It’s actually a song my Mexican friend knew, I didn’t even though I’m the Italian one xD

Che figata di serata!

Italian here, I had luck with my English teachers and my parents and then the internet encouraged me to learn extra

The sooner our society abandons individualism and goes back to community oriented structures, the faster these problems will disappear.

Mass media, mass religion, mass communication, they all included manipulation. From telling lies, to telling only part of the truth, to salience and propaganda. AI is the latest scary tool.

The issue is that we expect the individual to have the tools to defend themselves from this. That’s not how it works. We need human connection, small family communities, where members help each others on the various aspects of life, including following public discourse and politics. When everyone has their sense of belonging to a place of care, the value of money and of the mass manipulations it uses falls and fails to accomplish a thing.

Let’s also stop believing that people vote mainly based on how easy it is to manipulate them. People vote based on their culture, their experiences, their overall mood on how things are going. The turnout in New York should show that. No fake news on Mamdani had an effect that comes even close to people’s connection to a grassroots campaign, people’s dissatisfaction with Trump and billionaires, people’s cultural affiliation to a young immigrant that speaks of affordability, nurseries, and pride to be one’s true self against discrimination.

Time limits on apps where I tend to have arguments on politics

Mmmmm that sounds to me like some digital sound with a slight flanger. Like a guitar-ish sample.

LMMS has this Vibed instrument that starts from something pretty similar. You could play around with that, on a PC tho

Artichokes

I think generators have some kind of inherent style that we somehow learn to recognise

Like sure they have learned on thousands of styles for each type of image, and you have some control of the style through prompt, but one issue with the transformer decoder model (the principles of which back almost all genAI at this point) is that at each generation step it gets the stuff generated so far as input.

This feedback loop might induce repeated choices even on different prompts in the later stages of the generation. This is not apparent on images because they are seen all at once, but it is pretty evident on Suno (at least v3): later parts of different songs might share sounds. At least in my experiments making it generate EDM. I’m now able to spot the synth it often ends up creating.

In terms of pictures and videos, that might be a reason generated stuff are consistently uncanny across image types.

The bulk of my salary depends on the company I work in and my boss’ decisions

I have a much higher ability and chance to change that, compared to changing the tax system.

Taxes are just a fraction of my salary, and they supposedly also cover for my future pension. Meanwhile, most of my taxes pays for state jobs for essential services, such as schools and healthcare. Others pay for debt interests, for money that was used to invest in the country or pay said services.

Sure, a part of it is bad management and ill intentions, but that’s such a small portion of my salary. Depending where you live, you might be paying some vere generous retirement plans, but most of the retirement money goes to old people who would otherwise require help from their family.

So no, I don’t really care about my taxes. If I feel I don’t have enough money, there are other things I can do than complaining about them

Just here to add Adobe to the list

When Picard updates the 21th century scientist on what changed after the warp drive, in First Contact. That was the scene that convinced me to start watching star trek, thanks to a YouTube video about post-scarcity economy

From the series, some scenes from Measure of a Man would be an easy choice, but I actually probably prefer when Troi helps, again, the woman from the past find her family tree on the computer, don’t remember the episode name

Data/Sherlok sceses when the highly intelligent villain becomes sentient are also cool

Database queries, especially OpenSearch/ElasticSearch

My humble opinion: burnout exists, laziness doesn’t

Laziness is a buzzword concept to describe way too many states of mind, downplaying the causes of lack of motivation.

I think there are some words that, if avoided, allow deeper investigation into important things, and “lazy” is in the top 10 of that list

IT’S BEEN A LOOOOONG ROOOAD

no really I completely understand it can sound cringe but I enjoyed singing it almost every time

Family Guy

Star Trek Enterprise

And as an italian 90s kid, all cartoons on air in the 2000s

I read cows at first 🫠

Dope stuff anyway

Cows negotiating territory is very funny 😁

Would love a documentary about it, if you have any pointers

My favourite is language, not even writing, but language itself. We could collectively invent ways to understand each others with codes shared by tens of millions of individuals, living kilometres apart.

And then I also love early astronomy, like being able to approximate Earth’s circumference (or later the time needed to reach Asia by navigating west), based on the shadow lenght at two fairly distant (but still pretty close) places, thanks to that quirky thing some friends of yours invented to divide land called geometry. To say nothing of those demonstrating Earth rotates around the Sun just by looking at star positions during the year.

As for recent things, something pretty cool we take for granted is radio signals. Information getting places without anything moving, just invisible vibrations through space.

What’s funny to me is that such a robot takeover would mean all humans are (wage-)enslaved rather than 99% of us like right now

We already have a ruler, the Money god, that is already enslaving many, killing others, and silencing dissent. I might actually prefer if my ruler was some superintelligent logical being rather a than few male 60yos hoping to book the next trip to some harem island that might or might not have minors in it taken directly from the territories at war around the world

Hi, Italian here

Italy, like many European countries, had strong social-democratic foundations. Many state jobs, strong state education, one of the best state healthcares out there, strong labour laws with contracts made by unions with specific job sectors.

That’s now mostly on paper, and things change significantly from region to region. For example Emilia Romagna is still pretty strong on those, but go to the south and you’ll see state school buildings being closed because they might collapse, or not offering any heating or A/C for the kids. Public healthcare is now very understaffed in most regions.

As for labour laws, companies aren’t exactly too happy giving the expected raises or following work hours, and unskilled jobs are a disaster of underpay and unpaid overtime.

In general, social cohesion is hit or miss. Sure,most people are welcoming and friendly, but many of them are not paying all of their taxes. You’re friends with the person in front of you, not with your whole nation.

Now that I broke some of the possible expectations: yes it’s a good idea to come here. With time you will find some job, especially in the north and centre regions, just prepare for high rents in big cities and you’ll be fine. Oh and possibly find somebody to help with taxes. If you decide for Rome, Napoli or Palermo, don’t drive right away, take your time to learn how people drive here, what to expect etc