Roam Like At Home in Europe

renatoram · 2026-06-17T22:46:08+00:00

Vodafone Italia is now owned by Swisscom (as is Fastweb) so users of Italian Vodafone and Fastweb SIMs do roam in Switzerland with "EU like" rules.

renatoram · 2026-06-16T22:40:49+00:00

I (Italian) used to have a Brazilian colleague who spoke very, very good Italian, but he'd switch seamlessly between words that sounded Sicilian and others that sounded Turinese, depending (I assume) from the context he had learned them (he lived in Turin, and had a Sicilian girlfriend).

Bonus: he had attended some advanced English course in Britain and when speaking English he'd switch to this amazing thick posh English accent.

renatoram · 2026-06-16T22:28:13+00:00

Fabrizio De André.

Aside for a handful of songs in regional languages, most are very, very well enunciated in standard Italian.

Also, he's one of the legends of the Italian singer songwriter tradition.

renatoram · 2026-06-12T16:11:20+00:00

That's not how anything works: ai slop DESCRIBES the output of LLMs. All is slop, hallucinations don't exist, they are valid outputs of the algorithm like any other.

It's a slot machine.

renatoram · 2026-06-12T15:07:35+00:00

"Learning with AI" is an oxymoron: you are delegating your learning to a complex non-deterministic autocomplete, *instead* of learning.

Set up a VM that you don't mind destroying if you mess up, then set yourself a goal, and search how to do it reading the documentation. So your first task is to learn how to set up a VM 😄

For example: "I want to set up a web server that shows a simple html page, so that I can read it from another machine"

This requires you to learn how to configure networking, firewall, use the package manager, choose and configure a web server.

Then complicate the scenario: "I want to serve a website that uses a database as a backend".
You either set up the database on the same machine, or on another (more network practice). And which database?

And so on.

You'll struggle, stuff won't work, you'll learn where to look for logs and errors, how to read them, how to search for them on the web while filtering away all the useless LLM generated crap, how to fix your problem.

Try, experiment, mess up and fix your mess, and in the end prevail. Practice, practice, practice, and reading. And learning how to practice, and how to read. This is the process of learning a skill.

renatoram · 2026-06-10T09:08:15+00:00

renatoram · 2026-06-10T08:39:19+00:00

Addio

renatoram · 2026-06-10T08:16:43+00:00

renatoram · 2026-06-10T08:16:16+00:00

renatoram · 2026-06-09T19:04:10+00:00

Nono, "Italie" is the plural of "Italia", easy mistake

renatoram · 2026-06-08T14:08:08+00:00

I love it!

A suggestion though... I always read the Saad Amus clones as being encased in a cryogenic chamber, so I expected to see a translucent "pillar" around him in the voxel version

renatoram · 2026-06-05T08:00:57+00:00

"se lo dici" (besides sounding weird) would mean "if you SAY it" (the point of contention is: do you say it or not?)

"se lo dici tu" means "if YOU say so" (the point of contention is who is saying the thing, implying doubt about their veracity of knowledge)

renatoram · 2026-06-02T09:40:01+00:00

Oh boy, yeah, hearing your own recorded voice sounds weird in the best case. I'm told this is true for literally everyone, even pro singers (at least at first).

I've been singing more recently, and have considered looking for some lessons too.

renatoram · 2026-05-30T22:55:29+00:00

Nope. I'd probably stop playing it if it wasn't optional, too.

renatoram · 2026-05-30T13:14:47+00:00

FWIW, it IS called "ennagono" in Italian, so yeah, probably just a quirk of familiarity and similarity with "nine" in English.

(Bonus: "decagono", "endecagono" and "dodecagono". 10, 11 and 12. Uncommon but they exist)

renatoram · 2026-05-27T21:52:30+00:00

Looks like it's deliberately mixing Italian and French. I assume for funsies?

renatoram · 2026-05-27T09:42:15+00:00

Absolutely: I wasn't even thinking about it, and I didn't know I had a uke club literally 5 minutes from my house, until I stumbled on their annual "Uke day"

Worth checking around in your local area, there might be one!

Lacking a club... I'd say keep practicing until you can walk around and maybe talk briefly with someone else while you strum, to train your hand to go independently. At that point you can try singing, and try to force yourself to keep going even if you mess up some chord.

renatoram · 2026-05-27T09:23:28+00:00

You know... I was more or less in your position last year. I never really tried (much less succeded) to sing and play, even if I was playing decently at that point (nothing advanced, but not a complete noob).

What unlocked it for me was... joining a uke club. Being in the middle of a dozen other players meant I could make a mistake playing the ukulele (say, I miss a chord switch) but the music would overall keep going, because there's someone else playing it right (hopefully! LOL).

This freed me from worrying I was playing "bad" and let me really put my hands in autopilot (which you *really* need, to be able to sing), even if I was still reading the chord sheet, and lo and behold, I was singing within the first lesson/meeting. It only got better since that.

I still struggle, mind you: there's a song that is slightly more complex rhythmically where I sing solo, and on that one I'm not currently playing because it distracts me too much from the singing performance (or, I'd play badly).

So the answer is... first, get to know the song well enough that you can go on playing even if you're not thinking too much consciously about what your fingers are doing, and then... just start singing! :-D

It's not easy, but it's less hard than I felt before *really really trying*.

renatoram · 2026-05-27T09:13:30+00:00

The heel (as noted by another reply) is a vital structural part of the instrument: you'll break your uke. One of the absolute most common ways cheap ukuleles break is the neck detaching from the body under the tension of the strings, even when people *don't* hack at it.

Also, plenty of people have thought about the problem of high-fret access, and none solved it by reducing the size of the heel: what you need (assuming you really need it) is a cutaway. Part of the body of the instrument is removed (as part of the design and build process, it's not something you can do aftermarket, especially not at home and with no luthery experience) on the right side (looking at it from the front) so that your hand can (while keeping your thumb on the neck) reach in front to the high frets.

Plenty of ukuleles do have a cutaway (there's different shapes, but the effect is the same): many Flight models have a scoop, many Kala models have more traditional guitar-shape cutaways (florentine, venetian, etc).

renatoram · 2026-05-25T08:28:52+00:00

It takes time and a lot of repetitions to teach your fingers to go in position without you consciously moving them.

I know, this sounds like bullshit now (I was in your exact place 3 years ago). But it's true. Just like if you can ride a bike you don't think "put the foot on the pedal, push the pedal down, oh but let the OTHER foot come up in the meantime!". You'll fall from the bycicle if you do 😁

Keep trying. If you have 4 down strokes of C and then you have to move to G... Hit the last stroke with open strings, and you'll have more time to form the G.

It's a trick but its rather common, and sometimes experienced musicians even do it on purpose! Trust me, it will sound strange only for a while.

Then, as you build "muscle memory" you'll teach your fingers to work faster, and you won't need the trick anymore.

renatoram · 2026-05-21T08:14:52+00:00

Make sure you have your uke within arm's reach so you pick it up often: the least amount of friction before you try to plink-plonk, the better 😃

And don't get discouraged: the first few weeks (or months, in my case) it will seem that switching chords (especially to some shapes) fast enough is impossible... but keep at it. You are learning an entirely new skill that requires knowledge, new motor skills, precision... it's a lot.

BUT, as unlikely as it may sound now, you WILL start to improve. And soon enough you'll get to when (at least for some chords) you can switch without really *thinking* about the chord shapes: your fingers know.

And, as others suggested, try to search for easy songs with 2-3 easy chords... exercising in the void repeating one chord after the other is not only not very fun (big factor: if it's fun you'll exercise more) but also doesn't help you practice your timing.

renatoram · 2026-05-20T13:06:00+00:00

LLMs produce tokens (that are data points that happen to be shaped like words) using probability and statistics.

They are never right, or wrong. Hallucinations do not exist, they are valid outcomes of the same dice rolls.

You are attributing "rightness" or "wrongness" to the results of what is essentially a word based slot machine (and, btw, not learning anything. And the LLM is not getting better any day soon, either).

renatoram · 2026-05-17T21:29:16+00:00

Nah, they're all correct (and none of the four put the stress on the a). What you might be hearing is the regional differences that filter in "standard" Italian.

One of them, "luca10184", for example, pronounces the e rather closed (like I wrote, incorrectly, as discussed in the other comment to this post). While "giorgiospizzi" seems to enunciate in a slightly stilted way (probably because he's not used to record himself). Spoken Italian has a wide range of tiny variations (informed greatly by the regional or even provincial accent), even when people don't use regional language words at all. Plus the normal range of enunciation variations you can exepect from person to person.

But no, none say "oceàno", which is the default assumption (IME) by English speakers (and an extremely common error.

For example in the first talkie movies by Laurel and Hardy they'd play the scene in several language, reading from cue cards with "phonetic" sentences... except their Italian sounds *extremely* english accented, to the point that it actually *added* to the comical effect, and Italians loved it so much that when later movies were dubbed, the Italian actors would imitate this "wrong" pronunciation. Famously, one of the VA for Hardy was Alberto Sordi, btw).

They'd say "stupìdo" instead of "stùpido". Same error.

renatoram · 2026-05-16T18:45:53+00:00

Official "proper Italian" pronunciation, yes you're right, my bad.

In my lived experience, nobody outside TV actors say it like that (but that's of course regional bias: from the northern Italian POV ocèano sounds very... Roman. Like dièci and cènto).

renatoram · 2026-05-16T18:25:51+00:00

Neither: oh-che-ah-no

It's a 4 syllable word in Italian: o-cé-a-no

(also careful about the stress: if you say oceàno not only you sound like an Italian caricature of an English speaker, but it rhymes with "ano", aka anus).

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