Tra religione e superstizione: tutti i culti della Silicon Valley - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2017/11/24/tecnologia/idee/tra-religione-e-superstizione-tutti-i-culti-della-silicon-valley-xAcl2s8nyrf24dhzk3mYPL/amphtml/pagina.amp.html

Ah, finalmente dieci buoni consigli per gli aspiranti scrittori. Non gli autori, i saggisti, i creatori di codice o qualsiasi altra attività vi venga in mente che coinvolge una tastiera. No. Scrittori. Neanche poeti. Scrittori.

Money quote:

“2- The beginning of the book should rope the reader in. It has to be exciting and fun to read in order to hook the reader into reading on.

Again, complete crap. The reader should have to work hard to get into the book. Don’t make things too easy to comprehend. Overcoming difficulties and struggling makes things more worthwhile. Make the reader sweat a little; it might do her some good.”

https://curiosityneverkilledthewriter.com/the-worst-good-advice-ever-given-to-novelists-5c258dc2f1cd

I programmatori? Negli Usa a rischio, come gli scrittori - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/programmatori-negli-usa-rischio-gli-scrittori/

La cosa più bella vista in tv da parecchio tempo: BetterThings “Dance”

Ci risiamo, ecco di nuovo quelli che vogliono laptop iOS. E addirittura fisso... (con il presupposto che riescono a lavorare con iPad come se fosse un portatile).

Money quote: “I don’t know what they’d call it—can we bring back the iBook?—or what they’d charge for it. But I’d love to see it. And while we’re at it, yes, I’d also like Apple to make an iOS desktop in the style of the Microsoft Surface Studio. With all the improvements in iOS 11, it’s time to start considering all the places iOS can go that it hasn’t been able to go before”

https://www.macworld.com/article/3238186/laptop-computers/why-apples-next-laptop-should-run-ios.html

Una sorta di diario del Casanova nero, che nasce per il timore della di lui madre che le ragazze bianche possano approfittarsene (mandandolo in galera o peggio: negli Stati del Sud chi crede al ragazzo nero se la ragazza bianca si mette a urlare?) e finisce, beh finisce bene per tutti, direi, ragazze bianche incluse.

Money quote: “Okay, hold-up. I worry this confession may start to sound like a casual manual for female manipulation, one penned by a pickup artist. But you must understand, my goal was different. Which makes all the difference. You see, rather than figure out how to use women for my sexual gratification, rather than con women into bed, rather than mentally trick women into feeling some form of attraction, or worse coerce or flat-out debate their consent, my goal was to figure out how to offer myself to women to use for their sexual gratification. My thinking was simple: since I was a man, and thus far easier to arouse, I figured I’d be sexually gratified somehow in the process of getting her all the way off. And this approach worked very well. All it required was a small shift in perspective.”

https://medium.com/@zaron3/a-gentlemans-guide-to-sexual-misconduct-and-enthusiastic-consent-9a0b750bc93e

Non so se lo sapevate, ma Second Life è ancora viva e lotta assieme a noi

Money quote: "Second Life has no specific goals. Its vast landscape consists entirely of user-generated content, which means that everything you see has been built by someone else—an avatar controlled by a live human user. These avatars build and buy homes, form friendships, hook up, get married, and make money. They celebrate their “rez day,” the online equivalent of a birthday: the anniversary of the day they joined. At church, they cannot take physical communion—the corporeality of that ritual is impossible—but they can bring the stories of their faith to life. At their cathedral on Epiphany Island, the Anglicans of Second Life summon rolling thunder on Good Friday, or a sudden sunrise at the moment in the Easter service when the pastor pronounces, “He is risen.” As one Second Life handbook puts it: “From your point of view, SL works as if you were a god.”"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/

Apple, ecco come dovresti fare i tuoi MacBook Pro - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/apple-ecco-come-dovresti-fare-i-tuoi-macbook-pro/

Sta scoppiando la bolla del bike-sharing?

Money quote: “Just two days after China’s number three bike sharing company went bankrupt, a photographer in the south-eastern city of Xiamen captured a bicycle graveyard where thousands have been laid to rest. The pile clearly contains thousands of bikes from each of the top three companies, Mobike, Ofo and the now-defunct Bluegogo”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/25/chinas-bike-share-graveyard-a-monument-to-industrys-arrogance

Wired Usa spiega bene cosa vuol dire la fine della Net Neutrality negli Usa - e in parte anche nel resto del mondo.

Money quote: "Because many internet services for mobile devices include limits on data use, the changes will be visible there first. In one dramatic scenario, internet services would begin to resemble cable-TV packages, where subscriptions could be limited to a few dozen sites and services. Or, for big spenders, a few hundred. Fortunately, that’s not a likely scenario. Instead, expect a gradual shift towards subscriptions that provide unlimited access to certain preferred providers while charging extra for everything else."

https://www.wired.com/story/heres-how-the-end-of-net-neutrality-will-change-the-internet/

Perso quasi quattro milioni di Bitcoin su poco più di sedici.

Money quote: “In the future, more bitcoins will be lost. But the rate at which they disappear will be much lower than in the past since, now that they’re so valuable, people will be more vigilant about keeping track of them (unlike this poor fellow out who threw away a hard drive with the key to 7,500 bitcoins). Meanwhile, there is a question of whether the Chainalysis findings mean bitcoin is more scarce than people assume—or if the market has already priced the missing coins into the currency’s current value.”

http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/

“Shangri-La”, la space opera di Mathieu Bablet | il mio articolo per Fumettologica

http://www.fumettologica.it/2017/11/shangri-la-mathieu-bablet-mondadori-recensione/

Confondiamo gli effetti con le cause. Il problema non sono i movimenti e i leader populisti o il crollo della consapevolezza e del tessuto sociale, ma l’ignoranza alla quale ci stiamo abbandonando.

Questo articolo, che noi etichetteremmo come “bla bla bla sull’analfabetismo funzionale oltretutto americano” (credetemi, penso di sapere come ragiona un giornale), è una delle letture più importanti del 2017. Dentro c’è tutto quello che ci servirebbe.

Questa è la premessa:

Money quote: “Many of these poor readers can sound out words from print, so in that sense, they can read. Yet they are functionally illiterate — they comprehend very little of what they can sound out. So what does comprehension require? Broad vocabulary, obviously. Equally important, but more subtle, is the role played by factual knowledge”

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/sunday/how-to-get-your-mind-to-read.html

Questa è la cosa interessante:

Money quote 2: “Don’t blame the internet, or smartphones, or fake news for Americans’ poor reading. Blame ignorance. Turning the tide will require profound changes in how reading is taught, in standardized testing and in school curriculums. Underlying all these changes must be a better understanding of how the mind comprehends what it reads.”

Una pensatrice fenomenale e semi-sconosciuta anche a chi si occupa del suo campo, la filosofia morale: Philippa Foot

Money quote: "There is a clue in her reference to moral philosophy. For at least the past 200 years, people who have thought about these things have suspected – or hoped – that morality is the one thing that sets human beings apart from nature (or should one say, the rest of nature?). Nature is the realm of laws, stern and unbreakable, and morality that of freedom. Nature is how things are, morality how they ought to be. If there’s anything to these points of contrast, then what seems at first a mere platitude sounds more like an absurdity. We are not, in the relevant sense, part of nature – not even of that part of nature that consists in our fellow animals, and, still less, plants.

Have we anything to learn about morality from plants? This might well depend on that bigger question: are we, or aren’t we, part of nature? One of the many things that set Foot and her allies in philosophy apart from others of their generation was their refusal to make an either/or of it."

https://aeon.co/essays/how-philippa-foot-set-her-mind-against-prevailing-moral-philosophy

Tosto e non tutto condivisibile (ma cosa lo è?), però necessario: le quattro cose che ogni donna deve sapere nella cultura dello stupro.

Money quote: "Money was created by men, for men, to reward men’s skills. That didn’t matter a few decades ago when marriage meant the men who owned women provided food and shelter for them in a kind of quasi-slave relationship.

It matters a lot now. Women are told they are free, but so much of the work they do and the value they bring is deliberately ignored by our only valuing system. This fact alone puts invisible pressure on women to partner."

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/rape-culture-four-things-every-woman-needs-to-know-63961098eb85

Alcune considerazioni molto ragionevoli centrate sull’idea che anche l’acqua, quando è troppa, fa male.

Money quote: “Questa è la logica alla base di un consiglio attribuito all’investitore Warren Buffett: prima scrivi quali sono i tuoi 25 obiettivi principali nella vita, poi individua i cinque più importanti, concentrati su questi ed evita gli altri 20 come la peste, perché sono quelli che rischiano di distrarti di più, proprio perché contano, ma non sono le tue priorità.”

https://www.internazionale.it/opinione/oliver-burkeman/2017/11/28/tv-social-network-dipendenze

Che sia la volta buona e stia arrivando la fine dei social così come li conosciamo? E magari anche delle serie tv, aggiungerei speranzoso...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/the-end-of-the-social-era-twitter-facebook-snapchat

Money quote 1: “Will a future generation look back in 10, 20, or maybe 100 years from now and wonder, mystifyingly, why a generation of humans believed in these platforms despite mounting evidence that they were tearing society apart—being used as terrorist recruitment tools, facilitating bullying, driving up anxiety, and undermining our elections—despite the obvious benefits and facilitations they provide? Indeed, some of the people who gave us these platforms are already beginning to wonder if this is the case. Last month, I wrote a piece detailing how some early Facebook employees now feel about the monster they have created. As one early Facebook employee told me, “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way.””

Money quote 2: “Yes, it’s true that we’ve heard this all before—that people are abandoning social media, that the platforms are doomed. The New York Times has written variations on that story so many times over, it could have been a standing column in the business section of the paper. But I do believe that this time is different, the beginning of a massive shift, and I believe it’s the fault of these social networks”

Men’s Health esiste ancora e pubblica articolo... beh stile Men’s Health. Come questo sull’orgasmo femminile che sarebbe un’ottima cura per molti mali. Donne, oggetti misteriosi...

Money quote: “Her focus: sex as a way to promote general health—as a treatment for depression, chronic pain, sleep disorders, even arthritis. Someday, Prause says, doctors could prescribe masturbation. “Natural, free, accessible—what more do you want from your health care?” she asks me.”

https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/inside-the-orgasm-lab

Tutte le novità delle “nuvola” di Amazon. Il machine learning è più facile - il mio articolo per il Sole 24 ORE

http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/tecnologie/2017-11-30/tutte-novita-nuvola-amazon-machine-learning-e-piu-facile-103807.shtml