Visto che ne parliamo proprio qui su Telegram: è davvero così brutto come lo racconta quest'articolo? A me non pare, però boh, magari sbaglio.

Money quote: “Telegram is social media for organised criminals,” says Haywood Talcove, chief executive of LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ government division, who has been tracking new means of fraud targeting US government systems that he says have gone “viral” on the platform among some hacker communities. “It’s virtually the wild west out there.”

https://www.ft.com/content/c70ef7d6-230a-4404-b854-2e75fe0f2e0a

Lettura per la domenica.

Una ipotesi matta: che siano finite le generazioni? Cioè che Gen Z e Millennials siano la stessa cosa? Beh, non lo so. L'ultima volta che qualcuno ha detto che la storia era finita poi c'è stato l'11 settembre e la storia è tornata dalla finestra sfondando tutta la parete, già che c'era. E le generazioni? Veramente sono finite?

Money quote: "How did “the war among the generations” come to be so peaceful? Why do zoomers seem so unlikely to ever contradict the culture of millennials? You might say it’s simply too early to assess the cultural integrity of a cohort that’s just now entering the workforce. The childhoods were a bit different, but barely so: Zoomers grew up in the dawn of streaming music and social broadcasting, a series of technological advancements that have scrambled the whole notion of genre and reinvented the whole notion of celebrity. These shifts began with millennials, and zoomers are better understood to be partners, not rivals, in these transformations. The transformation from three-network broadcast television (baby boomers) to cable TV (Gen X) is much larger than the difference between Vine and TikTok."

https://www.theringer.com/year-in-review/2021/12/31/22860610/millennials-zoomers-gen-z-same-generation-olivia-rodrigo

The Ringer

It’s Time to Accept That Millennials and Gen Z Are the Same Generation

Though discourse in 2021 tried to deepen the distinctions, it’s clear that young people today are forged from the same digital monoculture

Sempre più autori stanno usando l'AI per fare cose. Anzi, sempre più persone lo stanno facendo, alcune di queste sono autori e altri lo saranno, in qualche modo perlomeno. Cosa sta succedendo? Chi sta rischiando? C'è chi pensa che quella della AI sia una vera nuova rivoluzione industriale che automatizzerà tutto.

Money quote: "Still, industrial automation did not entirely abolish handicraft. It seems hyperbolic to claim that large language models will swallow up literature. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine in November, the literary agent Andrew Wylie said he didn’t believe the work of the blue-chip authors he represents — Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Bob Dylan, among many others — “is in danger of being replicated on the back of or through the mechanisms of artificial intelligence.”
Since his job is to make money for human authors, Wylie is hardly a disinterested party, but history supports his skepticism. Mass production has always coexisted with, and enhanced the value of, older forms of craft. The old-fashioned and the newfangled have a tendency to commingle. The standardization of mediocrity does not necessarily lead to the death of excellence. It’s still possible to knit a sweater or write a sestina."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/books/review/writers-artificial-intelligence-inspiration.html

Archivio: https://archive.is/algd6

Per cercare di campare di più bisogna mangiare meglio, fare esercizio, avere una vita attiva. E una buona genetica, ovviamente. Per arrivare a qualche veneranda età con un cervello che funziona ancora bene bisogna, oltre alla genetica, lavorarci sopra anche un po'. Come si fa? Ecco qui un po' di consigli: imparare cose nuove, ad esempio. Non importa cosa e non importa quanto bene.

Money quote: "The other key piece of this is making sure that your new hobby involves some amount of challenge. “It has to be something a little new that’s a little hard,” Dr. Marcuse says. Passively watching the latest episode of The Bachelor won’t cut it, because you need your brain to be active, take in new information, digest it, and then put it back out there.

While you might feel that learning a new skill feels daunting, that’s the point! According to Dr. Marcuse, you don’t have to be good at the activity to protect your brain: “I never took music lessons as a kid. I’m not really good at it. I never will be,” she says.

And despite not being the next Mozart, she says that playing the piano adds some color and levity to her days, in addition to protecting her brain. “I really need that in my life—I have a very stressful job,” she says. “It makes me feel that the world is sort of full of beauty and hope.”"

https://www.self.com/story/brain-health-neurologist-tip

SELF

I’m a Neurologist. Here’s the One Thing I Do Every Day for My Long-Term Brain Health

If you’re worried about cognitive decline, add this to your routine.

“Midnight”, il film ispirato al manga di Tezuka, girato con l’iPhone da Takashi Miike - Il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/03/midnight-film-takashi-miike-osamu-tezuka-iphone/

Lettura per la domenica. Il segreto per capire l'arte.

Money quote: "“If you tried to reimagine your life without art ... it would look radically different,” says Karen K. Ho, a writer for ARTNews. “Art intersects with more things than people think.” It’s not just the van Goghs and Monets that hang on museum walls. It’s in works like Anish Kapoor’s innovative Cloud Gate (a.k.a. “The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium Park, or the spiral architecture of the Guggenheim building in New York. It’s the murals along the bike path or on the side of the school. Art adorns movie posters and storefront signage. Artists influence the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, the products you consume. Simply put, art is everywhere.

If art’s such a central tenet of our culture, though, why do so many of us feel like we just don’t get it?"

https://www.vox.com/even-better/24071171/how-to-look-at-art

Vox

How to look at art — and really see it

Art is for everyone. Here’s how to approach your next trip to a gallery or museum.

C'è un motivo se le vecchie tecnologie analogiche hanno ancora senso e un certo valore di scambio economico. Un motivo legato a come siamo fatti e a come stiamo vivendo la nostra epoca.

A me queste storie di gente che colleziona le cose di quando ero ragazzino mi fanno impazzire. Fortissime!

Money quote: "You never know what treasures may be sitting in your attic. A classic yellow “sports” Walkman, for example, is a popular item among collectors. The WM-F5 from 1983 was the first designed to be “splash-proof” and came with a built-in FM radio. The sharp colour and weather-proofing led to sales soaring, Walkman collector Mark Ip tells me. “I have many of them,” he adds."

Money quote 2: "Walkman-collecting, it seems, conforms to most tech-collector stereotypes: men in their 40s, 50s and 60s, recalling their youthful encounters with a then-nascent, exciting technology. As Ip says, “When you have a Walkman, and you have a cassette to play on it, you can go out to the street to listen to the music, and all the memories come back.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/17/walkman-memories-still-in-love-with-old-tech

the Guardian

‘When you use a Walkman all the memories come back’: the people still in love with old tech

Cassette players and tapes, vintage Game Boys and boomboxes seem like relics of a bygone era. So why are they being snapped up, sometimes for eye-watering prices?

Meraviglioso

Money quote: Had "the talk" with my mom

Alla fine, con l'intelligenza artificiale potremmo fare cose utili, anziché deepfake. Imparare la lingua delle balene è piuttosto alta, nella mia lista delle priorità.

Money quote: "How should we even approach these strange and beguiling creatures? If we drop a speaker into the water, they might assume that our clicks are coming from an unseen clan member. A robotic whale that makes clicking sounds would perhaps fool the sperm whales’ eyes, but their echolocation beams would reveal its synthetic innards. It would be most honest to communicate in person, but whoever we’d send would need to be careful not to corner a lone whale. They would want to approach a whole unit, so that if the whales felt threatened, they could fall into their protective rosette formation: heads in, flukes out, calves in the middle. Then we’d know to back off."

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/02/talking-whales-project-ceti/677549/

archivio: https://archive.is/VlDSq

The Atlantic

How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold

If we can learn to speak their language, what should we say?

Bill e Hillary Clinton hanno ricominciato a fare politica, dietro le quinte. La vittoria di Donald Trump si fa sempre più certa.

Money quote: "Hillary wasn’t part of that conversation, but she was on the plane, too — along with Michelle Obama and Jill Biden — and she had plenty of her own thoughts as Biden entered 2024 running behind her old foe in the polls. In recent months, the former secretary of state has begun convening groups of friends and political allies for private dinners to talk through the coming election season and to drum up badly needed support for Democratic candidates, starting with the president. The sessions are occasionally at the Clintons’ primary home in Chappaqua, but more often at their house in Washington, not far from the residence of Vice-President Kamala Harris, with whom she has quietly been keeping in touch."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bill-clinton-hillary-clinton-joe-biden-2024-election.html

New York

The Return of the Clintons

Bill talks economics with Biden. Hillary gives pointers to Harris. The former First Couple is as deep in politics as they have been since Trump won.