Flo Crivello

I’ve been working with the AI Futures Project to critique and improve their AI 2040 scenario. Ultimately I still have serious disagreements with it. However, to their credit, the team asked me to write up my criticisms to be shared alongside the scenario itself. Link below.

CHAT CONTROL IS COMING Even though most Members of the European Parliament have voted to REJECT Chat Control, we have not been able to reach the absolute majority that was needed (361 Members). This is a sad day for Europeans.

🚨 EVERY EUROPEAN NEEDS TO KNOW THIS: The European Union is turning into an anti-democratic surveillance apparatus. In March, the European Parliament REJECTED the extension of “Chat Control.” So what did Brussels do? While everybody is distracted from the World Cup, they furtively brought it back through a rarely used procedure and are trying again. The goal is to allow private communications to be scanned under a derogation from normal ePrivacy protections. They’ll have access to your private messages and your photos. And, as always, mass surveillance is being sold to you under the banner of “safety.” The EU bureaucrats do not trust you. They urgently want the infrastructure to surveil you. And when its own Parliament votes the wrong way, the bureaucratic and anti-democratic machine simply finds another procedure and tries again. The European Union is not protecting democracy. It is becoming its enemy. And almost all CONSERVATIVES members of the parliament voted in favor of this Orwellian plan. And now imagine a combination of governmental surveillance AND Palantir. SCARY!!!! SHARE THIS. Europeans deserve to know what Brussels is doing to their privacy.

The reason why my personal site has just one font size, monchrome colors, and looks “boring” is simply because I don’t consider myself a great designer. By using as little variation as possible, I limit the amount of design mistakes I can make, and instead, I try to make the content itself (hopefully) interesting. I know a few tricks to not make my work look like shit, but it’s far from the skills of a designer working at Linear for example. To expand on that, from what I’ve seen, most “design engineers” excel at either design or code, not both. I never believed I can be exceptional at both, and I haven’t seen many people that are really, really great at both. To me, trying to be great at both is like 2-in-1 shampoo conditioner, it never really works as well as two separate products designed specifically to do one thing well. That’s why I made open source projects like Sonner and Vaul, that require some design sense, but these are far from sharing design kits for example. And again, there are exceptions, but you shouldn’t expect all design engineers to design and build absolutely amazing things on their own. I think most design engineers (including me) are just engineers that care about design, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at designing (and vice versa). To me, the title design engineer is misleading in that it’s more of a description of where one’s interests overlap instead of actually indicating high skill in both disciplines.

Just like that, no longer a billionaires tax.

This is why I keep saying Abruzzo is highly underrated. This family moved from NYC, bought a home for $13k cash, and spent $15k renovating it in a tiny village. Their daughter's preschool costs just $70 a month, and groceries run $140 a week. These figures hold across almost every small Italian village. In Abruzzo, you get both coasts and mountains, and towns under 30k inhabitants qualify for the 7% flat tax on foreign income. Nature is stunning, food is exceptional. The key point: this is just one of the approaches. You can pursue it at various investment thresholds, and not necessarily living there year-round, maybe just spending summers there. Now add full self-driving cars to the picture, and you've got the recipe for thousands of amazing small towns in Italy, within an hour of Florence, Pescara, Rome, Lecce, and many more, suddenly opening up. I wouldn't be surprised to see this move made by creators and founders too, eventually as a European summer base.