> Excellent technical history, but it misses what made Olivetti incomparable: Adriano's human-centric philosophy that business and human culture were inseparable.
>
> The article mentions worker housing and urban planning in passing, then moves on. But that was the strategy. Ivrea wasn't welfare—it was integrated design. Factory, housing, schools, public spaces all operating under one coherent philosophy: machines and lives should both be beautiful and functional.
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> [...]
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> That's why Olivetti succeeded where technically equivalent competitors didn't. They engineered for humans, not just machines.
Two decades ago I randomly found myself in a tiny lecture room with a Very Important Manager from a Very Big European Bank. She started her talk stating "In the '80s, the Italian politics had to choose between the economic model of the Olivetti's family and that of the Agnelli's family. They choose Agnelli's. That was a mistake." Followed by a long string of expletives.
For context and for contrast, the Agnelli family was the owner of FIAT, then the biggest private employers in Italy. They were strongly anti-unions. They even bought the most important newspaper in Turin (the headquartiers of FIAT) to suppress reports of workers initiatives and strikes.
> The whole patch quilting thing is awful. Just keep the patches as commits.
I'd say that `quilt` the utility is pretty much abandoned at this point. The name `quilt` remains in the format name, but otherwise is not relevant.
Nowadays people that maintain patches do it via `gbp-pq` (the "patch queue" subcommand of the badly named `git-buildpackage` software). `gbp-pq switch` reads the patches stored in `debian/patches/`, creates an ephemeral branch on top of the HEAD, and replays them there. Any change done to this branch (new commits, removed comments, amended commits) are transformed by `gbp-pq export` into a valid set of patches that replaces `debian/patches/`.
This mechanism introduces two extra commands (one to "enter" and one to "exit" the patch-applied view) but it allows Debian to easily maintain a mergeable Git repo with floating patches on top of the upstream sources. That's impossible to do with plain Git and needs extra tools or special workflows even outside of Debian.
We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever.
Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1]
Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever.
> It's the Payment Services Directive (PSD2). Username+PW is obsolete and insecure at least 20 years now.
That does not imply that banks must implement 2FA with their proprietary applications.
Banks could just implement TOTP (Time-based One-time Passwords, RFC 6238) or HOTP (HMAC-based One-time Passwords, RFC 4226) and let me choose how I generate my OTP. For example with an hardware OTP generator or an open source application.
Most banks are using PSD2 as a occasion to force their privacy-invading apps on their users.