The EU’s ApplyAI Strategy: €1B (redeployed spending) to push EU AI forward. The standout for me? The FrontierAI Initiative. Submit your frontier model for development, and they’ll supply the compute.
Amazon granted permission for satellite ground station in Cork, Ireland
Amazon this week announced it has received regulatory approval from the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) to operate a satellite earth station gateway at the National Space Centre Ltd (NSC) in Cork County, Ireland.
Nice. It’ll join the Starlink gateway, and means Amazon will enter the retail satellite internet market in Ireland.
It's remarkable that we've had secure replacements for UPnP, like Port Control Protocol and NAT-PMP, yet most home routers don't ship with them. If you know UPnP is insecure, you probably know enough to do manual port forwarding anyway. Everyone else? They’re on their own.
I don’t care about how bad you think you look or how annoying you think your voice sounds. I’d rather a person voice their own YouTube videos than a text to speech program reading an AI generated script. There’s a lot of the latter on YouTube now and it’s trash.
On Amazon devices moving from Android to Vega OS. Google is in a battle to the death with Apple. Android/iOS now running on beefy hardware. Vega is about running on the smaller things. When you build on Linux, like Vega has, every component maker you go to has a Linux driver you can use. Fast dev.
Brazil’s ferociously litigious society turned to AI to clear its courts system, only for lawyers to use it to fill it up again.
Sodium-ion batteries are going to be so good. You can get the ingredients from nearly anywhere. No conflict minerals used. They are stable, can use passive cooling and are difficult to ignite. You can also run them to zero and not damage the battery. They’ll be great for grid storage.
I read an interesting thing by Daniel Kahneman. Smart people can believe opposite things because they trust different people. It’s rarely about facts, it’s about adopting the views of the people we like. People create reasons to agree with those they admire. It’s about trust, not truth.
The UK’s BritCard is here. Again. A digital ID for work, rent, and services. With the EU’s 2026 EUDI Wallet rolling out, this ‘convenience’ is spreading fast. We’ve long traded privacy for less friction online. Will anyone notice when digital IDs become the only option?
I've switched to eSIMs for roaming. My carrier was charging me €5 a day while in the US (€35/week). With the eSIM I'm just paying €3.79 for 1GB of data for a week. Which is more than enough data to get an Uber on a street when I'm not connected to WiFi. Living in the future is wild.
Even as it flirts with hosting services Mastadon must never “win” in a platform sense. It’s a social experiment in digital democracy, where if you don’t like what you’re reading you just drift off to a different instance. Winning platforms follow you with their crap.
While the U.S. (thanks to SpaceX) has mastered reusable launchers, Europe’s Callisto (delayed to 2027) and Themis are still in early testing. Challenges? Late start, funding gaps, and risk aversion. Can Europe stay in the race? It’ll take faster innovation, private investment, and bolder decisions.
Big change for SaaS in the EU. As of this week customers can cancel contracts with 2 months’ notice. No lock-in. By Jan 2027, early termination fees are to be removed. This applies to consumer and business SaaS contracts.
Mojeek remains Europe’s only search engine with a fully independent index, but there is progress on that. Qwant & Ecosia are now using their own European index (EUSP) for some results, and OpenWebSearch.EU’s pilot index is ready for commercial adoption. Let’s see if anyone builds on it.
The US NBER report on ChatGPT has some surprises. Coding is just 4.2% of use, companionship only 2.3%, and non-work chats soar to 73%. It’s more daily info tool than a coder or a therapist.
12 years since Spike Jonze’s Her was released but it’s still fascinating to see Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Jonze’s movie give each directors perspective on their mutual divorce. She (Johansson’s character) felt abandoned, he (Phoenix’s character) struggled with intimacy. Both had guilt.
I’m a big Demon Slayer fan, but the movies are always badly paced with too much filler. I’ll wait for their TV editors to streamline the Infinity Castle footage for a better watch.
AI is more like the smartphone era, where you didn’t buy your hardware and OS from two people in a garage, than the early PC days. Today, two devs in a garage aren’t selling LLMs to hobbyists. Megacorps own all the model innovation.
Immutable Linux distros are perfect for handing older PCs to family. Skip the regular distros, unless you want to be tech support forever.
Anthropic admitted to degraded Claude output for nearly a month due to inference bugs. Tough pill to swallow for $200/month users who were getting lobotomized responses for weeks.