Una brutta sorpresa: se pensate che nel mondo ci si fa largo sulla base del merito, pensate ancora. Perché non è così. (Né dobbiamo pensarlo, perché poi è peggio)

Money quote: "Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 per cent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.

Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing."

https://aeon.co/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you

Tenere un diario. Che sia tradizionale, Bullet Journal o altro, sono convinto sempre più che abbia senso. Questo articolo è piuttosto lungo e articolato. Non è detto per questo che abbia senso, e la metodologia che spiega a me interessa fino a un certo punto, però può essere utile a chi voglia ripensare/pensare il proprio rapporto con la scrittura - e usare carta e penna è d'obbligo secondo me - partendo da questo approccio strutturato e motivato.

Money quote: "I decided to introduce the insights that I was gaining from my work and from my personal therapy journey into my journaling practice.

I call the framework I came up with cognitive journaling, since the main ideas behind it derive from cognitive psychology."

https://betterhumans.pub/cognitive-journaling-a-systematic-method-to-overcome-negative-beliefs-119be459842c

La storia è molto semplice per le medie e secondarie: nelle scuole si usano sempre più i computer, con connessioni filtrate e app limitate. Tuttavia, uno dei software gratuiti che tutti usano è Google Docs. E dentro Google Docs c'è la chat. È diventata il canale segreto degli adolescenti.

Money quote: "As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along with the lesson plan. The students, however, are using it to organize running conversations behind teachers’ backs."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hottest-chat-app-teens-google-docs/584857/

Ragionamenti sul perché cancellare tutti i propri social e mandare al diavolo 60mila follower così, come se non valessero niente. (E in effetti...)

Money quote: "Aside from the social media affecting the type of work that I create, there is also the human element to consider. Personally, I am someone who gleans much of my information through external data points. I overthink everything. This makes social media a minefield for someone like me. I would analyze likes and follows and unfollows and draw conclusions based on what were likely benign engagements, and I would arrive at concrete and final conclusions that negatively impacted real-life relationships.

It sucked, to put it mildly."

https://petapixel.com/2019/02/19/why-i-deleted-all-of-my-social-media-and-60000-followers/

Back to basics. Sette cose utili a tutti quelli che manipolano grosse quantità di dati su una macchina Linux/Unix/macOS

Money quote: "This is the selected list, probably in the order of most frequent usage:
grep
cat
find
head/tail
wc
awk
shuf
In addition, it is shown how two auxiliary commands (xargs and man) can improve even further the usability of the 7 commands above."

https://neowaylabs.github.io/programming/unix-shell-for-data-scientists/

Uno strano, strano ragionamento sulle generazioni. Ma strano, eh

Money quote: "What I’ve observed on campus—and what Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in our book—is that there’s an increasing tendency to define, to look at any place where there’s not numerical parity, where any group is underrepresented relative to the population and to say, “that is unjust.” And any social scientist who’s thinking in any other domain would say, “well, no, wait a second. You have to know the pipeline. You have to know how many people were trying to get in, were people treated differently because of their group membership?”"

http://nautil.us/issue/70/variables/the-well_meaning-bad-ideas-spoiling-a-generation

Quando la computer science è più science che non solo computer.

Money quote: "A quine is a fixed point of an execution environment, when the execution environment is viewed as a function transforming programs into their outputs. Quines are possible in any Turing complete programming language, as a direct consequence of Kleene's recursion theorem. For amusement, programmers sometimes attempt to develop the shortest possible quine in any given programming language."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)

Il futuro degli Animali fantastici è relativamente sicuro - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/04/animali-fantastici-3-segreti-silente/

Gare di piccolezza

Money quote: "I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article "A Minimal Ray Tracer" from the book Graphics Gems IV).

The goal was to produce the source code for a raytracer...that would fit on the back of a business card."

https://fabiensanglard.net/rayTracing_back_of_business_card/

Il romanzo più bello di tutti. Ma proprio di tutti tutti tutti.

Money quote: "“If we concede that human life can be governed by reason, then the possibility of life is destroyed,” the book’s epilogue instructs. Even more than their Western European counterparts, Russians were obsessed with establishing a hard social science, as certain as physics. Any Western theory that promised such certainty found enthusiastic Russian supporters. In England, utilitarianism supported moderate liberalism, but by the 1860s Russians took it as proof of revolutionary socialism. The French positivist Auguste Comte, who coined the term “sociology,” originally planned to call his new discipline “social physics.” His Russian followers presumed that this “physics” already existed. Of course, Marxism—or “scientific socialism”—would eventually triumph over its rivals."

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/3/the-greatest-of-all-novels

Una console fatta in casa. Ma proprio tutta in casa.

Money quote: "This post serves as an introduction to a “homebrew” video game console made from scratch, using a lot of inspiration from retro consoles and modern projects but with a unique architecture.
Some friends of mine have told me again and again not to keep this project to myself and to put this information online, so here it goes."

https://internalregister.github.io/2019/03/14/Homebrew-Console.html

Ieri era il primo maggio ma nonostante tutto Mostly Weekly, la mia newsletter, è uscita come ogni domenica. Se volete potete leggerla anche qui:

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/165/

C'è tutta una matematica dello sviluppo cellulare che ignoravamo

Money quote: "Cells in embryos need to make their way across a “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate. New findings bear on how they may do this so efficiently."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-tells-cells-what-they-are-20190313/

È arrivato il multiverso della follia e Doctor Strange ci è dentro fino al collo - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/05/doctor-strange-multiverso-follia-recensione-film/

A me il mare aperto terrorizza. È profondo, e se ci caschi dentro pian piano vai fino in fondo. Questa è la storia della ricerca di una portaerei americana affondata durante la Seconda guerra mondiale nel Mar dei Coralli. Brrrr.

Money quote: "The ocean is also frighteningly deep. Much of the bottom of the Coral Sea, where the Wasp went down, lies between 4,000 and 6,000 meters, in what is known as the abyssal zone: a lightless realm characterized by frigid water temperatures, scant animal life and crushing atmospheric pressure. (Below 6,000 meters, in the oceanic trenches, the deepest part of the ocean, is known as the hadal zone; it is truly the underworld.)

It can be hard to grasp the profundity of the abyss. You could imagine its depth as being between eight and 12 Freedom Towers, stacked one on top of another; or, at the higher end of the range, one Denali. But even thinking about the distance to the ocean floor in terms of height is ultimately unhelpful, because to imagine skyscrapers or mountains is to imagine them made visible by light, and the sea is entirely dark below about 1,000 meters. While I was on board the Petrel, the concept that I found most vivid and unsettling was the idea of “sinking time.” When the crew dropped a transponder fitted with a 60-pound weight from the deck of the Petrel, it took more than an hour to reach the bottom."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/magazine/uss-wasp-lost-world-war-ii-aircraft-carrier.html

Strategie computazionali. Stiamo per tornare ai sistemi monolitici?

Money quote: "It feels like we’re starting to pass the peak of the hype cycle of microservices. It’s no longer multiple times a week we now see a blog post of “How I migrated my monolith to 150 services”. Now I often hear a bit more of the counter: “I don’t hate my monolith, I just care that things stay performant”. We’ve actually seen some migrations from micro-services back to a monolith. When you go from one large application to multiple smaller services there are a number of new things you have to tackle, here is a rundown of all the things that were simple that you now get to re-visit:"

http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2019/03/13/give-me-back-my-monolith

Una storia d'amore alquanto improbabile ma delicata, antica, fragile: un bel documentario presentato dal New Yorker.

Money quote: "In “Coby and Stephen Are in Love,” the co-directors, Carlo Nasisse and Luka Yuanyuan Yang, movingly recount the story of this unlikely pair. Separated by age, cultural milieu, and temperament—he romantic and unconventional, she no-nonsense and more focussed—King and Yee nonetheless forged a lasting bond, on the dance floor and off."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/an-aging-burlesque-dancers-unlikely-romance

Come si gioca a PacMan? Come si gioca a PacMan? Lo sapete? Secondo me no. Una fantastica etnografia che la mussa, la mussa, la mussa nella zagola come se non ci fosse un domani. A me l'approccio Sherazade alle volte fa (molta) fatica come lettore, ma da autore lo capisco molto molto bene.

Money quote: "Human beings leave physical impressions upon the things they love and use just as much as their do upon the lives of people and the planet they live upon. For every action, there’s a reaction. For every pressure, there’s an affect on mass and volume. And in the impressions left by that combination, particularly if you’re lucky enough to see the sides of a rare, unrestored vintage Pac-Man cabinet, lies the never before told story of how we really played the game.

Until now, I don’t believe anyone has ever written about it."

https://retrobitch.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/pac-man-the-untold-story-of-how-we-really-played-the-game/

Anni fa intervistai il Ceo di Mozilla, a Parigi. Alla fine mi chiese: "Hai qualche idea da suggerirmi per il nostro futuro?" Nel tempo ci ho ripensato varie volte. Non me l'aspettavo: avrei dovuto proporgli temi come la collaborazione, la gestione delle identità, la creazione di una piattaforma per quelli che all'epoca si chiamavano widget e presto sarebbero diventate app da browser. L'avessi fatto, questa sarebbe stata figlia della mia idea.

Money quote: "Introducing Firefox Send, Providing Free File Transfers while Keeping your Personal Information Private"

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/03/12/introducing-firefox-send-providing-free-file-transfers-while-keeping-your-personal-information-private/

Dove si colloca temporalmente Doctor Strange nel Multiverso della follia rispetto alle altre produzioni del Marvel Cinematic Universe?

👉 https://fumettologica.it/2022/05/doctor-strange-multiverso-della-follia-marvel-cinematic-universe/