i've seen a lot of buzz around such tools in the italian Linkedin space, it was either praised as the ultimate tool to automate jobs or feared it would leave unemployed a lot of office workers.
i understand both sides and can confidently say that this ban was made for the latter concern; the italian job space revolves so much around bullshit employment practices (unpaid internships, long term employment for useless tasks), that an action like that is somewhat understandable, as these tools would render their job either just a useless chore or result in firing.
and as the market is heavily controlled and protectionist of its workers, even if it means employing people for useless jobs (as long as they are paid almost pennies, and their salary doesn't grow) ai tools are seen as some foreign entity that need banning, as it challenges this vicious cycle of keeping everything down. note that workers are to blame too, there's almost close to none innovation in anything besides IT, because you either innovate and then force everyone else to be competitive in the field, or keep everything as it is and just ban competition in subtle and disgusting ways.
for reference, my family taxes are handled by a tax consultant, i do my taxes through an online service, which is way cheaper than having a dedicated consultant. since my mother couldn't keep her mouth shut, somehow this information got leaked to the family tax consultant, resulting in a police search of my office, and a mandatory visit to a police station almost an hour away. this kind of stuff happens regularly.
> since my mother couldn't keep her mouth shut, somehow this information got leaked to the family tax consultant, resulting in a police search of my office, and a mandatory visit to a police station almost an hour away. this kind of stuff happens regularly.
it comes back to the "keeping others down" mentality, since our tax consultant heard i was getting his services cheaper elsewhere, he most likely tipped the authorities for something bogus either as scare tactics or to actually do harm to my business.
i know it's him because he ranted about this service, said should be illegal to charge so little to handle taxes, and warned my mother that tax returns will be less or something because our situation isn't fully handled by him (completely false).
we pay him around 800€ per year, plus a fixed per tax return form (around 150€), and opening my business with him would have been around 700€ yearly plus 300€ once to handle some documents (it's free if you do it yourself).
i pay around 300€ every year for a service that so far was perfect, with online guides, a billing/management software, multiple tax consultants handling tickets and responses to any questions i might have.
you can see the convenience from a mile away, and he would be forced to innovate in a fair market; however the easiest (and most italian) way of handling competition is to be vicious about it, bring others down and leverage authorities
you'd be surprised at how accomodating and chill people are in Switzerland (the writer mentions living there).
i needed a couple prints for a birthday and my local shop was closed, so i went to a business that printed ads, banners, fliers, etc with incredibly expensive professional xerox printers. they printed what i needed, had me pay a fair price (less than the shop), and let me use their facilities for cutting/finishes.
I often got the sense, when living in Switzerland, that if there was a designated process for something it would nearly always be followed to the letter, which at least provided a great deal of certainty (although rarely the process didn't benefit either party). If there wasn't one in place, people seemed to operate using a healthy dose of understanding and common sense. This is true virtually everywhere but to varying degrees, with the two seemingly melded together more in some societies.
Just graduated last year in CS, currently working on and off as an ICT consultant with local businesses and on personal projects. Mostly on Linux systems and industrial environment, but notable experiences are:
- Built and operating a web ordering platform (Laravel) with various custom integrations on sales, billing, and advertising platforms.
- Consultancy for an Industry4 project (basically an heavy machinery production management system)
- Operation support and system recovery for a custom internal management software (Flask)
- Software development for data gathering, storaging and analysis, notably onboard a drone as a companion, inside heavy machinery and in other industry related environments.
Huge drone nerd, especially FPVs and self built stuff, from hardware to software.
Currently looking for something i can apply what i love doing (i.e. web+embedded, like iot) as the market is very dry locally (either keep studying or jump in basic web stuff).
for reference, my family taxes are handled by a tax consultant, i do my taxes through an online service, which is way cheaper than having a dedicated consultant. since my mother couldn't keep her mouth shut, somehow this information got leaked to the family tax consultant, resulting in a police search of my office, and a mandatory visit to a police station almost an hour away. this kind of stuff happens regularly.