Quinta’s weblog

I (used) to have an account at gemini.com I use different email addressess, each one specific for every service I register to. News is that today I received mail from a spammer to the email address I only used for gemini. So apparently, bad news don’t stop with their crash. Apparently either the users databases have been sold, or they have leaked, or else ?

Enter your text: who is stefano quintarelli ? Stefano Quintarelli is an Italian professional cyclist. He has competed in numerous races and is a former Italian National Road Race Champion. He has also competed in the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a Espana. Enter your text: is stefano quintarelli a cyclist ? No, Stefano Quintarelli is not a cyclist. He is a professional Italian racing driver who has competed in the Superstars Series, the International GT Open and the FIA GT Championship. Enter your text: is stefano quintarelli a racing driver ? No, Stefano Quintarelli is a professional…

Thanks to Spacekaren for explicitly confirming what I wrote (in Italian) The objective function of Twitter (as of any social) is to maximize user retention so as to create opportunities to show them advertisements. (Twitter [was] a little less than others, to be honest). This is achieved by fostering and stimulating emotions to increase virality and engagement. Emotions that often end up being exacerbated tensions, increasing the polarization of people (and with them, societies). Mastodon is designed to achieve the opposite effect. This is why Mastodon’s creators have included or excluded certain features, with the purpose of creating friction, of…

Questo è un post molto lungo, in Italiano per la sua valenza locale. La prima parte è una risposta ad un’articolessa di Franco Debenedetti e Francesco Vatalaro “La via del futuro per TIM” che era uscita su Il Foglio e che avevo preparato per quel giornale, ma è passato troppo tempo, sicchè la scrivo qui. La seconda parte è una “critica ragionata” che è il format che adottavo per rispondere punto per punto (su argomenti che credo di conoscere un pochino) quando leggevo qualcosa con cui sono in disaccordo. Risposta a Debenedetti e Vatalaro Ho letto con il consueto ultradecennale…

I must be surely wrong. could you please point out my mistakes to me ? two cases: a 30% and a 100% “fair share” : I fail to see how this could turn into a bonanza for network investments Updates: I corrected Netflix’s figures as they were in USD not in EUR These are the KPIs of the telco groups that are asking the EU commission to mandate a “fair share” levy (source: their balance sheets for last FY. – remember ? we were locked down for months in 2021 due to covid) supposing these telcos account for 50% of…

This is a transcript of a chat with some friends.What I’m about to say doesn’t mean that one can’t make a lot of money out of LLMs, yet I have some doubts that there are many sustainable multibillion-dollar businesses based on them. Several years ago, long before Satoshi Nakamoto, while speculating with a friend who now is a prominent crypto personality about a possible fully P2P decentralized coin, I argued that I could not clearly see a possible way of sustainably making substantial revenues because if there are no asymmetries in the playing field (like in pure P2P), no player…

The Musk and twitter affair should teach us the importance of considering our digital lives not from a static point of view but from a dynamic one, that is, not considering the choices we make as facts pertaining just to the specific moment but rather to consider how they might evolve after some time. Twitter was a publicly traded company with a good board of directors, a strong reputation as a well-administered system that cared about protecting users. Musk’s acquisition concentrated ownership in one person, the moderation team was decimated as well as the regulatory compliance people. Today Twitter is…

At the beginning of december, italian digital identity, SPID, has surpassed the 1Bn yearly authentications mark; I suspect it to be a european record (or more). In Italy there used to be a smartcard based digital identity (CIE/CNS/CPS/CRS) even prior to the introduction of SPID, a smartphone based Digital Identity, that I first proposed in 2013 and that effectively started after the pilot phase in 2016. The adoption grew significantly both in users and in service provider adoption. The case in Trentino (a small autonomous province of Italy) is very important because there was an ubiquitous deployment of smartcard based…

After a process lasting two years, the joint committee of the German federal data protection authority and 17 state regulators found that “”that, on the basis of these documents [provided by MS], it is not possible to use Microsoft Office 365 in a way that complies with data protection requirements”. Boom Now I wonder if and how it is possible for similar services from Google or other U.S. companies to comply with EU laws. This is particularly significant in Italy where almost all schools are using Google Classroom (wouldn’t it be the moment to use EU services instead ?) Past…

Questo post è un riassunto di cose scritte in precedenza altrove (sul mio account @quinta@mastdon.uno) , concentrate in un unico luogo perchè potrebbero essere utili o di interesse a nuovi utenti di Mastodon. Mastodon è meglio o peggio di twitter ? E’ diverso. E’ costruito per ridurre tensioni, insulti, maleducazione, tossicità… C’è meno gente, ma i contenuti di twitter possono essere mirrorati facilmente, per quegli utenti di cui porprio non potete fare a meno. Meno dopamina, più tranquillità. In questo post spiego un po’ le basi per destreggiarsi, quali sono i principali meccanismi de-tox di Mastodon e la sfida (affatto…