go well? TextExpander: semicolon followed by “NO” populates a sympathetic four-paragraph rejection email. We then return to step one: LinkedIn."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/10/17/my-google-job-was-tedious-and-pointless/
Ma poi, non so se ve lo siete mai chiesto: perché gli Stati Uniti, che sono uno dei paesi più ricchi al mondo, non hanno un servizio sanitario pubblico degno di questo nome che offra assistenza universale come accade, ad esempio, in Italia? Le cose ovviamente sono parecchio complicate e la storia è paradossale. I motivi sono diversi da quelli che potreste immaginare.

Money quote: “It wasn’t one moment, says Karen Palmer, professor of health science at Simon Fraser University, but rather, “a series of decisions, turning points, and cascading events.” Though until World War I there had been some attempts by socially liberal governments to follow the examples of Germany and others, they were met with opposition from doctors, insurance companies, businesses, and even some conservative labor organizations, which considered state-sponsored health care paternalistic and unnecessary. Labor unions also worried that it would weaken their own bargaining power, says Palmer, as they were otherwise responsible for getting their members social services.

But the root of the current system, Palmer says, can be found in World War II. In 1943 president Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed an effective freeze on labor wages, and companies started offering health and pension benefits as a way to retain workers instead. This was the beginning of employer-sponsored healthcare, though there was no government mandate to offer it (except in Hawaii). Unions began negotiating the benefits as part of what they could obtain for workers. The rest of the population wasn’t covered, but it meant the unions didn’t put pressure on the government to create a public health system.”

https://qz.com/1022831/why-doesnt-the-united-states-have-universal-health-care/
Cloni (o nuove versioni aumentate) open source di giochi relativamente noti. Attenzione: sono proprio tanti.

Money quote: "Since all these projects are open-source you can help them and make this world a better place. Or at least you can play something to appreciate the effort people put in them."

http://osgameclones.com
Dolci storie di cuccioli di orso polare

Money quote: “She was the size of a squirrel, deaf and blind. Translucent fur barely covered her pink skin. Soft paws paddled against the straw, and her nose led her in one direction: toward her mother.”

http://projects.oregonlive.com/projectnora/1-3/
David Hume e Adam Smith sono due filosofi e pensatori che più hanno influenzato il nostro tempo, alla base del pensiero economico e sociale moderno. Hume in particolare è stato anche un ateo imperterrito, sino alla fine.

Money quote: “As the Scottish philosopher David Hume lay on his deathbed in the summer of 1776, his passing became a highly anticipated event. Few people in 18th-century Britain were as forthright in their lack of religious faith as Hume was, and his skepticism had earned him a lifetime of abuse and reproach from the pious, including a concerted effort to excommunicate him from the Church of Scotland. Now everyone wanted to know how the notorious infidel would face his end. Would he show remorse or perhaps even recant his skepticism? Would he die in a state of distress, having none of the usual consolations afforded by belief in an afterlife? In the event, Hume died as he had lived, with remarkable good humour and without religion”

philosopher and infidel | Aeon Ideas
https://aeon.co/ideas/he-died-as-he-lived-david-hume-philosopher-and-infidel
Una idea che secondo me (e non solo secondo me) sarebbe esportabile anche in altri ambiti: il blocco degli appunti (diciamo anche: il diario di bordo personale) del software engineering

Money quote: "To deal with the newbie developer info-flood, I went back to the concept of a ‘software engineering lab notebook’. At first, I jotted down commands needed to setup proper compilation flags for the dev environment and how to run the build locally to debug errors. A bit later, I started jotting down diagrams of the internals of the systems I was working on and summaries of code snippets that I had found particularly thorny to understand. Sometimes these notes proved indispensable in under-stress debug scenarios when I needed to quickly revisit what was happening in a particular area of the codebase without the luxury of a long debug."

http://winterflower.github.io/2017/08/17/software-engineering-notebook/
Parlare male, perché la lingua nella quale ci stiamo esprimendo è una seconda lingua acquisita più avanti nel corso della nostra vita, ha più vantaggi di quello che non sembra. Primo fra tutti, la possibilità di avere un trattamento di favore da parte di chi è invece nativo.

Money quote: “Thus it might come as a surprise that, in 1980, Henry Kissinger (the former US secretary of state and a non-native English speaker, originally from Germany) told Arianna Huffington (the Greek immigrant and entrepreneur/writer who would eventually start The Huffington Post) not to worry about [her] accent, ‘because you can never, in American public life, underestimate the advantages of complete and total incomprehensibility’.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-unexpected-benefits-of-getting-lost-in-translation
L’approccio quantitativo supportato da tecnologie che consentono quello che viene definito il “quantified self movement”, ha un grosso problema: uccide la possibilità di pensiero profondo, e ogni approccio puramente qualitativo.

Money quote: “The stringent requirement for measurement limits learning in two ways: first, tasks are tightly structured and centred on closed problems with definite solutions. These tasks tease out only a sliver of students’ thinking skills. Second, detours are rarely permitted on the learning journey. Students have scarce opportunity to explore new terrain — say, more open-ended problems — because this form of learning is not so easily measured”

https://hackernoon.com/the-quantified-self-movement-may-sound-the-death-knell-of-deep-thinking-c771be8dc30f
Forwarded from MacchiaChannel via @like
Il New York Times ha utilizzato tecniche forensi per raccogliere tutti i video girati al momento della sparatoria al Mandalay Bay a Los Angeles, sincronizzando i rumori degli spari tra un video amatoriale e l’altro e quelli girati dalla polizia. Alla fine ha confezionato uno spettacolare e inquietante documento di 10 minuti che ricostruisce secondo per secondo gli avvenimenti di quella sera.

Link: https://www.facebook.com/nytimes/videos/1931805993703580/
Siamo in un periodo di profonda crisi che, secondo alcuni, è una crisi sistemica. Parte del problema è l'incapacità di produrre anticorpi e di governare il cambiamento, di evolvere. La crisi sistemica del capitalismo è legata anche alla sua incapacità di essere autoriflessivo. L'animale, dopotutto, è cieco...

Money quote: "Je ne peux pas croire que l’existence d’une autre possibilité, d’une autre stratégie, puisse être incarnée par un mouvement électoral. Le parlementarisme est la formule politique ajustée à la domination capitaliste, et rien d’autre"

http://www.investigaction.net/fr/entretien-avec-alain-badiou-22-democratie-et-medias/
Il mito delle tartarughe che reggono il mondo (letteralmente) è molto antico e diffuso ovunque. Ne parlano in tutte le culture primitive ed è entrato a pieno titolo anche nella modernità (avete presente Discworld di Terry Pratchett?). Quali sono le ragioni e la storia di questo mito?

Considero questo tipo di letture un balsamo dopo la raffica di ovvietà sparate quotidianamente dai media, compresa quella di ieri e oggi su Anna Frank: insopportabile.

Money quote: "In a 1974 issue of the anthropological journal Man, the scholar Jay Miller provides some thoughts on what makes the turtle such a popular world bearer, writing, “I viewed the turtle as a logical choice for such an atlantean because its shape and appearance were suited to this role.” But he goes on to write, specifically of the Lenape belief in a world turtle, that the creature also mirrored aspects that they valued in their culture, such as perseverance and longevity. And that idea doesn’t just apply to the cosmic turtle in Lenape culture. “With intensive research, the above analysis should also apply for other societies that place the earth on the back of a turtle.” Most turtles and tortoises are also famously long-lived, giving them a wise, ancient quality that lends itself to mythologizing."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/world-turtle-cosmic-discworld
Storie di chi produce gli iPhone nelle fabbriche cinesi di Foxconn

Money quote: "We could keep going, but to our left, we see what look like large housing complexes, probably the dormitories, complete with cagelike fences built out over the roof and the windows, and so we head in that direction. The closer we get to the dorms, the thicker the crowds get and the more lanyards and black glasses and faded jeans and sneakers we see. College-age kids are gathered, smoking cigarettes, crowded around picnic tables, sitting on kerbs."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract
Se volete giocare con i circuiti, cioè con la logica booleana (una delle pietre angolari sulle quali è fondata tutta l'informatica), qui c'è il lavoro di alcuni studenti olandesi che è veramente di livello. Adatto per tutte le età.

Money quote: "BOOLR is a digital logic simulator. We are three Dutch high school students in our final year and we are doing a project about digital logic. To make our own digital logic circuits we have built BOOLR, which we have created with JavaScript and lots of love. BOOLR works with Windows, Mac OS and Linux and it is completely free."

http://boolr.me
Stiamo entrando in una età dell’oro dell’archeologia sottomarina. Con le nuove tecnologie sul fondo del Mar Nero sta venendo fuori di tutto, in eccellenti condizioni di conservazione. Parliamo di decine di navi mercantili di età ellenistica e romana.

Money quote: “According to the press release, the wrecks survive in such good condition because at a certain depth the Black Sea has anoxic, or oxygen-free, conditions preventing decay. Many of the ships sit at the bottom of the sea with their masts upright, their rudders still at the ready and their cargo bays full of untouched goods. For maritime historians it’s a gold mine since the wrecks have artifacts that most researchers have only read about or seen drawings of.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/another-fleet-ancient-ships-discovered-black-sea-180964978/?no-ist
Il pensiero che le blockchain non siano una cosa vera ha sfiorato la mente di molti. Ma negli ultimi mesi, direi addirittura settimane, questo pensiero sta evaporando. Ormai pensare che le blockchain siano vaporware lo pensano solo i notai italiani (e neanche tutti).

Money quote: "Google’s venture capital firm Alphabet came in as the world’s second biggest corporate investor, behind the Japanese finance giant SBI Holdings. Alphabet invested in companies such as Ripple and the trading platform LedgerX, both of which work with cryptocurrency. The American banks Citi and Goldman Sachs also ranked in the top five firms, investing in startups like Digital Asset Holdings, which has reportedly raised $110 million so far under the leadership of former JPMorgan Chase executive Blythe Masters. JPMorgan Chase invested in Masters’ startup as well, while simultaneously funding development for the open source blockchain platform Quorum."

http://www.ibtimes.com/google-citi-goldman-sachs-among-blockchains-biggest-investors-2603162

Qui uno spiegone per quelli relativamente inclinati alle tecnologie su cosa sono e come funzionano le blockchain

https://unwttng.com/what-is-a-blockchain
Amazon è come il software: si sta mangiando il mondo del retail e non solo. Ma ci sono alcune attività commerciali che sono immuni dal modello studiato da Jeff Bezos. No, non sto parlando del più antico mestiere del mondo (che peraltro non è detto sia immune). C'è anche altro...

Money quote: "As for home furnishings, Amazon’s challenge will be to overcome people’s desire to see and examine these items up close before purchasing. It’s easy to buy something like toilet paper or a book online, sight unseen. But the curtains that will hang from your living-room window—you’re probably going to want to examine those pretty closely before committing."

https://qz.com/1102505/the-businesses-amazon-is-most-likely-to-struggle-to-take-over/