Fosco Maraini è stato un geniale avventuriero, uno scrittore straordinario. Claudio Cardelli, amico ventennale, ce lo racconta.
For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it's very real.
Virtually nobody is pricing in what's coming in AI. I wrote an essay series on the AGI strategic picture: from the trendiness in deep learning and counting the OOMs, to the international situation and The Project.
When it comes to conversations about vaccines and autism, we always have plenty to write about. And the latest news that the Trump administration has tapped David Geier for a study on possible links between immunizations and autism, first reported by the Washington Post, is no exception.
The history and future of the motorway from infrastructure to a socio-cultural device of technological innovation and integration with the landscape.
The exhibition, realized in collaboration with Autostrade per l’Italia on the occasion of the centenary of the construction of Italy’s first motorway in 1924, presents historical projects and construction sites in progress.
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvements over the previous processor, the Intel 486, including a faster floating-point division algorithm. A year later, Professor Nicely, a number theory professor, was researching reciprocals of twin prime numbers when he noticed a problem: his Pentium sometimes generated the wrong result when performing floating-point division. Intel considered this "an extremely minor technical problem", but much to Intel's surprise, the bug became a large media story. After weeks of criticism, mockery, and bad publicity, Intel agreed to replace everyone's faulty Pentium chips, costing the company $475 million.
The hardest part of advising Ph.D. students is teaching them how to write.
Fortunately, I've seen patterns emerge over the past couple years.
So, I've decided to replace myself with a shell script.
In particular, I've created shell scripts for catching three problems:
abuse of the passive voice,
weasel words, and
lexical illusions.
Maria Tipo da oltre venticinque anni vive nei dintorni di Firenze, in una splendida villa che domina un paesaggio da mozzafiato della città con l'Arno a gomito. Ci accoglie con affabilità e franchezza tutta napoletana nel grande salotto di casa, accanto allo studio in cui troneggiano due pianoforti a coda letteralmente coperti di fotografie di grandi artisti, maestri, colleghi, amici, allievi. Sorseggiando lievemente un thè, comincia il racconto.
Starboard Value, the activist investor agitating for change at Pfizer, called on the pharmaceutical giant’s board of directors to hold the company’s executives responsible for what it described as a yearslong pattern of underperformance.
Nei recenti giorni passati sono successe un paio di cose, sconnesse ma in qualche modo correlate, che mi hanno stimolato qualche pensiero che provo a sistematizzare. Mettendo a posto la cantina di casa ho ritrovato un po’ di vecchie foto degli anni di servizio scout (tra cui quella della Route Nazionale del 1997 di cui ho parlato anche qui) e proprio in quei giorni si è tenuta a Verona la Route Nazionale 2024 della Co.Ca. AGESCI, la prima da quella del 1997 a cui avevo partecipato. Ecco: il passato che fa capolino, il presente che si impone, e in mezzo un uomo di mezza età che pensa al futuro.
At the start of WWII, the US armed forces used various means for enciphering their confidential traffic. At the lowest level were hand ciphers. Above that were the M-94 and M-138 strip ciphers and at the top level a small number of highly advanced SIGABA cipher machines.
In the Standard Model of particle physics, the odds of this decay occurring are less than one in 10 billion.
NIST’s second draft of its “SP 800-63-4“—its digital identify guidelines—finally contains some really good rules about passwords.
Taiichi Ohno, creator of the Toyota Production System is credited, perhaps apocryphally, with taking new graduates to the shop floor and drawing a chalk circle on the floor. The graduate would be told to stand in the circle, observe and note what he saw. When Ohno returned he would check; if the graduate had not seen enough he would be asked to keep observing. Ohno was trying to imprint upon his future engineers that the only way to truly understand what happens on the shop floor was to go there. It was where the value was added and waste could be observed.
Gennaro Sangiuliano si mostra ancora una volta per quello che è.
Unito dal 1940 al 1945 e dal 1951 al 1955. La storia di Winston Churchill, la storia di un primo ministro capace di fare le scelte giuste per combattere con tutti i mezzi la minaccia nazifascista, è una storia formidabile che può offrirci le coordinate giuste per orientarci in un mondo come quello di oggi in cui le democrazie cercano di contenere le nuove minacce totalitarie e in un mondo come quello di oggi in cui non sempre i partiti che si dicono antifascisti sembrano trovare la convinzione giusta per combattere il fascismo non solo a parole. Abbiamo chiesto a Carlo Nordio, ministro della Giustizia e appassionato di Churchill, di scrivere quattro puntate sulla storia dell’ex primo ministro inglese per il Foglio. Nordio ha accettato. Questa è la prima puntata.
Probabilmente conoscete il quizzino che vi chiede di usare una moneta truccata, che se lanciata esce testa con probabilità compresa strettamente tra 1/2 e 1, per ottenere una probabilità del 50% esatto di vincita. La risposta, che si dice essere dovuta direttamente a John von Neumann (ma non ne sarei così certo) è la seguente: “Lanciate la moneta due volte: se il risultato è prima testa poi croce (nel seguito, TC) vince il primo giocatore; se è prima croce e poi testa (CT) vince il secondo giocatore; altrimenti si ricomincia da capo”. L’idea, come avrete capito, è di trovare due combinazioni simmetriche, in modo che la loro possibilità di uscita sia la stessa.
Inspired by this thread on Hacker News about the C++ diff-pdf tool I decided to see what it would take to produce a web-based PDF diff visualization tool using Claude …
"Il matto" - una storia vera Per un periodo il Noir Festival, quello nato a Cattolica e poi trasferito a Courmayer, si svolse a Viareggio. ...
Eight or so years ago, young filmmaker Colin Levy got an opportunity of a lifetime. He got a one-on-one meeting with Martin Scorsese.
Allo zoo di Osaka, in Giappone, ci hanno messo sette anni ad accorgersi che Gen-chan non è un maschio ma una femmina: era piuttosto complicato osservare i suoi genitali
Last night I estimated the distance to the planet Jupiter using nothing more than my eyes and a simple calculator.
A New Zealand MP performed a haka in a powerful speech for her first appearance in parliament, resurfaced video shows. Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, 21, first spoke in parliament on 12 December. She is the youngest MP to be elected to New Zealand's parliament in 170 years, after James Stuart-Wortley, who was elected in 1853 aged 20 years and 7 months. Maipi-Clarke was emotional in the chamber as she said: "We have arrived. We are here. We are sailing. We are navigating, just like our ancestors once did, in the biggest ocean in the world."
FDA held a Non-prescription Drug Advisory Committee meeting Sept. 11-12, 2023, to discuss the effectiveness of oral phenylephrine as an active ingredient in over-the-counter (OTC) cough and cold products.
Permettetemi di richiamare alcuni ulteriori aspetti che riguardano la vicenda di Holostem, della sua ricerca di punta e dei suoi ricercatori, tutti messi a rischio dalla decisione del suo principale investitore, in realtà dell’azienda farmaceutica Chiesi, di procedere alla liquidazione.
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La sua é; una fotografia che prova a confrontarsi con i giganti del pensiero antico e contemporaneo. Ora vede tutto e non ha piú; bisogno di fotografare
This one is a bit roundabout but stick with me. I've exchanged a few emails with the science.org website technical support people about the RSS feed for the excellent chemistry/pharmacology blog "In the Pipeline". It's not Derek's fault at all, but his science.org/aaas hosts have basically blocked native RSS feed readers and they only allow corporate service websites that do the feed reader part for you like Feedly.org. They consider using a native application feed reader to be scraping their website and ban them.
Born in Naples in 1933, Carotenuto studied in Rome and Turin, earning a degree in philosophy. He then lived for a period in the US, where he attended the School of Experimental Psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he made the acquaintance of Edward Whitmont. Upon his return to Italy, he became Professor of Psychology of the Personality in the new faculty of Psychology at Rome’s University “La Sapienza”, as well as President of the Associazione di Psicologia e Letteratura, dedicated to the study of the relationship between psychoanalysis and artistic creativity.
I wrote this piece after an early-career friend of mine asked some very good questions on how to be useful. Since this is a thing I struggle a bit with myself, I thought it worthwhile to write up my thoughts. Note that I fully understand that not everyone has the luxury to think about their career like this – you first have to take care of yourself and family before you can start fretting about if your working life is saving the world!
A month ago Coleman Hughes, a young writer whose name I recognized from his many thoughtful essays in Quillette and elsewhere, set up a virtual "AI safety roundtable" with Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gary Marcus, and, err, yours truly, for his Conversations with Coleman podcast series. Maybe Coleman was looking for three people with the most widely…
A decision that arises over and over when designing concurrent programs is whether to represent program state in control flow or as data. This post is about what that decision means and how to approach it. Done well, taking program state stored in data and storing it instead in control flow can make programs much clearer and more maintainable than they otherwise would be.
[...] la Cassazione ha confermato la destituzione di questa docente bollata di "inettitudine permanente e assoluta" [...]
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Evening in the country, perhaps after skiing. A straight, warm dress of wool and rayon, its waist pulled in with a string, its skirt a new ankle length. By Joset Walker. Jewelry by Seaman Schepps Vogue November 1946 © Frances McLaughlin-Gill
Leaked Internal Google Document Claims Open Source AI Will Outcompete Google and OpenAI
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
Buone intenzioni, implementazione proposta pessima.
[Warning: This might be the longest Shtetl-Optimized post of all time! But that’s OK; I expect most people will only want to read the introductory part anyway.] As I’ve mentioned before…
A from scratch GPU-free introduction to modern machine learning. Many tutorials exist already of course, but this one aims to really explain what is going on, from the ground up. Also, we’ll develop the demo until it is actually useful on real life data which you can supply yourself.
Other documents start out from the (very impressive) PyTorch environment, or they attempt to math it up from first principles. Trying to understand deep learning via PyTorch is like trying to learn aerodynamics from flying an Airbus A380.
Il mondo è molto più grande del piccolo cerchio che noi chiamiamo Comunità internazionale, avverte il fisico. C’è molto di vero in questa arringa, ma anche un disastroso errore di fatto
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
Ethan Tseng, Shane Colburn, James Whitehead, Luocheng Huang, Seung-Hwan Baek, Arka Majumdar, Felix Heide Nature Communications