Work

For almost six years on my desk, in addition to the monitors and the current Mac, a mechanical keyboard IQUNIX F96 Coral Sea – now out of production, this one – has stood stable and proud.

A dear friend of mine is no longer working. She was laid off last May 2025 and hasn’t been able to find a new job for a year. A whole year without work. She was a copywriter. Today, her job is done by an LLM. Bad, but sufficient for the vast majority of clients of mediocre communications agencies in Italy.

I left the company where I had been working for the past (almost) year. There are various reasons for this, but they all boil down to two main issues.

I’m back to traveling for work. My old project and my new job will require me to travel more often, much like I did in recent years, when four out of every 14 days I spent 800 km away from home.

With a toot¹ on Mastodon in which he appreciated this post, my dear friend Nicola made me think about how little I put into promoting my professional blog on these shores.

I’ve been working a lot with AI lately. Wait, don’t run away. I know it’s a boring and unpleasant topic, about which everything and its opposite has been said, but it’s a topic that can’t be ignored. And anyway, I’m only telling you a side story. So, listen, go ahead.

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!

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.