Mostly, I Write
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Storie e pensieri suoi e di altri, raccolti da Antonio Dini http://www.antoniodini.com
Per contatti su Telegram: @antoniodini
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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/
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/
Quel vecchio baco di WinRar. Ma proprio vecchio, eh?

Money quote: "WinRAR, a Windows file compression program with 500 million users worldwide, recently fixed a more than 14-year-old vulnerability that made it possible for attackers to execute malicious code when targets opened a booby-trapped file.

The vulnerability was the result of an absolute path traversal flaw that resided in UNACEV2.DLL, a third-party code library that hasn’t been updated since 2005. The traversal made it possible for archive files to extract to a folder of the archive creator’s choosing rather than the folder chosen by the person using the program. Because the third-party library doesn’t make use of exploit mitigations such as address space layout randomization, there was little preventing exploits."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/nasty-code-execution-bug-in-winrar-threatened-millions-of-users-for-14-years/
Senza una lira, una svanzica, un euro. Niente. Cashless

Money quote: "It is very difficult already today to find an establishment where they accept cash. You have to be ready to pay by card or by the mobile application Swish."

https://interestingengineering.com/sweden-how-to-live-in-the-worlds-first-cashless-society
La fine del futuro: la morte del Mriya: la tragedia nella tragedia

Money quote: "In a hangar a few miles away rested the world’s largest airplane, so special that only one was ever built. Its name is Mriya, pronounced Mer-EE-ah, which in Ukrainian means The Dream. With its six jet engines, twin tail fins and a wingspan nearly as long as a football field, Mriya hauled gargantuan amounts of cargo across the world, mesmerizing crowds wherever it landed. It was an airplane celebrity, aviation enthusiasts say, and widely beloved. It was also a cherished symbol of Ukraine."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/world/europe/ukraine-airplane-russia-war-mriya.html
Una storia come non ne avevo mai letto. Incredibile: il libro che è affondato con il Titanic e poi è bruciato nel blitz.

Money quote: "A contemporary of that opinion was King Edward VII's librarian at Windsor Castle, Sir John Fortescue. He was among the first to be offered the chance to buy the Omar but declined, later describing it as "the most eminent failure, perhaps, that I ever saw", a work he found "absolutely inappropriate, ineffective and insignificant, and to me personally a positive distress"."

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-57683638
Se a un certo punto la paranoia vi brucia definitivamente il cervello e non vi fidate più neanche della Wayback machine dell'Internet Archive, fear no more: ecco la risposta autarchica per definizione. Codice sorgente e tutto il resto.

Money quote: "ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites (it saves HTML, JS, media files, PDFs, images and more)."

https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox
Learning by doing. È la regola di alcuni settori, ad esempio quello aerospaziale. Ma vale anche per il software. Così, per fare un altro esempio, per capire bene bene come funziona Git forse si potrebbe riscriverlo...

Money quote: "This article is an attempt at explaining the Git version control system from the bottom up, that is, starting at the most fundamental level moving up from there. This does not sound too easy, and has been attempted multiple times with questionable success. But there’s an easy way: all it takes to understand Git internals is to reimplement Git from scratch.

It’s not a joke, and it’s really not complicated: if you read this article top to bottom and write the code (or just clone the repository — but you should write the code yourself, really), you’ll end up with a program, called wyag, that will implement all the fundamental features of git: init, add, rm, status, commit, log… in a way that is perfectly compatible with git itself. The last commit of this article was actually created with wyag, not git. And all that in exactly 503 lines of very simple Python code."

https://wyag.thb.lt/
Un linguaggio di programmazione per fare arte con la matematica

Money quote: "Curv is a programming language for creating art using mathematics. It's a 2D and 3D geometric modelling tool that supports full colour, animation and 3D printing."

https://github.com/curv3d/curv
Avete bisogno di qualche bella immagine surreale per il vostro web? Search no more...

Money quote: "Each illustration offers the possibility of limitless interpretations and uses and everyone can give it its own meaning.

It depends only on each one's creativity and free spirit."

https://absurd.design
Un gioco da tavolo fatto con una profonda base etica. Sugli uccelli

Money quote: "Aiming to design a game with scientific integrity, Ms. Hargrave pulled data on North American birds from eBird, a citizen-science project managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She also made use of the lab’s All About Birds website, as well as Audubon’s online guide."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/wingspan-board-game-elizabeth-hargrave.html
È arrivato il momento che giochiamo tutti a Dwarf Fortress

Money quote: "Dwarf Fortress, the famously complex and often inscrutable colony simulation, is coming to Steam and itch.io. The new version will be published by Kitfox Games, a Montreal-based independent studio, and will include graphics, music, sounds, and Steam Workshop integration. An ASCII-based mode will still be available in this new version, and development of the original game will continue unabated."

https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/13/18263905/dwarf-fortress-steam-graphics-workshop

E poi: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/