social.gl-como.it
Dal Corriere di Bologna.
Di Federica Nannetti.
È successo un po’ di tutto nel 2024 di Roberto Mantovani, taxista conosciuto anche come Red Sox e nel tempo diventato amato e al contempo odiato per la sua battaglia alla trasparenza del settore: la cacciata da Cotabo e la conseguente riorganizzazione del lavoro con non poche ripercussioni economiche, l’imbrattamento della sua auto con simboli razzisti e misogini, poi trasformato in una raccolta fondi per la Casa delle donne per non subire violenza, la pubblicazione di un libro che molti colleghi «vorrebbero cadesse nel dimenticatoio». Eppure lui non ha mai rinunciato e mai rinuncerà ai suoi valori; rifarebbe tutto per filo e per segno. E a metà gennaio presenterà ufficialmente la nuova grafica del taxi, rimesso a nuovo dopo gli atti vandalici, dedicata al centro antiviolenza e al contrasto alla violenza contro le donne.
Roberto Mantovani, come è andata la raccolta fondi?
«Benissimo. Entro il 30 dicembre consegnerò l’assegno alla Casa delle donne. La nuova grafica del taxi, che verrà presentata a metà gennaio, è già tutta pagata e grazie alle donazioni sono avanzati oltre 20 mila euro netti per la Casa. Un evento spiacevole lo si è riusciti a trasformare in un bel gesto: tantissime persone, molte da fuori Bologna o regione, hanno donato, sentendo la Casa delle donne come un patrimonio di Bologna ma anche dell’intero Paese. Forse anche nella speranza di avere centri simili ovunque».
Come sarà la nuova grafica?
«Il messaggio sarà immutato, dunque dedicato alla Casa delle donne e al contrasto alla violenza di genere e ai femminicidi. Ma sarà molto diversa e rinnovata; ha anche visto la partecipazione di un artista, Mauro Biani, che ha donato, gratuitamente, alcuni suoi disegni».
Il 2024 è stato anche l’anno della cacciata da Cotabo.
«Sono rimasto scottato, deluso da molte persone, colleghi, sindacalisti. Quando mi ridono in faccia, ai posteggi, dicendomi di avermi battuto… rimango deluso dalla prepotenza e dalla sfacciataggine».
Ci sono state ripercussioni negative?
«Soprattutto economiche, perché le cifre incassate prima adesso sono impossibili. Ora ho la prova materiale, tecnica, di un guadagno nettamente inferiore, come prima l’avevo di altre cifre. Senza chiamate, vado direttamente in aeroporto, in stazione e in piazza Maggiore, con molti chilometri a vuoto e una perdita di almeno il 40%. In ogni caso sono orgoglioso di quello che sono e di quello che ho fatto. Rifarei tutto: guadagno meno ma sono più contento; e non avrei mai potuto fare finta di nulla».
Molti colleghi l’hanno attaccata per le sue battaglie sul pos e sulla trasparenza, ma quest’anno sono stati sul piede di guerra anche per l’introduzione di nuove licenze da parte del Comune. Cosa ne pensa?
«Hanno continuato a raccontare la “balla” del numero di taxisti sufficiente, quando tutti hanno sempre saputo della necessità di licenze in più. Un atteggiamento egoistico, un mentire alla cittadinanza, che ha diritto a un servizio pubblico. L’ultimo sciopero dei taxisti di Bologna è stato fallimentare».
Quest’anno ha anche pubblicato un libro, edito da Garzanti.
«Una grande soddisfazione, soprattutto per quanto sono riuscito a tirare fuori. Abbiamo però notato come tutti i taxisti d’Italia siano stati zitti sul libro, come se tutte le cooperative avessero emanato un ordine a non parlarne. Mai nessuno, da maggio a ora, ha nominato o citato il libro, che evidentemente si ha la necessità di far dimenticare. Forse c’è paura delle tante verità contenute all’interno, a partire dagli incassi: verità che non possono negare o confutare, perché ci sono le prove. Di conseguenza tutto deve essere dimenticato».
My colleague Julius
by Ploum
ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en…
<- I haven't met anyone this bad, but it's a parody; even so, my strong feeling is that such people constitute the bulk of management and marketing at tech companies.
@tgent_fens I may be a STEM graduate but I've studied some humanities. The story is as much in the interpretation, as in the writer's intention.
But I've posted @ploum blog posts before. His English is superb but it's not his first language.
I think he did not mean Julius was an AI. I think Julius was meant as a human throughout. I've met and worked with many people like this: working as specialists in a field where they do not in fact know what the thing that they're specialists in *IS*.
The AI comes in at the end and it's called AI.
The intention here, IMHO, is:
1. There are people who are totally incompetent but who look and sound good, and management tends to love that.
(1a: this is partly because management often has zero understanding of what the menial workers actually *do*.)
2. Julii can and do thrive and prosper despite doing nothing useful.
3. Julii succeed by forcing colleagues to do _more_ work.
4. The setup up many organisational hierarchies encourages this. It is common. Some of the workers know, but management does not.
(5. Julii may not even know that they are useless. They may even think that they are doing good work.)
6. A few smart managers may know this but do not know the real cost.
7. "AI" is the new automated Julii. It will thrive & make workers' lives worse.
How to Build an Electrically Heated Table?
solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024…
With once again great illustrations by @marieverdeil
This manual explains how to assemble an electrically heated and insulated table that keeps you toasty warm in a cold space.LOW←TECH MAGAZINE
Kowloon Walled City: Heterotopia in a Space of Disappearance
mascontext.com/issues/trace/ko…
«
The Kowloon Walled City is known by many as the informal settlement that once existed seemingly out of place within modern Hong Kong. […] It was often considered an anomaly… »
Essay by Matthew Hung with photography by Greg Girard.MAS Context
I have just implemented one of the most cursed thing ever!
An implementation of Conway's Game of Life in a MANUAL PAGE, by abusing the Turing completeness of the roff language.
On most systems (a system that uses groff and man-db), the following command will give you a live demonstration:
$ curl codeberg.org/cve/mott/raw/bran… | man -l -
Support for other roff implementations such as mandoc is planned.
You can find more about it here: codeberg.org/cve/mott
Why Do Animals Adopt?
nautil.us/why-do-animals-adopt…
Taking responsibility for another’s young reveals the deep evolutionary roots of care.
STIPENDI NON PAGATI DA 2 MESI, EDILI OCCUPANO GRU DIETRO DUOMO
Oggi una trentina di operai edili si sono presentati nel cantiere di via Silvio Pellico, dove è in corso una ristrutturazione, per protestare contro il mancato pagamento degli stipendi da due mesi. Quattro di loro hanno occupato una gru mentre gli altri li sostengono da sotto.
Si tratterebbe dell'ennesimo caso di catena di subappalti che farebbe capo, in questo caso, a COIMA, gigante immobiliare e vero "padrone del vapore" di Milano.
La goccia che avrebbe fatto traboccare il vaso sarebbe stata l'intimazione fatta agli operai da parte dell'azienda subappaltatrice di non presentarsi in cantiere oggi.
La pratica dei subappalti ha lo scopo fondamentale di ridurre selvaggiamente il costo del lavoro e deresponsabilizzare i datori di lavoro di tutto ciò che non funziona.
SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT a turing-complete programming language for writing programs in the style of clickbait news headlines
Tabloid is a real, turing complete programming language written in JavaScript, inspired by cilckbait headlines.tabloid.vercel.app
This is wild.
❝In 2008, a Mexico City metro station was the site of an hours-long fight between emo, punk, and goth groups.
In the mid-to-late decade of the 2000s, subcultures in Mexico were often referred to negatively as “urban tribes,” and many were united by considering emos, the newest tribe, as their enemy. The emo subculture that reached its peak in this decade differed from the “original” emo movement of the 1980s and many of its characteristics were seen as having been plagiarized from early subcultures. Glam rock pioneered the androgyny, the dark and frizzled hair owes a lot to new wave and goth, while their music was similar to the pop-punk of the turn of the millennium.
Hatred against emos was widespread in many countries, mainly by other “tribes” such as goths and punks, but in Mexico and its capital city, the animosity was particularly commonplace and strong. The aforementioned androgyny might have been crucial in the reaction towards this group of people, as homophobic slurs and attitudes were often incorporated into anti-emo sentiments. Two years before the “war” in 2008, another well-publicized altercation occurred in the Metro Insurgentes roundabout between emos and punks, which led to police intervention.
The Metro Insurgentes roundabout is one of the main transport hubs near the City’s Zona Rosa (Pink Zone). For decades, it has been a crucial meeting point for countercultural and LGTBQ+ movements. While generally peaceful and tolerant, on March 15, 2008, a large gathering of people belonging to the emo subculture found themselves attacked by a group incorporating members of the city’s punk, neo-rockabilly, and goth tribes (locally known as “darketos”).
The conflict was estimated to have lasted up to five hours, on and off, but its definitive end came about in appropriately absurd fashion. While there was police intervention to prevent any major injuries, the actual end of the confrontation came about when a group of Hare Krishna followers entered the roundabout, inviting both factions to join in with the chanting and dancing. Even if they did not manage to fully incorporate the crowd, their presence did help in calming and dispersing most of the people involved.❞
atlasobscura.com/places/emo-wa…
In 2008, this Mexico City metro station was the site of an hours-long fight between emo, punk, and goth groups.ugc (Atlas Obscura)
Spotted in Belmore
(Credit - Cyanide and Happiness, explosm.net/comics/rob-gamesat… h/t @futuresprog)
![Stop playing video games at work!
Gimme a sec, I just have to fight this boss…
[ strikes boss ]
Alright I’m back
https://explosm.net/comics/rob-gamesatwork](https://social.gl-como.it/photo/preview/640/3478788 "Stop playing video games at work!
Gimme a sec, I just have to fight this boss…
[ strikes boss ]
Alright I’m back
https://explosm.net/comics/rob-gamesatwork")
LaTeX.css – Make your website look like a LaTeX document.
Write semantic HTML, add <link rel="stylesheet" href="latex.vercel.app/style.css"> to the <head> of your project and you are good to go.
A minimal, almost class-less CSS library to write modern websites that look like LaTeX documents.latex.vercel.app
One of the use cases I thought was reasonable to expect from ChatGPT and Friends (LLMs) was summarising. It turns out I was wrong. What ChatGPT isn’t summarising at all, it only looks like it…R&A IT Strategy & Architecture
There's a trick I pull on my #ADHD brain that works every time.
Whenever there's a task I don't really want to do, I tell myself "okay, we just have to START the task, and then we can stop after <small timespan>" And then, without fail, I end up completing the task, or at least making serious headway on it.
This is because I have a huge problem with task-switching. Once I am ON task, I find it difficult to stop, but I have to get there in the first place.
I hope this never stops working.
I'm not ADHD, but I use a similar trick: I sometimes find it really difficult to do some tasks, but I can often get around them by identifying the smallest step to move that task forward, however little. Like, to pay a bill, my first small step might be to find the envelop that contains the bill. Not open the envelope, not even put it on my desk, just checking that the envelope still exists.
Or find a pen with which I can write "paid" on the bill, once I've paid it.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.www.youtube.com
A little bit of math can go a long way. The design of a system can be hampered not only by having too little mathematical analysis go into it, but also too *much*.
One familiar example of this is with password requirements in cybersecurity. Mathematically, the more complex that a password is required to be - for instance, by mandating minimum length, special characters, or no reused passwords - the more secure the password becomes. However, make the requirements too complex, and users and service providers will then seek workarounds to the complex requirements, such as easy ways to reset or recover the password, or storage of such passwords in insecure systems - that in fact can serve to *decrease* the security of the overall system, rather than *increase* it. Overoptimizing on just a single metric - the security strength of the direct user/password login system - can serve to compromise the broader objective - a textbook example of "Goodhart's law" in effect en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart… . Roughly speaking, the security of this direct entry method should be strengthened to be comparable to the security of alternate entry methods, but beyond that any further strengthening tends to be counterproductive. There is little point putting in more locks on the front door of a building beyond the first one, if the windows are unsecured, and in fact doing so may even lead to a dangerous false sense of security. On the other hand, if the windows are harder to access than the front door, then putting at least one lock on the front door makes excellent sense. (1/3)
Even within pure mathematics, we have learned that sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to abstract away information that one would intuitively think to be highly relevant. Much of the progress in analytic number theory, for instance, has been obtained by adopting the perspective that strongly number-theoretic structures, such as the set of primes, should in fact often be treated as much less structured objects, for instance as a rather arbitrary set of numbers obeying some minimal set of combinatorial properties. Abstract too much, and one no longer has enough information to solve the problem; but with just the right amount of abstraction, the problem can move into sharper focus, suggesting the right set of techniques to attack it, and also exploiting the freedom of the setup to perform additional transformations that would not have made sense in the initial setting.
I sometimes like to joke that applied mathematicians need to know the first two chapters of every pure math graduate textbook, but after that the subsequent chapters may have little (or even negative) value to them. On the other hand, the quest to locate Chapters 3-12 are often what made Chapters 1-2 the perfectly polished and useful gems of mathematics that have such broad utility... (3/3)
I really like the thread that you're pulling on here, which aligns with your blog post on "stages of mathematical development", and i think both are true of all specialisms
All progress seems to have two stages, accrue -> consolidate, which repeat (or don't) through time. We tend to confuse accrual (and accrual alone) as *real* progress; when it is the consolidation stage which matters more, because consolidated form is more stable, in that we can build upon it. which is *real* progress
The first stage of specialisation (the second of your post) is accrual, of special details, which we deem existentially significant, and subsequently tend to parse everything by those forms, almost exclusively. But the territory of specialisms is not isolated -- in nature nothing exists alone
The second stage (the third of you post) begins when we learn the plurality of significance of form -- that other specialisms/ ways-to-interpret the same form (or parts thereof) exist; and with each additional interpretation, an essence, the intersect of both, equates to a new generalisation, which is simpler, and which allows us to notice that the surface detail obsessed over by specialists is only part of the whole story
In this way, we can think of all special-domains as delta, to a respective/ relative general-domain, of relative simpler forms
And the interesting thing is that, essences being general, are fewer, and common across different phenomena: so a universal general-domain of essential forms, which all special-domains recontextualise
The implicit point, is that the path to unifying knowledge, is not by union, but by intersect: radical simplification
Which is cool
going to fawn over Standard Ebooks site standardebooks.org for a minute here
So aside from providing beautiful ebooks of public domain books, the site is blazing fast serving pages for so many books, and it's all static pages:
alexcabal.com/posts/standard-e…
Then look on a page for a book. There's a render of a book with the cover, the books at like an angle and if you hover over it the book floats a little.
Turn off javascript and the pic still renders and floats a little. If you right click and say open pic in new tab just the unaltered cover comes up.
Which means all the magic to take the cover and turn into a render of a book with a floating animation is all done in CSS.
And even better, go to a typical book. Typical thickness in that render. Then go to a big book, like The History and Decline of the Roman Empire.
standardebooks.org/ebooks/edwa…
Look at that chonk of a book in the rendering. So each book rendering is rendered the relative thickness of the book. Just such a cool detail.
edit: Oh, and go to the feeds for books:
There's OPDS (the catalog feed format), and RSS and Atom. Normally, you make the mistake of going to a feed URL in your browser instead of a specific program to read feeds, and you're punished with horrible XML.
But click on any feed link here and it's the nice looking HTML like the rest of the site. Is the server determining dynamically if a browser is reading the feed or a different program? But wait, isn't the site static?
That's right, all those feeds are also good looking HTML. Just brilliant work.
AI and the American Smile
medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-…
How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression.
Turns out that LLM summaries are actually useful.
Not for *summarizing* text -- they're horrible for that. They're weighted statistical models and by their very nature they'll drop the least common or most unusual bits of things. Y'know, the parts of a message that are actually important.
No, where they're great is as a writing check. If an LLM summary of your work is accurate that indicates what you wrote doesn't really have much interesting information in it and maybe you should try harder.
Flow looks amazing :)
made in #blender
#b3d
creativebloq.com/3d/3d-animati…
youtu.be/BdqxF79LPgY?si=-UOaDj…
Flow looks stunningly immersive.Joe Foley (Creative Bloq)
In una precedente news vi avevamo parlato della scoperta, orbita e visibilità della cometa Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (C/2023 A3). Dopo il difficile periodo di visibilità mattutina avuto durante il passaggi…Asteroidi e dintorni
@ALFA
@versodiverso @ALFA
dubito che i taxisti aderiscano ai sindacati di lavoratori dipendenti.
non sono dipendenti, sono piccoli proprietari di licenze, che si associano liberamente in cooperative che non sono altro che moderne corporazioni.
@Trames @ALFA