The Changelog – November 2022
This November has been weird. If I had to describe it, my first instinct would be to say that it felt like slipped time. After all, my emotional status has been all over the place, with moments of genuine excitement and moments of dread. November is usually a bad month. It is always full of bad memories and events. Even this year, November hit again early in the month: once again, I had to attend a November funeral.
Utility-based AI for Games
Finite-State Machines (FSM) are the bread-and-butter of game AI due to their simplicity (both in implementation and theory) and effectiveness. As such, FSMs are the topic of many tutorials and guides. Unfortunately, most of them focus on the States part of FSM. After all, they are called Finite-State Machines, so you expect that states are the critical part. Well, no. The critical part is the other: transitions. Transitions can make or break your AI independently of how carefully crafted the states are.
The Changelog – October 2022
It was an October that didn’t look like October: the maximum temperatures never went under 25 °C; it was almost always sunny, and everything looked more like spring than autumn. This threw me off a bit. At the moment I am writing, it is Halloween, yet I do not really feel it. Well, I didn’t feel the October vibes for the other part of the month, either. So I will probably call this month September 2.
“Matteo squashed a lizard and Davide cried”
In one of my earliest memories, on a warm sunny morning, I am in my school backyard with my teachers and schoolmates. Something catch my attention. On a sidewalk, I see a small, motionless lizard. Maybe it is injured, or perhaps it is already dead (it is in the nature of childhood memories to be uncertain). What I know is that I bend over it in awe: “There is a lizard!
The Changelog – September 2022
September is the best month. It is the “back to school” month. The time when you sprint into a new season of life. Only that, this time, I think I forgot about that. I still have a task I put on my to-do list on September 1st. It is about my regular planning and organization for the new season. I usually need to do that in the first week of September.
The Changelog – August 2022
August was my summer vacation month. Therefore I had more time on my hand, some of which had been utterly wasted. In general, though, I think I had a good month of new activities, a weekend in Tuscany, friendly human interactions, and a good chunk of consumed media (I put a big dent in my extra-large-neverending watch/read/playlist). I’ve also finally updated this blog with an extensive article. The funny thing is that it was not any of my “currently in draft” articles.
The Freakout-Free Guide to Generative AI
I saw a bit of a heated debate around generative AI and AI art. So this is my “guide” for the general public, where I try to answer some common questions. What is generative AI? How does it work? What are its problems? What are their advantages? Do we all die because of it? (no).
The Changelog – July 2022
Every time a new month begins, I start looking for something different to do. Something that would create a memorable milestone in the journey of life. Unfortunately, when I reach the end of the month, I realize that I often fail at this simple goal. It is not easy to break the routine and create something memorable every 30 days. But July was not one of those months. In fact, when it started, I was sitting at a beach bar in Attica, Greece, looking at the moon reflecting on the nigh sea after the first day of the company retreat (to be precise, the first retreat after the pandemic pause).
The Changelog – June 2022
This issue came a bit earlier. In fact, tomorrow I’ll be traveling to Athens for work (and fun, I hope), and I’ll be back on July 3rd. So I think it is better to release earlier than late and leave the traveling part for next month. But let’s come back to the chase: June. June started as May ended: in an emotional disaster. Fortunately, though, things got better along the way.
The Changelog – May 2022
Why am I starting again with the monthly changelogs? I constantly have the burning desire to have a place to write something completely free. My blog is mostly about technology, and my Medium publication is about political philosophy, but what about everything else? In the last two years, my interests shifted, and while I am definitively still working in tech fields, and I will still write about it, I missed having a small place where to explore different things that are not big enough to be worth an entire article or, even worse, a separate blog.