Ever since I realized how beautifully simple and effective of a technology RSS is, I’ve been… well, I’ve been accumulating articles to read later on Pocket. This may the inevitable consequence of a hectic life, but I also want to blame myself for choosing to use Pocket a little bit. While having an easily accessible archive of good, already consumed web content makes sense (and would make even more sense if I wasn’t relying on Pocket’s servers and proprietary app to keep it going), my “Pocket saves” mostly consist of stuff that hasn’t been read yet, and that probably won’t even be opened as long as it stays on Pocket. Not only do I find myself much more prone to read on paper or on my e-reader, but the initially pretty good reading experience on Pocket has been steadily declining for the past few years, making it very unlikely for me to read anything that takes longer than five minutes on it. Also, Pocket is (mostly) LIFO, meaning that things that doesn’t get read almost immediately is bound to be forever forgotten in its depths.

Over the past two or three years, I tried to hack my way out of this situation. First, I considered writing a Pocket client for my Pocketbook e-reader, but neither the Pocket API nor the Pocketbook SDK were remotely intellegible for me. Then, I decided to simply write a script that would build small ebooks (aka “pocketbooks”) from a list of “saves” exported from the Pocket website (recently updated to work with their new output format). This second attempt was most promising, but I quickly realized that, as always, technology is just a tool and not a complete answer to any problem. The time had come for me to stop reading books and clear the Pocket backlog so that I could leave the platform behind for good.

“Webruary” (Web February) was my first serious go at this, and since by definition everything that I ever saved on Pocket is available on the WWW, I thought it’d make sense to share the highlights from this rather peculiar reading month on my blog. At the end of the month, my pile of Pocket saves has shrinked a bit, but I I’m still far from clearing it and not desperate for an actual book just yet and might actually keep going for one more month. In the meantime, here are my February favorites - as always, in the language in which the content I refer to is written in.

Una serie di articoli piú o meno recenti di Internazionale.it sul tema dell’intelligenza artificiale

Raramente sono soddisfatta dal modo in cui i media generalisti, spesso oscillanti tra panico ed hype, trattano il tema dell’IA. Devo dire però che, negli ultimi tempi, mi sembra che Internazionale stia facendo un ottimo lavoro nel parlare in modo equilibrato ed allo stesso tempo stimolante - per quanto non sempre curato dal punto di vista della lingua - sia delle tecnologie in sé che delle politiche in merito. Mi fa molto piacere anche il fatto che molti articoli sul tema siano interamente prodotto della redazione di Internazionale e non traduzioni di articoli già apparsi su altre riviste.

In particolare consiglio:

Some past posts from Nicky Case’s blog

I had somehow lost touch (parasocial relationships at their best) with Nicky Case despite her abundant blogging activity in 2024. I know and admire Nicky mostly for her interactive explanations (I even co-translated one to Italian a few years ago!), but I hadn’t read much of her more casual content.

This month, I enjoyed Welp, I’m 30. (30 tips for my 13-year-old self) (especially “emotions are sensors”, “healthy relationships are conditional & transactional” and “backup beliefs”). The awfully long Clearing out the idea closet (47 projects on my backlog) may have been less engaging, but it is inspiring me to empty my own idea closet and reinstate some kind of quaderno delle idee, something I had back in primary school.

News from Rekka and Devine

Speaking of parasocial relationships, 100R (the internet presence of Rek and Devine, a couple of artist-programmer sailors) is one of my favorite places on the entire World Wide Web. Despite my lack of interest in sailing and a decidedly different lifestyle, I somehow relate to the way of being of these two human beings.

Their Victoria to Sitka logbook was a cozy evening read for me and brought back good memories of Busy Doing Nothing (another one of their travel notebooks that was turned into an actual book). And, of course, of K.

I also read the transcript of two of Devine’s talks, Weathering Software Winter and An Approach to Computing and Sustainability Inspired From Permaculture, which pretty much summarize their current take on software development. Basically, since cloud-based software and energy-hungry devices suck aboard a sailboat (+ other relatable “modern software” frustrations), they built a personal computing ecosystem, Uxn/Varvara with an emphasis on energy efficiency and portability to older devices, programmable in its own assembly language. These were two interesting reads. While Devine seems to be largely reinventing the wheel, I do share some of their concerns about where software is headed and I think Uxn is pretty refreshing. I don’t think I could personally do any serious work in an environment like that (I am, after all, the kind of programmer who enjoys quick prototyping and weekend projects the most and I don’t tend to shy away from using very high-level languages and plenty of third-party libraries to speed up the development process), but I’d like to test Uxn for play, maybe on an e-ink device one day.

Sjätte numret av tidskriften IDÉ

IDÉ är en student- och alumndriven tidskrift för idéhistoria vid Göteborgs universitet. Egentligen är jag särskilt förtjust i IDÉs tryckversion, som delas ut gratis vid min fakultet, och läste därför på papper i detta fall. Tekniskt sett var det ett undantag från W-regeln, men det gjordes i samma anda då jag ackumulerar även tidningar. Jag uppskattade speciellt mycket Axel Perssons essä om två helt olika historiska perspektiv om begreppet “trädgårdsstad”.

A negative highlight: The two Chomskys on Aeon

Now here’s an essay that made my blood boil.
I know Chomsky mostly as a linguist, and less so as a political analyst, even though I think I’ve seen him interviewed on Democracy Now a couple of times. So, I was obviously intrigued by the title of this piece. The topic of this essay is in fact quite interesting: the focus is on the dilemmas and contradictions that (supposedly) come from the fact that Chomsky’s work in linguistic was massively funded by the US military, the very institution he openly criticized in much of his political activism.

The way in which the essay refers to Chomsky’s contribution to linguistics, though, I find quite outrageous. Quoting directly from the essay (emphasis mine):

This novel and allegedly ‘scientific’ model of language was so extreme in its individualism and abstraction that, in the end, it proved of no use to anyone. Not even the US military could make any of it work.

…Honestly, what the heck!?
Admittedly, my path to linguistics was not the most linear: I was interested in languages as a teen, then studied computer science, then gradually went back to language. And what reignited the spark for language, you may wonder? This:

Lecture notes from the course Linguaggi Formali e Compilatori, where I learned about syntax trees, the Chomsky hierarchy and lots of cool compiler stuff (this material was awesome, by the way, but I can't find any public link to the PDFs).
Lecture notes from the course Linguaggi Formali e Compilatori, where I learned about syntax trees, the Chomsky hierarchy and lots of cool compiler stuff (this material was awesome, by the way, but I can't find any public link to the PDFs).

Chomsky’s theories may have been surpassed when it comes to cognitive linguistics (that said, so has Newton’s understanding of gravity, doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful). On a more personal (and more painful) level, I am growing increasingly disillusioned with purely grammar- and rule-based language, much of which is derived from Chomsky’s theories. But don’t come here and try to argue that Chomsky’s contribution to linguistics was inconsequential. Maybe the US military was too stupid to put it to use, but computer scientists at large certainly weren’t. In fact, you could even say that the impact of Chomsky’s ideas on computer science ($\leftarrow$ compilers $\leftarrow$ formal linguistics) is the reason why I am becoming a computational linguist. As one of my mentors puts it in the introduction of one of his books (about grammar engineering!), programming language technology is the real success story for grammar-based computing methods.1
</rant>

Uno speciale di Radio3 su Paolo Poli

Per la maggior parte, le cose che salvo su Pocket sono articoli da leggere in un secondo momento. Qualche volta, però, anche i contenuti audio finiscono nelle sue profondità. É il caso di album da ascoltare con calma, episodi di podcast che non seguo regolarmente e trasmissioni Radio 3 che la Rai Radiotelevisione Italiana ha incomprensibilmente deciso di rendere, sí, disponibili online, ma solo tramite la maledetta piattatorma RaiPlay Sound e non piú come normali podcast a base RSS da ascoltare dove, come e quando mi pare (risultato: ho praticamente smesso di ascoltare l’ottima trasmissione Wikiradio che accompagnava i miei pranzi a casa con mamma ai tempi del liceo e che avevo continuato ad ascoltare assiduamente via internet anche dopo essermi trasferita in Svezia).

Una trasmissione che é valsa decisamente la pena ascoltare persino tramite la suddetta diabolica piattaforma é lo speciale sulla musica di Paolo Poli, originariamente andato in onda nel 1993 e riproposto da Radio 3 nel 2023. Da piccola, ho avuto il privilegio di assistere ad uno spettacolo teatrale di Paolo Poli in un teatro perugino e ricordo di esserne rimasta incantata. Piú avanti, mi é capitato varie volte di imbattermi nuovamente nel personaggio tramite spezzoni video, audiolibri (la sua lettura dei Promessi Sposi é imbattibile) e interviste, le quali mi hanno fatto anche intravederne l’importanza come una delle prime figure pubbliche queer della storia d’Italia. Ho ascoltato questo racconto del suo modo di rapportarsi con la musica e utilizzarla nel suo lavoro con un sorriso a 32 denti. Splendido.

  1. Aarne Ranta, Grammatical Framework: Programming with Multilingual Grammars, CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2011, p. 22 ↩