Hey👋,
I'm Giacomo

Sunday thoughts:
"Working in a cafe is still working. Whether you're in a Starbucks in Swindon or a beach bar in Bali."

What a news 😂

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a fan of office work, as opposed to remote.

But digital nomadism is on another level of remote.

And it will inevitably wind down.

It's sold as a dream by social media remote "performers", whose real lives and struggles are seldom disclosed.

But the reality is that it just doesn't work for the vast majority of people.

We all crave for connections.
With a place, with people, with a community. With a job?

This is especially true in our careers.
Personal connections are, like, 90% of professional success.
Prove me wrong!

Office colleagues for employees,
or local groups from university, startup accelerators, co-working mates for self-employed.

Every one of these connections needs time to be built and maintained.
You need to "consistently show up".

Something digital nomads definitely don't do.

That's why it should be treated as a rare exception.
Not a dream to be sold to everyone.

Tell me how I'm wrong.

Just to put things into perspective 😅

Ruoming Pang will make more money than all the major tech CEOs combined.

Meta, where do I apply?

Everyone on LinkedIn:
“Europe is a joke. The US is crushing it.”

The data:
👉 5 of the 8 richest countries on earth are in Europe, lol 😅

↳ The US isn’t even in the top 5.
↳ Four European nations rank higher.
↳ Three of them are in the EU.
↳ The fourth, Switzerland, just proposed a new set of treaties to be even closer to the EU. Some are even calling it a “passive member.”

👉 Of the 10 most liveable cities in the world:
4 are in Europe.
Zero in the US.

👉 On the Human Development Index,
the US ranks 17th.
Europe once again dominates the top ten: 8 are European countries.

👉 Mortality rate:
Even the richest Americans have a mortality rate close to the poorest Northern and Western Europeans.

Michael Jackson what am I missing here?

Maybe the future.
Because this data reflects the present.
But the future might look darker for Europe.

Or... maybe not?

The greatest civilisations in history thrived on democracy and openness.
To people. Capital. Trade. Ideas.

From Ancient Greece to the Roman Republic,
to the US and Western democracies in the '90s and 2000s,
to Switzerland,
a hyper-democracy where >20% of residents are foreigners.

But now, the US is shifting gears.
Tariffs. Immigration restrictions. Democratic cracks?
It's starting to challenge the very openness
that made it the world’s largest economy.

Sure, a few tech giants are making a tiny group of people incredibly rich.
As in: <20 people! those earning 9-figure salaries at Meta. 😅

But what about the millions of others?

Europe is watching closely.
And, so far, it’s not making the same mistakes. (kind of)

The future might not look like what everyone on LinkedIn says it will.

Looking to stand out?

Easy. Gift a Coldplay ticket to to your CEO 😂

I had never heard of Astronomer before.
Now I have.

Now I know who they are, what they do and even found out some teams at my employer use its tools.

Earned media at its best 😅!

ColdplayGate is turning into a marketing case study!

Meet Andy Byron, NOT THE GUY FROM THE COLDPLAY GIG 🤣

I love how he capitalised on the trend and promoted his own video business.

Kudos to you Andy,
I'm sure your wife was relieved to know you didn't waste hundreds of dollars to see Coldplay 😂

Oh, and many brands are capitalising on the trend too.

My favourite is Ryanair - Europe's Favourite Airline:

"Ryanair 🤝 Coldplay
splitting up couples"

Literally just happened to me on a flight last week 😅

The Ai content flooding of the internet is coming faster than I thought.

LinkedIn is already dangerously full of Ai posts and comments.

YouTube is another victim,
with an avalanche of Ai-generated repetitive videos, uploaded with the sole purpose of monetisation.

It seems Google is doing something about it.

This new update to YouTube’s monetisation policies should better identify “mass-produced” and “repetitious” content.

And remove monetisation in order to discourage their creators to produce more.

For platforms it’s a trade-off:

-> More content (whatever the quality) -> more inventor for ads

Vs

-> Less content but higher quality -> more engagement -> more premium ads

The latter will definitely be the winning strategy in the long term.

Users will get fed up with Ai garbage very quickly and move to the next platform that promises to filter this content out.

How platforms manage the Ai flooding now, will determine their success in the next decade.

Yesterday, I drove in the footsteps of James Bond at the Furka Pass.

But something was deeply wrong.

The massive glacier from the movie, the one behind the iconic Hotel Belvedere, was gone!

Vanished in just 60 years.

The hotel, built in the 1880s, was named "Belvedere" for its breathtaking view of that very glacier. Just few hundred meters away.

Today, it overlooks a pile of rocks.
No wonder it's abandoned. 😔

Climate change isn't just real. It's fast. Frighteningly fast.

Forget the political debate for a moment and let's talk business.

The next 2008-style financial crisis won't be triggered by an AI bubble.
(Spoiler: there is no AI bubble).

👉 It will be triggered by climate change.

Here's why:

Extreme natural disasters have skyrocketed.
Some data shows a five-fold increase in 50 years. Other sources say two-fold in just the last 20.

But here’s the problem nobody talks about:

Natural disasters → $$$$ financial damage → $$$$ insurance claims.

When claims get too high, insurers can't cover the losses.
So they simply stop insuring properties in high-risk areas.

Provided they haven't bankrupted in the meantime.

And then the domino effect:

→ No insurance, no mortgage. Banks won't lend without insurance.
→ Property values plummet.
→ Massive wealth destruction.
→ Left without local business, banks close up branches and leave.

A collapse in property prices and banks closing down is a horror movie we've all seen before.

But this time, add catastrophic insurance losses to the mix.

In all of this,
AI might be our only way out.

Sophisticated reasoning models could find AND implement the solutions for us.

Or at least, I hope that's what the 9-figure AI engineers are working on right now!

THIS HAS TO STOP ⛔

Big LinkedIn creators are liking and commenting each other's posts with bots.

Just google "automatic comments linkedin".
It's a booming market.

I found a whole ecosystem of major creators (>100k followers) in a closed loop.

→ They all comment on each other's posts, instantly.
→ The comments are painfully, obviously written by AI.
→ So are the author's replies 😔

All their posts have roughly the same number of comments.
No surprise.

I have followed some of these creators for years, even before AI.
So I witnessed the change.

Their posts used to be original, valuable and generate genuine conversations.
Followers were growing, but not exponentially.

Then the shift to bots, to pump followers over 100k.

Now, compare that to creators like Linas Beliūnas, one of my favourites.

His comments section is alive.
Real thoughts. Real conversations. Real humour.
Even typos.

Linas take active part in the conversations.

I get the "fake it 'til you make it" hustle.
Use fake engagement to eventually attract real followers.

But we're really drowning in AI-generated garbage here.

WHAT'S THE POINT?

If platforms don't start filtering this out, the entire creator and social media marketing economy will collapse.

But here's the truly scary part:
what if I'm wrong?

What if those soulless comments are intentionally written by humans?

It means we humans are becoming the very machines we're trying to compete with!

and the question still remains,

what's the point then?

I've been a ChatGPT fan since day one.

But I think I'm moving to Gemini. 😬

Here's why 👇

After Gemini completes a deep research, you can instantly:

→ Create a web page out of it.
Yes, a fully functioning web app built on your research content. Wild!

→ Create an interactive infographic.
A feature I absolutely love.

→ Create a quiz.
To ensure you've actually learned the content.

→ Create an audio summary.
Delivered in the style of a podcast.

But that's not even the half of it.

→ You can seamlessly export everything to Google Docs.
→ You can inject AI-powered features directly into your new web app.

Add Veo3 to the mix,
and it's hard not to feel like Google is pulling ahead in the AI race. 🚀

The craziest part?
Many of these features were rolled out in just the last few months.

The race is on!

On top of all this:

→ The Canvas feature is better than in ChatGPT.
The interactive preview reminds me of Lovable's style. I love it.

→ Deep research seems to pull from more authoritative sources.

→ The UI is much cleaner.
It spares you the headache of choosing between 10 different models.

My biggest hesitation was the lack of CustomGPTs.

But Google fixed that too.

Gems are the Gemini equivalent, and they work just as well.

What's your take...

Team ChatGPT or team Gemini?

Eleven star engineers are set to make $200M this year.💰

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands just lost their jobs.

And they won't get it back!

Job openings for software engineers in the US are now nearly half of pre-pandemic levels.

Microsoft just announced another 9,000 layoffs, adding to the 6,000 cut in May.

Yet, for some lucky ones, pay packages have almost doubled.

💸 Median compensation for a Principal AI Researcher in Big Tech hit $5M, vs $3.5M just three years ago.

For comparison, a typical Big Tech software engineer not involved in AI, makes between $180k–$220k (base salary).

The gap is widening. And it's accelerating fast!

Recruiters estimate that only a few hundred people globally possess the skills to build cutting-edge AI models.

This is less than the number of players competing in the football Champions League!

Eleven of them were just poached by Meta last week.
The rest is evaluating their options.

OpenAI even granted employees a week off to organise one-to-ones with top performers, figuring out how to convince them to stay.

👉 Want a preview of AI's impact on the broader job market?

Start with tech.

A handful of superstars earning historically unprecedented sums,

while everyone else lives under constant threat of layoffs and AI-driven replacement.

Welcome to the economy of superstars at its peak.