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‘Se Natale nun venesse ‘cchiù,
chi chiagnesse ‘e lacreme ‘cchiù amare?
‘e commercianti o ‘e creature?

Smartphones are not the enemy, reports Kev Quirk in his blog referencing Thomas Rigby’s post. True, the phone is just a tool, and our attraction is caused by the operating system’s constant demand for attention and the apps that try to eat away at our time.

My friend Nicola, a few weeks ago, referenced this post of mine and wrote about Bitonto, the town where he lives. I admire and almost envy the way he described it. You can clearly tell that, somehow, it’s his roots and that those roots engage him.

Microsoft cannot guarantee that European citizens’ data will not be transmitted, if requested, to US authorities. Neither can Google, Meta, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Oracle, Adobe, Dropbox, Zoom, Atlassian, Twilio, Salesforce, Cisco, Box, Slack, Anthropic, or any of the dozens of others I can’t think of right now.

One of the guys I met at my new job, when I pointed out that the software he’d developed lacked a shred of documentation and was impossible for new developers to manage, complained that requests always came to him as urgent, and so he quickly produced code—patching things up, not documenting or commenting, and neglecting privacy and security aspects—for the good of the company. Damn, for the good of the company!

Last August we visited the Netherlands. We based ourselves in Amsterdam and visited a few places and cities around there. I won’t write a review; it would be impossible to convey its beauty, its costs, its uniqueness, and its immersiveness. It was intense. That’s enough.

I was reading, somewhere online, but unfortunately I’ve lost track of it, a suggestion to me as a reader: “record your thoughts”.

If you apply a certain force to someone, expect a force of at least equal magnitude to be exerted on you. To paraphrase Newton’s third law, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Bringing the whole thing back to a less philosophical and low-level level, I could say that it’s absolutely foolish not to imagine that an action will always have consequences of equal or greater intensity.