Whirlwind
This week, started the week on Sunday with an article about how I spent the month of October to carry out some experiments and knowledge update, decided that, before starting tomorrow a 7-day whirlwind packing courses and conferences, would be better to start the week with my monthly article- also because recently, while visiting Turin, heard again accents that I had not heard since at least 2007, when last visited Riga.There is a curious element in our daily dose of news about the AI, AI costs, AI impacts, AI benefits that I see each morning when I read Italian newspapers (and earlier and in the evening also foreign ones): few really discuss the potential to expand what we humans anyway do.
Well, this is the time to try- as, after the main companies will have to focus on providing each quarter results, most companies will stop subsidizing AI use.
Some already started tinkering with their prices.
Hence, personally, beside what was doing over the last few years, looking at numbers about revenue and investment, decided that it was the right time to use also online AIs to help me...
... prepare something that will improve my use of AIs offline, and to benefit from their "knowledge" of almost everything that has been printed and produced by humans to generate specific training material and training or updating approaches that will be still usable also if online AI (what are called "Frontier models") were to become so expensive that only larger companies could afford it, or simply so restricted along political and business "borders", to require a redesign of how it is used.
Already had in the past training material designed with the collaboration of AIs and used it, but in October decided to try test different approaches- as I was used to redesign processes and activities even before started working officially in 1986 (yes, also when I was in the Army, ended up having multiple - unpaid - jobs at the same time: but was funny to make those 12 months counts for more than waiting to end, and deliver value also to others).
Part of the concept was to see how could evolve my old 1990s way of working that followed while going around Europe.
On the post-2022 AI side, started by simply attending workshops and conferences and using AI to "augment" what was being presented, by e.g. sharing the picture of a slide being presented while listening to the speech, and asking AIs via my smartphone to prepare a report, interacting once in a while to "focus" what was produced before time was actually spent in developing that report, revising a tools, of generating a comparison with other, plus collecting information about trends.
In 2026, thanks to the improvement in models, expanded that also to document development and software improvements while walking around.
So, generally started early in the morning by launching requests to one or more AIs, and, whenever I had a break, see the progress and answer questions.
The latest test in October was do develop and test from scratch a process and associated tool to keep my writings posted online "up-to-date"... in a single busy day, while doing in parallel other things.
It was interesting to check progress whenever switching bus, or while standing in line- and being able to really do that (and attending events in person, etc) all in the same day.
As I wrote above: between early October and late December plan to "pack" in my spare time (currently, time between discussing about potential missions and looking, just in case, for new missions) the "heavy lifting" to reach few targets.
The "heavy lifting" is design and initial usable results, what is called "MVP"- but working, not just a prototype, and in some cases actually had time to had two-three evolutions after using the initial one: all by leveraging on past experience, recent training, and knowledge that top AI models have more "vertical" expertise that needs only to be steered to produce results that can then be verified, validated, and improved.
During October also observed how we Europeans have been in a whirlwind of announces about changes, tinkering, boasting- but mostly inward-looking, to confirm our own post-colonial position in the larger scheme of global affairs.
Reminds a joke about "facimmo ammuina" that a NCO told me while I was serving in the Army- to pretend to be relevant by showing off as being a "busy bee".
I think that in that case the reason was that somebody had had the smart idea, to accelerate leaves removal from trees during fall, to send in helicopters- so we ended up with leaves not on trees, not on the streets inside the barracks- but everywhere- including on the roof of buildings.
Or maybe was the time when somebody had had the smart idea, during the winter, to remove ice from the soccer field by sending in tanks- which of course crushed the ice, but made a mess of the underlying ground, and pushed bits of ice underground.
In both cases: to show resolve and speed in action.
Point is: to the senior officers observing the results, did not seem to have been really a show of decision-making worth a promotion or two...
In our current case, all our initiatives depend on the actual ability to complete and deliver- not just to announce something that one day, if all the universe freezes to wait before competing with us, will give us a competitive advantage.
A joke about the Gosplan was that delivered factories producing one the left shoe, the other the right shoe- and the quantities by size never matched.
It is better to have guidelines, some long-term plan that anyway is needed, however long it takes, and then adjust to cope with the short- and medium-term transition, than to keep promising a future sunrise- as it ends up sounding akin to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow- do you remember "Over the rainbow" from "The Wizard of Oz".
I know- if you read other posts and articles, the examples above appeared once in a while: but, unfortunately, it is what makes those examples relevant that keep happening again and again.
And does not really change the short-term (and, probably, medium-term) issue: our relevance as European Union in global affairs.
We Italians are used to the concept: seen from the outside, it appears almost as the post-WWII Italian "convention ad excludendum", whose purpose at the time was to exclude the Italian Communist Party from any potential government coalition.
In our modern case, it is played by President Trump, e.g. look at the proposed November 10th-11th meeting between USA, Russia, Ukraine- to be held in Abu Dhabi
Contains at least a couple of messages:
_ a war in Europe will be solved outside Europe
_ it will be hosted in Abu Dhabi, just around the corner from Iran.
This announce is also useful to show a potential for results before the closing of the polls for the mid-term elections in the USA, as it shows also that the "progress" announced on Iran that I see reported every day on my MorningNews (foreign newspapers) is enough to enable holding a negotiation not too far away from Iran.
Reminds that movie with Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier where the latter asked to the former "Is it safe?", The Marathon Man.
Curious that Italian newspapers instead, since few days, sound a copycat of the equally "sabre-rattling" ("saber-rattling" for the Americans) Axios or PM Netanyahou.
Probably because Italian media converged on previous cases where Axios "leaked" what President Trump administration was about to do, and what the PM of Israel was willing to do, and therefore simply assumed that Axios has to be considered a reliable source, while on e.g. NPR, Reuters, Al Jazeera were instead reported the discussions between Oman and Iran, and the work that some Arab countries and Pakistan were doing to "build bridges", and the relevant progress.
In the end, even President Trump, as of course all those signals about negotiations, meetings, etc are useful for the elections that will be completed today, had to utter to Axios that he is in "no rush" to decide on bombing Iran again.
Coupled few minutes ago with another announce:
As for the preparations of a "plan B" (resume): well, it is just normal- but preparing for a "plan B" does not imply that "plan A" is a decoy.
Also if some would like to see that "plan B" to become "plan A"- curious the discussion online if some picture showing USA airplanes arriving in Israel were modified to increase the number of planes or not.
Keep asking for that, and hyping to derail any negotiation, and probably, as happened recently in various conflicts, you will not be disappointed.
The same cannot be said for those who will be under the side-effects of pushing for "plan B" to become "plan A".
For now, we Europeans can just wait and see- and prepare to foot the reconstruction bill.
So, for now, what shared in August 2026 stands:
After September, also October, just looking at the writing side, was a busy month, as I wanted to accelerate before year end on some preparation activities.
This month, will keep this article short: and the second half of this article, i.e. the part where discussed the logic behind what published and events that happened in October, will go instead on my robertolofaro.com
You can see there the list of the articles published in October.
Read the previous blog item in this list, and you will see a discussion about the concept of PESTEL- looking outside your won tiny box, if your role (as it was in my case) required to be a "bridge" between different domains, industries, companies, and often even cultures (organizational and not).
In October, on my website released no article about the forthcoming elections in Italy (the series "The Cospaia of Europe" that started in mid-September - the name is from a tiny republic that was created by a map misreading, and lasted few centuries as a kind of "buffer zone" between two local powers).
There is a reason: was preparing to close the month by launching a weekly news review on Italian politics, in preparation of the forthcoming elections of 2027, "The Italian Observer", as often shared with foreign connections my feed-back, but recently saw that more and more read some material, and therefore decided to share in a different way what I was anyway doing.
The issue 01 was released on 2026-11-01, as will be published each Sunday morning (Rome time), and will contain just few sections:
_ a digest summary listing the news items collected within the issue, with the trends (escalating, stable, de-escalating) and alert level (green, yellow, red)
_ a small "signal board" with a handful of key themes within the issue
_ "Italian politics this week", reporting selected news from Italian newspapers
_ "What politicians said", sharing a few interviews with Italian politicians that generate a bit of feed-back
_ "Trends in politics", comparing with the previous two weeks to discuss emerging trends
_ "How others see us", to share the feed-back from abroad on Italian politics (often via Italian newspapers, but sometimes we get direct commentary).
If you were in Italy, and were to read a handful of newspapers, you would actually get dozens and dozens of articles each week that blend news, commentary, "king making"- as it is traditionally the way Italian media worked, also if try to pretend to be "neutral".
It would make no sense, to have a general perception of trends, to read all of that, if you are an outsider.
I do read most of that, but I am based in Italy and trying to see which "niches" would make sense in the future, should either be still in Italy, or end up supporting foreigners interested in Italy.
So, when used MorningNews as a basis to generate the new one a set of cultural and contextual explanations with references to past Italian political reporting since the 1970s (when I started reading it- as starter reading really before starting elementary school), and examples from the past, to "frame" my concept and request to obtain a "bipartisan" weekly with a limited list of items and the structure that shared above.
It worked- both the issue 2026-00 and issue 2026-01 were quite balanced, and in the latter there was also almost a joke: the two interviews selected by the AI were both from the center-left "coalition", specifically two leaders backbiting at each other:
Yes, "bipartisanship" in Italy is both between coalitions and within them- if you had been in Italy a couple of decades ago, you probably heard at least once the term "Tafazzi" used to refer to self-defeatist political choices- it was so common, that generated also "tafazziano", whose definition you can find on the Treccani website with examples from newspapers.
And this is all for November- only the fountain picture is missing:
Yes, tomorrow will start a whirlwind of training, webinars, workshops that will last a week- but, in November actually expect much more news worth discussing and reporting on.
Stay tuned!