Mostly, I Write

E se l'AI avesse una traiettoria paragonabile a quella di Kubernetes? (una roba un po' tecnica da sapere prima, lo ammetto, però il concetto se leggete l'articolo viene fuori chiaro chiaro) Money quote: "Once that happened, innovation moved to Kubernetes. Whatever the platform was missing, someone started building: networking, storage, observability, deployment tools, policy engines. A large number of startups were created, and legacy vendors joined in as well. Almost every component required to run Kubernetes in production became available as open source. Cloud providers and companies including Mesosphere/D2iQ, Rancher, Red Hat and Nutanix then built businesses around integration, enterprise features, support and operations. Kubernetes did not win simply because its repository was public. It became a neutral substrate that engineers, cloud providers and enterprise vendors could all extend to fit their customers’ needs. Common interfaces and vendor-neutral governance gave everyone confidence that they could build on it. The lesson I took away wasn’t that open source always wins. It was that once an open platform that people can customize becomes the industry’s center of gravity, no single vendor can match the combined rate of innovation around it. I think AI is approaching the same point." https://tobi.knaup.me/2026-07-25-open-weight-ai-is-having-its-kubernetes-moment/

La domesticazione delle nuove tecnologie passa anche attraverso articoli come questi: l'inchiesta del Wall Street Journal che svela al mondo il modo con il quale i "giovani" usano l'AI a scuola, al lavoro e tra di loro. Money quote: "Niharika Abbaraju uses artificial intelligence in her work as a cancer researcher. But when she leaves the lab, the tool becomes her conversation coach. ChatGPT helps her draft pickup lines for dating apps and icebreakers for parties. She’ll even, at times, fire it up to formulate a response to the person standing next to her. When the conversation shifts to an unfamiliar book or article, for instance, Abbaraju will call up an AI summary. The vibe she’s going for: “Like, I read sometimes,” she says. It isn’t that Abbaraju can’t think for herself, she says. AI just makes things smoother. Abbaraju, 20, is part of a growing cohort of young adults outsourcing deeply human tasks to AI. Many, struggling with social anxieties great or small, will seek assistance ahead of a face-to-face encounter. Others let their bots script their text messages and even mediate their dating lives as a digital Cyrano de Bergerac." https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-chatbot-in-person-social-interactions-d1cb6831 archivio: https://archive.is/3vzvm

Ho ritrovato per caso questo articolo che parla del quarantesimo anniversario di Xanadu, la colonna sonora del film omonimo con Olivia Newton-John e Gene Kelly (il film) e gli ELO (la colonna sonora). Era il 1980, quindi sono 46 anni adesso. Mi sono messo a riascoltarlo ed è stato come fare un giro nella macchina del tempo. Wow. Money quote: "The film was camp beyond belief and whilst people like myself had been calling it iconic well before its recent resurgence of popularity, that ever-present wrongdoing tag that ends up in things being labeled “iconic,” seems to have finally found its cultish way to Xanadu. The film was Gene Kelly’s last cinematic role and the soundtrack, the subject of this retrospective, includes performances by ELO (Electric Light Orchestra), Cliff Richard and of course the star of it all, Olivia Newton-John. Whilst the film barely broke even at the box office and received mostly negative reviews, the soundtrack ended up being something of a smash success." https://www.beyondtheencore.com/retrospectives/olivia-newton-john-amp-electric-light-orchestras-xanadu-soundtrack-turns-40-anniversary-retrospective

Da un bel po' su Instagram inciampo in tizi che fanno cose di bricolage usando tonnellate di resina epossidica. Fighissimo e all'apparenza facilissimo. Be', lo è (anche se ovviamente bisogna prendere una serie di precauzioni e attenzioni nell'uso). Money quote: "Uno dei vantaggi più importanti della resina epossidica deriva dal fatto che il materiale non contiene solventi. Questa peculiare caratteristica ne permette l’uso in totale sicurezza, per molteplici applicazioni e in diversi ambienti. Il materiale è peraltro molto facile da usare, soprattutto perché una volta applicato si indurisce a freddo e non necessita di particolari attrezzature per raggiungere il giusto livello di induriment" https://www.vernicistore.it/la-resina-epossidica-come-si-usa-e-a-cosa-serve

Letture (e collezioni) per la domenica Stanno diventando parecchi (56 e crescono ancora) ma sono piccoli, deliziosi e soprattutto negli anni li ho comprati (quasi) tutti. Maledizione. Money quote: "Penguin’s Little Clothbound Classics series was first released on 25 August 2022 in the UK. The books are small-format editions of stories and short novels, bound in a similar style to the ever-popular Clothbound Classics series. It is a great little collection of stories, featuring plenty of classics you probably don’t already have in a nice format, which is an excellent breath of fresh air. The titles have been selected to celebrate a diversity of authors and genres, with locations ranging from “snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, or from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story set on the moon”." https://beautifulbooks.info/illustratedbibliographies/classic-fiction/penguin-little-clothbound-classics/

Un'idea se volete un hostname stabile in un ambiente con IP dinamici ma senza la fatica di tutta la gestione di un DNS. Sembra interessante. Money quote: "GoDNS gives you a DDNS endpoint that is fast to set up, easy to copy into clients, and ready to grow from a free test hostname to a paid custom label." https://godns.app

La bolla cinese dell'AI? Boh Money quote: "This is the backdrop for everything else in this essay, and it is the part that goes missing in the American version of the story. We talk about Chinese AI as though it were emerging from a uniform position of strength. However, the people building AI in China see it as the one sector the state has decided must work, propped up with abundant state-subsidized electricity, fast-tracked IPOs, and open encouragement of price wars with little regard for who survives. Perhaps a more true perspective is that it is the only engine of the Chinese economy that is working." https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-export-is-wasted

Per me è il regista giovane della mia adolescenza. Oggi è un vecchio senatore che produce ma gira anche. E ha fatto la storia del cinema commerciale. Ma poi, esiste veramente il cinema commerciale rispetto a quello d'autore? Perché Steve Spielberg è un genio anche tecnicamente: come muove la videocamera lui... In questo articolo c'è la sua storia, che non è male, raccontata da amici e parenti. Money quote: "George Lucas, friend and collaborator on the Indiana Jones franchise: The first thing they’d tell you at film school was that you’re never going to get to make movies. But that’s how we heard of Steven. He had sort of snuck onto the Universal lot, made friends with the guards, and then acted like he was actually supposed to be there." https://www.vulture.com/article/oral-history-of-steven-spielberg-and-his-movies.html archivio: https://archive.is/LLI3u

C'è qualcosa di marcio nel sistema, io ve lo dico. "Ad ascoltare il vento". Ma dai! Money quote: "La segretaria permanente dell'Accademia reale svedese Ingrid Carlberg ha detto che quando ha chiamato la poetessa era in Islanda. «Carson ha appreso la notizia del premio con gioia e sorpresa. Proprio pochi minuti fa sono riuscita a contattarla al telefono. Ne è rimasta davvero sorpresa. Non abbiamo avuto molto tempo per parlare. Ha avuto il tempo di dirmi che, al momento, si trova in Islanda, ad ascoltare il vento. È rimasta sorpresa, ma molto felice. Lo si capiva dalla sua voce»." https://www.vanityfair.it/article/nobel-letteratura-2026-anne-carson-audace-e-creativa

Letture per la domenica Gli Yuppies. Gli Yuppies! Ma ve li ricordate? Era l'accusa peggiore: paninaro da ragazzo e poi diventi yuppie da grande. Mamma mia. La loro storia, raccontata bene. Money quote: "When I’m giving a book talk or visiting a university class, I often begin my presentation with a straw poll: I’ll ask for members of the audience to raise their hand if they’ve heard the term “yuppie” before. As you suspected, there’s a clear generational divide. Almost all of the older folks–the Boomers and Gen Xers–will shoot their hands up. Millennials are about 50-50. Undergrads are generally clueless. This comes as no surprise: the yuppie as a media stereotype was coined way back in the early 1980s. It came into full flower in 1984, the year Newsweek magazine declared it the “Year of the Yuppie,” the headline printed above a Gary Trudeau cartoon of two urban professionals commuting in Central Park. Inside that issue, a series of articles painted a portrait of this new social type–the young people who were working in law and advertising firms, joining fitness clubs, moving into renovated condos, and using their American Express cards to pay for cases of Perrier. In some obscure way, yuppies represented the end of the radical optimism of the 1960s, as that energy turned inward towards careers and consumption. Even if their lifestyles were definitely aspirational, it was all a bit satirical, a bit tongue-in-cheek, just like the term itself. " https://www.patreon.com/CultureStudy/posts/youre-gonna-this-159867972

Ora scrivo una cosa originale, attenzione eh. Questa cosa dell'AI ci sta un po' scappando di mano. Ecco, l'ho detta. Money quote: “My p(doom) is low; my p(dystopia) is high.” https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-case-for-boycotting-generative

A parte l'app a pagamento, l'idea dietro al metodo per prendere appunti seguendo quel che fa Andrej Karpathy (co-fondatore di OpenAI) è intrigante. Soprattutto per lui, immagino. Money quote: "The append-and-review note is a note-taking method where you keep a single running note, add every new thought to the top, and scroll down now and then to review it. Anything that still deserves attention gets copied back to the top. Everything else sinks, "almost as if under gravity", in Karpathy's words, and stays searchable. He says the approach has worked for him "quite well for many years" and that it "captures the majority of day-to-day note taking use cases"." https://www.gravitynotes.app/blog/why-gravity-exists

Una lista praticamente infinita, un sogno per gli amanti dei graffiti legali su muri pubblici. E infatti è gestita dalla comunità in tutto il mondo, con circa 2.590 posizioni mappate in più di 70 paesi (persino l'Antartide!) Money quote: "legal-walls.net has been tracking 50 graffiti locations in Italy across 24 cities since 2008. 34 are legal, 7 require permission, 5 have closed and 4 have been reported as not legal. The Italy dataset received 5 updates in the last 12 months. The most recent update was in September 2026, when Muro Legale Sottopasso Ferroviario was added." https://www.legal-walls.net

Buone notizie dal fronte delle auto elettriche in Europa. Talmente buone che non le leggerete sui giornali (of course). Tra le altre cose: il numero di colonnine di ricarica pubblica per veicoli elettrici nell'UE è cresciuto di quasi otto volte dal 2020, raggiungendo 1,16 milioni entro giugno 2026, indicando che ci sono colonnine pubbliche sufficienti per la flotta attuale dell'UE in circolazione. Money quote: "Manufacturers of cars and trucks are largely on track to meet the EU’s carbon dioxide (CO2) standards for new vehicles, provided there are continued investments in the transition. For passenger cars, as of June 2026, auto manufacturers were less than 2 g CO2/km short of the average target of 93 g CO2/km for the 2025–2027 period (Figure 1, middle). Electric vehicles2 are a large part of the compliance strategy. Battery electric passenger cars reached a 22% share among new vehicle registrations in H1 2026, with strong performance in large passenger car markets like France (28% of new registrations) and Germany (26%), as well as several smaller markets like Belgium (36%) and Denmark (80%). Adoption has also picked up in Italy (8%) and Spain (10%; Figure 1, right). Not only is the market for new battery electric vehicles (BEVs) picking up, the used BEV market is also gaining momentum. In Germany, BEVs accounted for 5.6% of used car ownership transfers in H1 2026, up from 3.2% in H1 2025. For reference, the share for the full year 2025 was 3.6% (Figure 2).3" https://theicct.org/publication/ev-transition-check-2026/

AI. Qual è il contrario dell'apocalisse prossima ventura? Il senso di comunità. Money quote: “Call it conspiracy theorizing or savvy cynicism, but when the foxes hold a press conference about how the hens should do more to regulate them, there’s cause for wariness.” https://thewhitepages.net/p/the-opposite-of-the-apocalypse-is

Letture per la domenica Intervistare i dittatori. La Columbia Journalism Review si chiede, in questo lunghissimo articolo che è anche una sorta di testamento al metodo americano, molto procedurale, con cui lavora la stampa di quel Paese e che fa da standard per il resto del mondo libero, se intervistare i dittatori sia eticamente corretto, visto soprattutto i limiti che vengono solitamente messi a queste interviste (cosa chiedere e cosa no, i vincoli della libertà di riportare eccetera). Money quote: "Perhaps the greatest chronicler of dictators and autocrats is Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker. Over three decades, he has interviewed everyone from Augusto Pinochet to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hugo Chávez, whom he profiled twice. When I reached Anderson, he told me that when dictators grant an interview they are often thinking strategically. But they are also motivated by hubris, vanity, and a belief in their own persuasive powers. Anderson feeds their egos. Before sitting down for an interview, he typically spends weeks learning everything he can about an autocrat, visiting their hometown, talking to people with whom they grew up, understanding their beliefs and motivations. “I’m genuinely interested in knowing what they have to say,” Anderson told me. “I suspend a visible judgment or judgmentalism about whatever they’ve done while I’m with them, and that may put them at ease.” Pinochet agreed to an interview with Anderson at the urging of his daughter Lucía; at the time, she was seeking to soften his image while he was facing a possible indictment for human rights violations. Pinochet joked with Anderson that, as a student of history, he understood that “dictators never end up well.” Only days after the piece ran, on October 12, 1998, Pinochet was arrested on charges of genocide and terrorism." https://www.cjr.org/feature/should-journalists-interview-dictators-dan-rather-jon-lee-anderson-christiane-amanpour.php

Jason Fried è quello che ha fatto 37signals, quelli di Basecamp ed HEY. Si definisce un "imprenditore non seriale". Ha fatto un po' di coding aiutato dalla AI (ma non vibecoding alla cavolo, perché è un programmatore vero) e si è realizzato la sua videoscrittura personale. Il video parte un po' lento ma è decisamente interessante vedere una dopo l'altra tutte le funzioni. E poi dovrebbe diventare open source, a un certo punto. Ottimo. Money quote: "So this weekend I just made it myself, with Claude's help. It's called Write_On and the short video walks you through it. Essentially it's "alternative control" at the word, sentence, and paragraph level, plus a way to dim stuff back, and stash stuff near by. Not version control, but alternative control. You'll see what I mean when you watch the video below. So here it is. Write_On." https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7511470985133379584/

Mastercard, Visa, American Express. Tutti si stanno preparando per abilitare i pagamenti agentici (l'AI individua, esegue e finalizza l'acquisto online in totale autonomia). Cosa potrebbe andare storto? Money quote: "The efforts are setting the stage for what executives see as a rapidly approaching new era in payments, where AI bots could increasingly drive purchases. The prospect of that scenario means rethinking matters like the fraud- and crime-detection systems that banks, merchants and payment processors have built over the years. “We believe it’s not about if, it’s about when and how quickly,” said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer." https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mastercard-inks-deal-as-payment-giants-brace-for-new-era-of-ai-shopping-eb22da8b archivio: https://archive.is/ZqEid