Companies such as Microsoft and Meta have shared the names of civil servants and academics working on European tech regulation with a senate committee investigating “tech censorship” or “jawboning”, news magazine Vrij Nederland reported on Friday.
The cabinet has described the news as “extremely worrying”, given that the named officials could now face travel bans or even sanctions, Vrij Nederland said.
“If you want to discuss policy, then you do it with us, not over the backs of civil servants,” digital economy minister Willemijn Aerdts told the magazine. “That has happened and we will now talk to our contacts, including those in the US.”
This is the job now. You're standing on a burning ship, holding a map, trying to figure out where the hell we're going and how we're going to get there.
There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember.
Companies like Lovable, Base44, Replit, and Netlify use AI to let anyone build a web app in seconds—and in thousands of cases, spill highly sensitive data onto the public internet.
The European Commission has delayed formal presentation of its tech sovereignty package to 3 June … marking the third such delay on the flagship plan’s big reveal.
The latest postponement comes soon after a blunt warning by the US ambassador to the EU, speaking in an interview with Euractiv earlier this month, that “protectionist” rules could derail the EU-US trade deal.
See also yesterdays "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born":
The US no longer has the power or influence it once did and that changes everything for US tech companies.
LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.
LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.
There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons—indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don’t think.
The ground is shifting underneath every industry that was built on the assumption that the US would protect and preserve the globalised status quo. The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge.
It’s impossible to guess what exactly will happen next to software or tech. All I know is pretty much all of modern software is built on a premise that no longer holds. Even free and open source software is contingent on everybody agreeing to similar policies regarding copyright. Whether tech has enough clout on its own to continue its strategy of capture and control, whether it compromises with local governments to retain its power, whether we’re in for a period of collapse and fragmentation is anybody’s guess. The old world is dying and the new cannot be born.
A GPU-rendered terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics 🧀
Seit vergangener Woche werden Land auf Land ab private Pools im Garten befüllt. So manche Wasserversorger bringt das derzeit an ihre Grenzen. Gerade in Zeiten extremer Trockenheit wird in manchen Regionen Oberösterreichs ein Rekord-Wasserverbrauch verzeichnet.
Bosses betting on AI to slash headcount and boost margins are discovering an uncomfortable truth: the strategy isn't working.
New research from Gartner lays out the problem in stark terms. The analyst firm surveyed 350 global businesses - all with annual revenues above $1 billion, all piloting or deploying intelligent automation - and found that around 80 percent had cut staff as a result.
The returns? Elusive. Companies that reduced their workforces were just as likely to see negative outcomes or marginal gains as they were to generate any meaningful return on investment (ROI).
Aufgrund der geringen Niederschläge in den vergangenen Wochen steigt die Waldbrandgefahr deutlich an, warnt das Landesfeuerwehrkommando. Und auch in der Landwirtschaft sorgt die Trockenheit für Probleme, weil das Grünfutter nur zaghaft wächst.
Eine Rechtsauskunft auf Knopfdruck, visualisierte Baupläne in wenigen Sekunden und hocheffiziente Softwarecodes: Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) ist im Berufsleben von Anwaltskanzleien, Architekturbüros und IT-Firmen auch in Österreich längst angekommen – mit Folgen für alle, die künftig in Berufe einsteigen.
Im heurigen April ist laut Daten der Geosphere Austria nur halb so viel Regen wie im 30-jährigen Durchschnitt gefallen. Es gab bereits Waldbrände, nun wird in den ersten Tiroler Gemeinden offenbar auch das Wasser knapp. In Iselsberg-Stronach und Reith im Alpbachtal wurden die Bewohnerinnen und Bewohner zum Wassersparen aufgerufen.
Die Gemeinde Reith im Alpbachtal ruft ihre Einwohnerinnen und Einwohner zum Wassersparen auf. Wegen der anhaltenden Trockenperiode seien im gesamten Gemeindegebiet rückläufige Quellschüttungen in der öffentlichen Wasserversorgung zu verzeichnen.
Während in Brüssel viel von digitaler Souveränität gesprochen wird, bleibt die Finanzierung der Projekte, die diese verwirklichen sollen, ungewiss. Michiel Leenaars von der niederländischen NLnet Foundation gibt Einblicke in seine Arbeit zur Förderung von Alternativen und erläutert, was er von der EU erwartet.
You see, it’s not that Microsoft was subsidizing nearly two million people’s compute, it’s that AI has become so strong, powerful and complex that it’s basically a different product!
While Copilot might not be “...the same product it was a year ago,” very little has changed about the underlying economic mismatch: that Microsoft was allowing users to burn more than their subscription costs in tokens every single month for three years. Per the Wall Street Journal in October 2023:
Most people think an email address is just a username and a domain. It is a lot more than that. This covers structure, rule, edge case, and security trap worth knowing about.
TIL: display-popup in tmux
Displays a popup running shell-command (or default-command when omitted) on target-client. A popup is a rectangular box drawn over the top of any panes.
https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man1/tmux.1#display-popup
/via https://sean.taylormadetech.dev/2026/04/29/tmux-display-popup.html
Die Pläne der Bundesregierung für eine moderne IT-Infrastruktur in der Verwaltung stoßen auf juristische Hindernisse. Ein Konsortium um den US-Konzern Google hat gegen die geplante Vergabe eines Cloud-Großauftrags an die Deutsche Telekom und SAP Beschwerde eingelegt. Wie die FAZ berichtet (Paywall), führt dies zu einem vorläufigen Stopp des Projekts, das ein Volumen von rund 250 Millionen Euro über eine Laufzeit von vier Jahren umfasst.
John Oliver just did what he did best: demolished a harmful industry piece by piece.
On the latest episode of his HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver tore into AI chatbots, those oh-so helpful tools that can sure save us “significant time writing emails,” he opened, with the small cost of “everything else on Earth.”
“The more you look at chatbots, the more you realize that they were rushed to market with very little consideration for the consequences,” he warned, on a more serious note.
“The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments,” the researchers write in the paper. “We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022.”
„Es wird befürchtet, dass die zunehmende Verbreitung von KI-generierten und KI-unterstützten Texten im Internet zu einer Verringerung der semantischen und stilistischen Vielfalt, der sachlichen Genauigkeit sowie zu weiteren negativen Entwicklungen beitragen könnte“, schreiben die Forscher in ihrer Studie. „Wir haben festgestellt, dass bis Mitte 2025 etwa 35 % der neu veröffentlichten Websites als KI-generiert oder KI-unterstützt eingestuft wurden, während dieser Anteil vor der Einführung von ChatGPT Ende 2022 noch bei null lag.“