The first month of the year is always a month of change. However, the mistake is to make it a month of drastic change. First, for once, the months start with the New Year’s Eve celebrations hangover, so we are already set up for failure. Second, drastic changes are doomed to failure anyway, so we should not put all our hopes on the line with bold new years resolutions.

Is this a good reason to give up? Absolutely not. But if we want to build a tower, we must prepare the terrain first. This is what January is for: not for tracking down goals but for preparing ourselves to veer the boat in the right direction.

I believe nothing describes a person better than looking at the books they read. If that list is empty, you already know that you should reconsider that human interaction (unless, of course, there are good, valid reasons). But if that list is not empty, we can also know what kind of person they are.

So what this list tells about me?

For one, it says that I am a bit disappointed. I ended the year with only 28 books: three less than 2021, even if there are more short books. So, I should look back and see what didn’t work out. For instance, I started too many books in parallel. Another thing is that this tragically eventful year has deeply distracted me. Finally, I only read 7 fiction books (last year, they were 17). 2 of these 7 were really boring bricks that slowed me down a lot. The lesson is that I should learn how to drop a book that is draining the life out of me.

Oh, December. You beautiful cozy lazy month. It is the month in which I delude that I can make 10000 different things, but, instead, I spend all my time reading and being with my family. Not a bad thing to do, don’t you agree?

December is also when winter begins. People see winter as a gloomy season, but I see it as the season of rest. If you look around, winter is when Nature goes to rest. Some animals go into hibernation, plants look dead, and sprouts and seeds lie sleeping under the snow. Winter is when Nature takes it slow.

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. So I was ready to accept another black month in which the best I could do was to collect the pieces.

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. In other words, intelligence is in change, and the element of change in an FSM is represented by transitions.

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 2.0, hope for a more traditional November (or not; I am okay with mild temperatures this year), and move on.

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!” I say to my friends with the typical enthusiasm for the small things of a six-year-old.

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. But it is still there at the time of writing (September 28th).

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. Instead, I tried to intervene in a bit of drama between the artist community, the recent progress of Computational Creativity, and the state of the art in “AI-Generated Images.” So if you don’t know what I am talking about, but if you like AI, are an artist, or simply want a freakout-free guide to “AI Artists,” you are the perfect audience for my article.

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).