For example, a podcaster/youtuber may want a short intro track. An entertainer or a marketer may want some generic or silly background music.

Does it have a use case for a producer/musician? Maybe. It might give them ideas for chord progressions, melodies, etc. But real music does that too, and much more effectively.

I find myself leaning more these days towards the view that the whole "eventually consistent JSON database replicated across all participating servers" thing is maybe too much of a reach. One big reason is that I think the challenges of moderation put a cap on how decentralized any usable communications system can be, so decentralizing things beyond the level of moderation doesn't actually add much, and can in some ways make things worse.

It's abundantly clear that you can't run any kind of public anything on the internet these days without some sort of moderation. It's also clear that moderation ultimately requires humans making decisions; you can have bots reacting in various ways to filter spam but you always need humans at the top who can override and tune those bots. For public forums, the capacity of those humans to keep things running in a sane manner is the bottleneck on centralization, not any technical decentralization of the protocol.

What this means is that if you have a chat room with a three-person mod team, there is not much to be gained by having the underlying protocol decentralized across the servers and/or clients of all 100 or 500 or 10,000 users in the room. Everything that every user sees is already subject to the decisions of the three mods and is therefore effectively "gatekept". Moreover, what it means for the room to be healthy is that all those users are basically satisfied with the moderation, which means that letting unmoderated traffic flow in a free and decentralized manner is actually not what people want --- it just means they'll see more spam.

A possibility to explore would be something that has some kind of partial or two-tiered decentralization in which (within the context of a given room) moderator servers have different status than ordinary-user servers. This might mean, for instance, that non-moderator servers simply trust moderator servers about state, rather than every server doing the full state resolution for every room. It could also mean that when moderation is overwhelmed by a flood of spam, there is a mechanism that can throttle traffic to the non-mod users, so that the room just appears quiet, rather than the whole flood of spam being replicated to everyone.

This idea is half-baked but I feel like something along these lines could mitigate some of the worst cases I've seen on Matrix, which can arise when the spam effectively DDoSes the moderators and the moderation actions (such as redactions or bans) become stuck in the processing queue behind spam messages.

In any case, though, it's clear that moderation needs to be baked into the protocol at a lower level than it currently is.

I can confirm in Italy almost no one will even accept a tip. (Taxi drivers, wait-staff, hotel staff)

Sad if this is no longer the case.

In the UK at least (and the rest of Europe too, as far as I can tell), this is still very much the case. The curve varies with the individuals tipping. I would be quite happy to give 20% if the service was outstanding. I’m equally happy to not tip at all if the service was very poor.

For example the old tiles displayed rail tracks extremely prominently, which just aren't relevant 99% of the time even when traveling by train. In the vector tiles they're much more muted and thinner.