Tootfinder

Kein Zwang zum Algorithmus: Australiens Vorstoß gegen Big Tech verärgert die USA
Australien plant ein strenges Online-Sicherheitsgesetz, das Nutzern ein Algorithmen-Opt-Out ermöglicht. Die USA protestieren scharf gegen die Pläne.

Kein Zwang zum Algorithmus: Australiens Vorstoß gegen Big Tech verärgert die USA
Australien plant ein strenges Online-Sicherheitsgesetz, das Nutzern ein Algorithmen-Opt-Out ermöglicht. Die USA protestieren scharf gegen die Pläne.

A look at the playbook tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI use to shape American schools to their benefit, and the pushback against unproven AI tools (Natasha Singer/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.co…

How Big Tech Captured American Schools
Companies like Google and Microsoft have used their money, their might and their massive reach to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.

AI is the latest induced-urgent-panic that Big Tech has been imposing on schools. I've been in the school ed biz for 3 decades and it's wave after wave of this: "ideas", technology, curriculum, all pushed down w/ urgency. So much more to write here about how their pressures work.
https://www.

How Big Tech Captured American Schools
Companies like Google and Microsoft have used their money, their might and their massive reach to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.

Noch ein paar der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Kein Zwang zum Algorithmus: Australiens Vorstoß gegen Big Tech verärgert die USA

Kein Zwang zum Algorithmus: Australiens Vorstoß gegen Big Tech verärgert die USA
Australien plant ein strenges Online-Sicherheitsgesetz, das Nutzern ein Algorithmen-Opt-Out ermöglicht. Die USA protestieren scharf gegen die Pläne.

UK PM Andy Burnham keeping Lisa Nandy on as culture secretary renews pressure over potential streaming license fees and puts the WBD deal back in the spotlight (Max Goldbart/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2026/07/lisa-nandy-big-decisions-…

Analysis: As The New UK Prime Minister Cosies Up To Donald Trump, Lisa Nandy Could Be About To Become The Most Consequential Culture Secretary In America In Recent Memory
As Andy Burnham befriends Donald Trump, UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has big calls to make on Paramount, the streamer licence fee and big tech.

Puh, die #DLF Presseschau zur 'Allmacht' von KI ist wirklich deprimierend. Da sind sehr viele der Big-Tech- (oder Big AI-) Propaganda aufgesessen, die hier vorführt, was ihre Geldvernichtungs-Maschinen angeblich ganz alleine alles können.
(Wenn sie gelassen werden. Müsste ja nicht sein.)

from my link log —
Tech ain't that deep - and that's a problem.
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/tech-aint-deep
saved 2026-07-20 https://…

Tech ain't that deep - and that's a problem | deadSimpleTech
With that in mind, it became fairly clear to me that the tech industry these days has a depth problem: as much as tech is becoming quite a bit more complex, it's also becoming shallower. Learning new things in tech these days, as often as not, simply doesn't give me the same feeling of satisfaction or achievement as learning or writing C back in the first years of my career did. Being effective in tech these days feels as though it's less about understanding than it is about memorising a big li…

China grants Geely a two-year permit for the country's first private satellite IoT trial, letting Geely offer connectivity to sectors like transport and energy (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article

China clears Geely for landmark satellite test to spur commercial space drive
Geespace secures a two-year satellite IoT trial from MIIT, the first approval for a private Chinese firm.

Interessante en goede opinie wat mij betreft, alleen als het verschil in kwaliteit tussen genoemde gespecialiseerde oplossingen en de generieke van BigTech te groot wordt, de BigTech spelers vrij spel hebben en houden op de Europese markt, dan gaat deze strategie niet werken vrees ik. 🤔
Het gaat verder niet alleen om AI maar ook om Cloud.

Opinie | Europa moet geen Big Tech namaken, maar onverslaanbare AI-specialisten bouwen
Pluriformiteit: Europa is te afhankelijk van Amerikaanse en Chinese techbedrijven. De oplossing ligt niet in het optuigen van een Europese Big Tech-sector, betoogt Elianne Anemaat, maar in het investeren in gespecialiseerde bedrijven.

Curious how this will develop.
I think Schwarz Digits is on a great course, business-wise.
My hope is now for interesting custom processors to develop as part of its expansion.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-richest-man-big-tech-schwarz-digits/a-7789372…

Germany's richest man takes on Big Tech
Supermarket billionaire Dieter Schwarz is investing billions in his cloud company, Schwarz Digits, to rival Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

The EU appears to be shifting from outsized regulatory fines against Big Tech to technical DMA orders that force compliance, such as sharing search data (Jacob Parry/Politico)
https://www.politico.eu/article/brussels-changes-gear…

Brussels changes gear on Big Tech enforcement
As the EU’s focus shifts from big-ticket fines to compliance, concerns are growing that the market power of dominant tech platforms could become more entrenched. 

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle
have doubled their debt to build AI,
👉to $350 billion
💥and cash flow is not keeping up.
Now they are crowding into European credit markets,
🔥on track to out-borrow France
https://thenextweb.com/news/big-tech-3

Where is Europe's Big Tech Sector?
New article at The European Perspective: https://europeanperspective.news/where-is-europes-big-tech-sector/ by our collaborator Alex Hoffmann
30% of the world's deep tech Universities are in Europe. But there'…

Where is Europe’s Big Tech Sector? - The European Perspective
Featuring Original Interviews with European CEOs and Founders

Was die Krise der Demokratie mit der digitalen Transformation zu tun hat und warum wir die Technologie zugunsten der Gesellschaft und nicht die Gesellschaft zugunsten der Technologie regulieren sollten.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible' – Zum Stand der Demokratie im Digitalzeitalter"*
Webseite der Episode:

Alibaba's Damo Academy open sources RADAR, a medical vision-language model it says can read CT scans and identify ~150 abdominal conditions, including cancers (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/artic…

Alibaba open-sources AI model that can detect cancer and nearly 150 conditions
Tested on nearly 40,000 real-world exams, the model outperformed most radiologists, according to a new study published in Science.

Big Tech giants are turning their backs on reports of how their platforms support child sexual abuse, according to Australia's eSafety.
"Even when we've laid this out, we haven't seen adequate responses, despite the technology being ​readily available."

«Gesellschaft — Die gefährlichsten Firmen der Welt:
Algorithmen entscheiden, was wir sehen, denken und wählen. Facebook, Google & Co. verdienen mit Daten nicht nur Geld – sie manipulieren Meinungen und beeinflussen Wahlen.»
So Asozial Kommerziell die Online-Giganten. Ihr kennt und wisst dies sicherlich schon aber vlt. was um weiter zu teilen für die, die immer noch auf FB, X, TikTok & Co. ihre Zeit verschwenden.
📺

Die gefährlichsten Firmen der Welt - Big Tech: Milliarden, Manipulation, Macht
Algorithmen entscheiden, was wir sehen, denken und wählen. Facebook, Google & Co. verdienen mit Daten nicht nur Geld – sie manipulieren Meinungen und beeinflussen Wahlen.

Big Tech AI Spree Revives Accounting Devices That Toppled Enron
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/big-tech-ai-spree-revives-accounting-devices-that-toppled-enron

Stellt sich heraus, chatkontrolle ist over the top. Es würde schon reichen, Big Tech sauber zu halten. Die Milliardäre machen sich gar nicht erst die Mühe, Kinderpornographie auf ihren Plattformen zu verheimlichen.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

“This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens
Meta dragged its feet removing ads that nudify young girls' Instagram pics.

Bernie Sanders Saw This Coming
For decades, the senator has argued that concentrated wealth threatened American democracy.
Now he’s betting that frustration with Big Tech, billionaires, and unchecked AI is reaching a tipping point
https://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interv…

Bernie Sanders Saw This Coming
For decades, Bernie Sanders has argued that concentrated wealth threatened American democracy. Now he’s betting that frustration with Big Tech, billionaires, and unchecked AI is reaching a tipping point.

Trump nominates FCC general counsel Adam Candeub to lead the DOJ's antitrust unit; Candeub, a longtime Big Tech critic, has long sought to challenge Section 230 (Ella Lee/Financial Times)

Unlike some here, I am genuinely of two minds about AI datacenters. I find the lack of reliable information about them very frustrating. That isn't improved in the least by lobbying and regulatory capture. And some of those lobbyists post…a lot!
https://www.

How utility and tech firms ‘educate’ regulators with big donations, secret retreats
While consumers object to high energy costs and data center development, utility and tech companies are sponsoring events for friendly regulators.

oracle’s web site is winning on the Big Tech Website Leaderboard https://www.speedlify.dev/group/big-tech/ but not for a good reason: the website is… uh… not working

Abstracts from 'Digital Heritage and the Global South: Ethics, Politics, Futures' in July 2025. A focus on AI and 'digital colonialism, algorithmic bias, infrastructural dependency on Big Tech, and the erasure of local agency, while foregrounding community-led and decolonial approaches to digital heritage'

Analysis: OpenAI and Anthropic employees are donating to campaigns more heavily and cohesively than Google, Meta, and Airbnb employees did post-IPO (Alexandra Lindsay/The San Francisco Standard)
https://sfstandard.com/2026/07/18/ai-s-…

AI’s new political donor class is already outspending Big Tech’s last one
Campaign filings show AI employees donating faster, more heavily, and more in sync than three prior tech-IPO donor classes. Here’s where the money is going.

Da stand »[…] das Momentum rund um gemeinwohlorientierte, offene soziale Netzwerke als Gegenmodell zu Big-Tech-Plattformen wie Facebook, Tiktok oder Youtube weiter befeuern […]«, aber ich las mehrfach »[…] das Mormonentum rund um gemeinwohlorientierte, offene soziale Netzwerke als Gegenmodell zu Big-Tech-Plattformen wie Facebook, Tiktok oder Youtube weiter befeuern […]« | #Verleser

Dutch Surf sta elaborando un'offerta per liberarsi dalla dipendenza dalle grandi aziende tecnologiche
La cooperativa olandese per l'informatica applicata all'istruzione e alla ricerca sta conducendo progetti pilota con strumenti open source, affiancando valide alternative ai servizi esistenti delle grandi aziende tecnologiche.

RE: https://mastodon.mediafaro.org/@mf_newsdigest/117258015385159892
These useful idiots are playing straight into the hands of fascists and Big Tech.

No idea how to raise funds myself. One thing is clear: "big publishers" are no longer a good choice. The price of a paycheck is too high. Too many IPs stayed with the publisher and went straight into the title graveyard.
A while ago I called it the "ecological dead zone", a devastated mid-epidemic planet from Subnautica where only the plankton (solo devs) and the leviathans (megacorps) survived. Yet even the leviathans are not immune. They merely die much slower. Wi…

Designers talk a big game about "empathy" for users. But empathy without respect is nothing more than pity.
And nowhere is the lack of respect more apparent than in how LLMs have been productized and adopted. The "human in the loop" excuse pushes consequences down onto scrupulous employees and ultimately onto the very users on whom we claim to be centered.
The consequences of disrespectful software are now becoming apparent across tech.

Empathy and delight mean nothing when the software is disrespectful
Software is now something we do TO users, instead of something that we make FOR them.

«„Rechtswidrige“ Mediennutzung — Nigeria untersucht große Tech- und KI-Unternehmen:
Techkonzerne wie Meta, Alphabet und X sind aufgrund von Vorwürfen wettbewerbswidriger Praktiken ins Visier der nigerianischen Wettbewerbshüter geraten.»
Die EU schaut auch auf die Finger der Big-Tech Konzernen doch weshalb immer noch nicht ihren Wettbewerbswidrigkeit?
📰

„Rechtswidrige“ Mediennutzung: Nigeria untersucht große Tech- und KI-Unternehmen
Techkonzerne wie Meta, Alphabet und X sind aufgrund von Vorwürfen wettbewerbswidriger Praktiken ins Visier der nigerianischen Wettbewerbshüter geraten.

US tech companies are offering community investments, guaranteed jobs, and hosting open houses to address concerns and win public support for AI data centers (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/inside-big-techs-frantic-…

Forschung mit Neurodaten: BfDI für mehr Mut, aber klare Grenzen für Big Tech
Gehirn-Computer-Schnittstellen erobern Medizin und Gaming. Auf einer Tagung in Bonn forderten Experten klare Regeln für den Schutz von Neurodaten.

Forschung mit Neurodaten: BfDI für mehr Mut, aber klare Grenzen für Big Tech
Gehirn-Computer-Schnittstellen erobern Medizin und Gaming. Auf einer Tagung in Bonn forderten Experten klare Regeln für den Schutz von Neurodaten.

@… or they have a Big Tech derived bureaucratic culture and need someone experienced at navigating those kinds of dysfunctional environments, which is a skill in itself.

from my link log —
Fast IPv4 to hostname lookups: PostgreSQL vs ClickHouse.
https://tech.marksblogg.com/fast-ip-to-hostname-clickhouse-postgresql.html
saved 2020-01-09

Die stille Kolonisierung – Wie Big Tech Europa entmündigt und was wir dagegen tun können - Prof. Dr. Harald Wehnes (Universität Würzburg)
Heute Mittwoch 29.07.2026, 17:00-18:30
online
Leider via Zoom, aber wir (u.a. unsere FG Digitalisierung und Nachhaltigkeit) setzen uns dafür ein bei der GI @…, Alternativen für Mitglieder zu schaffen...

Die Art und Weise wir wir sprechen ist so sehr durch die Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie geprägt, dass sich zukünftige Linguist:innen fragen müssen was los war.
Praktisch jede Information auf den Big Tech Plattformen, selbst wenn sie wohlwollend ist, muss in ein Format gepresst und vermittelt werden welches, oft über Wut und starken Emotionen, deine Aufmerksamkeit fängt.
Ich habe eben ein Video gesehen welches lediglich über die bösen Pride Flags aufklärt (also, Flaggen die für Dinge…

Sources: Nvidia chips remain the norm for Chinese AI labs training LLMs, as switching from its CUDA platform to Huawei's CANN requires major code rewriting (South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article

What is delaying Chinese AI giants switching from Nvidia to local chips?
High transition costs are keeping AI developers in China reliant on Nvidia chips, industry sources say.

Big boi in my backyard today.

Major U.S. cloud providers are urging Washington to push back against South Korea’s planned overhaul of the security approval system for cloud providers serving its government agencies.
https://www.koreajoongangdaily.com/busines

U.S. cloud giants challenge South Korea's public cloud security overhaul
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are pushing back against South Korea’s public cloud security overhaul, warning the new rules could block market access and violate fair trade principles.

Speaking to people in the 'conventional tech services' industry, I get the impression that *nearly all of them* hate the technologies - mostly from US Big Tech - they feel forced to push. Seems soul destroying. People talking about shifting gov't departments from IBM to Microsoft dependence to save $15million annually. When, in most cases, they could be saving $100s millions by using a local provider running libre software... Seems like an industry swamped with cognitive dissonan…

"[Gerhard] Andrey hofft nun, dass die Bundes­verwaltung bald nachziehen wird. «Die Digitalisierung wird zunehmend als geopolitische Waffe eingesetzt. Deshalb muss auch die zivile Verwaltung unabhängiger von Big Tech werden.»"
#DigitaleSouveränität

Mark Zuckerberg was so convinced the metaverse was the next big thing that he renamed his company after it.
Meta, as Facebook is now known, bet the farm on virtual reality,
investing more than $80bn into metaverse-related ventures over the past five years alone
—only to abruptly decide it wasn’t the future after all.
In March this year it was announced that Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship metaverse venture, would shut down its VR operations in June, continuing only as …

Life at the end of the metaverse
Mark Zuckerberg built a future that nobody wanted. Tech bosses are repeating his mistake

Big Tech is increasingly using residual value guarantees for off-balance sheet AI spend, giving Nvidia and Broadcom a way to support their customers' purchases (Financial Times)

Browse self-hostable software · selfhost.directory
The index of self-hostable projects — ranked, categorized and served with live updates.
Own your data and stop giving it to big tech.
🌐 https://selfhost.directory
:mastodon: @…

Browse self-hostable software
Discover self-hostable software you can run on your own server — a curated, open-source directory with setup guides, alternatives, licenses and live version track…

If big tech CEOs were _not_ held hostage by #AI, what would they do differently?

Analysis: nine top tech companies including Alphabet and Meta had ~$3T of AI-related off-balance-sheet commitments, far exceeding their $600B in reported capex (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/why-big-techs-

Trump nominates FCC general counsel Adam Candeub to lead the DOJ's antitrust unit; Candeub, a longtime Big Tech critic, has long sought to challenge Section 230 (Ella Lee/Financial Times)

Už nějakou dobu hledšm alternativy a postupně migruji od Big Tech. Vadí mi zšvislost na několika mšlo firmšch, Jde o soukromí, kontrolu nad daty, možné výpadky. Zkrštka jeden dodavatel může kdykoli změnit podmínky nebo vyklšdat své pochybení jako zšsluhy.
Pršvě proto mi dšvš smysl Den digitšlní nezšvislosti – DI.DAY. Ukazuje alternativy a cesty. Čím více mšme různých cest a možností, tím svobodnější a odolnější společnost budujeme.
Tak opět 4. října :-)

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@Javvad/116885896446967984
“Existential,” my sweet patooti. Whose existence is threatened, exactly? Some big tech shareholders will lose some money for once? That’s not what existential means. For it to be existential it’d have…

Don't just ask big tech not to track you. Become untrackable.

La protesta contro i data center sta unendo l'intero spettro politico, contro i miliardari delle Big Tech
La battaglia contro la costruzione dei datacenter negli USA sta superando la polarizzazione politica a livello locale, cosa accadrŠ a livello nazionale? Può essere un esempio di come quando c'è di mezzo una questione locale le persone dovrebbero superare le idee politiche per il bene della loro comunitŠ?

DeepSeek says it is seeking ~150 senior engineers in an "unprecedented" hiring spree to overhaul its backend systems, strained by high user demand and AI agents (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/…

DeepSeek seeks 150 engineers in hiring spree to overhaul backend systems
The company cited rapid surge in user demand for AI and increase in complexity of its computing systems.

Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube launch the Streaming Access and Choice Alliance, led by trade group TechNet, to advocate for "technology-neutral policies" (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/14/netflix-amazon-youtube-streaming-coalition

Exclusive: Netflix, Amazon, YouTube launch new streaming coalition
The alliance is led by TechNet, a trade group that represents Big Tech companies.

When you think big tech/ai heads won't make you more angry, you learn they go after rare books, scan them and destroy original copy...
And this is considered "fair use" of course 🤦
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/23/ai-vendors-ar…

AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot
Every AI vendor trains their chatbots on the Common Crawl, a copy of the whole public internet. But that’s just the starting point. AI vendors are desperate for more data — in the hope of making th…

Man I can't wait to watch The Odyssey on my cell phone screen while I'm walking on the treadmill. That's how big a cinema enthusiast I am!

ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen will disable humanlike and user-created agents before July 15, as China's anthropomorphic AI interaction rules take effect (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/ar…

Are we human? Why ByteDance and Alibaba are disabling AI agents in China
With Beijing’s rules on humanlike AI interaction services taking effect on July 15, Doubao and Qwen move to disable customised features.

Montag: Chinas Chip-Pläne gegen US-Embargo, Werbereduzierung auf LG-Monitoren
Chip-Offensive mit weitem Weg LG mit weniger Windows-Werbung Botenduos für schwere Pakete Big-Tech für offenes KI-Ökosystem Deutschlands Gesetzgebung

Montag: Chinas Chip-Pläne gegen US-Embargo, Werbereduzierung auf LG-Monitoren
Chip-Offensive mit weitem Weg + LG mit weniger Windows-Werbung + Botenduos für schwere Pakete + Big-Tech für offenes KI-Ökosystem + Deutschlands Gesetzgebung

Laat Big Tech niet bepalen wat je ziet! Stop de grote platforms en teken het burgerinitiatief! @…
https://campagnes.degoedezaak.org/campaigns/burgerinitiatief-big-tech?utm_campaign=zgKn5oIfd2&utm_medium=mastodon&utm_source=share

"Die größten Bedrohungen digitaler
Souveränität liegen also nicht unbedingt nur im Einfluss von außen, sondern in der inneren Prekarität."
A. Ballmeier, P. Engelbutzeder, @… & IISI, @…

Big Tech Is Hiding $1.65 Trillion in Debt. How Worried Should Investors Be? https://ground.news/article/big-tech-is-hiding-165tn-in-off-balance-sheet-ai-debt_13bb09

Australia finalizes the News Bargaining Incentive, upping the rate from 2.25% to 2.5%, narrowing the charges to digital ad revenue attributable to Australia (Ronald Mizen/Australian Financial Review)
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/labor

News Bargaining Incentive and how Labor’s new tax on big tech firms such as Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft aims to boost funding for Australian journalism
The final detail of the long-awaited incentive will also show the Albanese government has backflipped on a carve out for professional networking site LinkedIn.

Why can drones replace soldiers in Ukraine but not firefighters?
Chief sergeant Guillaume Millet, a firefighter of 24 years experience heads the Fire and Rescue Service branch of the CFDT union in the Gironde, the region worst hit by wildfires in France this summer.
He says that while the techniques for tackling fire have not changed much, technology in forest fire detection has.
"The big change, especially in my département, is that now we've got cameras assisted …

Could tech replace firefighters in the battle against wildfires?
Tech is being used to watch for wildfires but firefighters are still needed to put them out.

Retail traders are shifting from Big Tech to stocks boosted by AI like SK Hynix and Marvell; five of the Magnificent Seven stocks trail the market this year (Hannah Erin Lang/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/everyda

Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-workers-tech-ceos-job-losses-afc71e15
http://www.memeorandum.com/260706/p31#a260706p31

I'm glad that all things considered #auspol is kinda boring, we already had our reagan/trump and thatcher type situation and saw that through before big tech bros could do anything about it. Pauline is an issue but anyone under the age of 50 and any city dwellers sees them for what they are (Gina and Elon Musk's puppet)

📚 My book review of The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late
Cory has the amazing ability to say things in a way they completely resonate. His view on the current hype cycle and how it links to the thinking patterns of Big tech managers make a lot of sense. If only more decision makers could see beyond “oh, look, shiny” and dig a little deeper, or at the very least read this book (I've already shoved …

Finally caught up with this two-year-old archive (🫣).
It'sage isn't relevant, as it talks about things that are unlikely to change: Your data is only yours if you also have it on physical media in your possession. (And stored there in open formats.)
Because services will come and go, promises will be forgotten, data loss will not cause more than a shy "sorry". Especially for free online services, but it also happens for paid services.

Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s collective carbon emissions
have increased by nearly a fifth in the past year,
driven largely by datacentre construction.
In the financial year ending March 2026, the three tech companies emitted
119m mTCO₂e (metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent),
or about a third of those of France.
The previous year, they emitted roughly 101m mTCO₂e,
roughly equivalent to the 2024 emissions of Czechia.
The US companies’ cl…

Datacentres drive up big tech’s carbon emissions to a third of those of France
Microsoft, Amazon and Google say they still aim to achieve net zero output despite construction boom

RE: https://mastodon.nl/@vosje62/116930593133496410
Sja wat weet big tech nou over de wadden .... 🙃🙈

I finally have IPv6 working everywhere and it's really quite satisfying. The one big practical improvement is I can now set up unrelayed Tailscale tunnels between my two LANs.

DeepSeek details DSpark, a speculative decoding framework for its V4 models, saying it speeds up AI inference by up to 85% and was tested on Gemma and Qwen (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/artic…

Faster AI, lower costs: DSpark eases bottlenecks and chip strain, says DeepSeek
Start-up unveils speculative decoding framework that speeds up inference by up to 85 per cent amid China’s push to overcome US AI curbs.

#nogenAI #noDataCenters #UK #Scotland
Hi all, if you agree that we need to

Pleased to share that my paper, "Practitioners at the Limit: Bereavement, Mockery and Ideology in Response to Crisis" is now available as a preprint on arxiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30667

Practitioners At The Limit: Bereavement, Mockery and Ideology in Response to Crisis
After decades in which the software industry heroized its technical employees, our current moment finds those employees in crisis. Economically, they are squeezed by a job market that has turned on them since Elon Musk gutted Twitter in 2022. Politically, their craft is continually pressed into the service of an ever tighter alliance between Big Tech and authoritarianism. Professionally, they find themselves less and less able to contribute anything good to anyone within business models that ar…

Meituan reports Q2 revenue up 14.4% YoY to $15.62B and adjusted net profit of $372M, ending a three-quarter losing streak as the food delivery price war cooled (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article…

Meituan snaps losing streak with profitable June quarter as price wars cool
Revenue for the quarter rose 14.4 per cent year on year to 105 billion yuan, beating the consensus estimate of 101 billion yuan.

BCG: enterprise users spent a total of $300M on quantum computing in 2025, outranking the combined spending of research labs and governments for the first time (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/businesses-are-sp

@… it’s because Big Tech promotions and pay raises are conditional on “impact”, i.e. making half-baked new stuff, not polishing or maintaining existing stuff. It’s that incentive structure that leads to the Google product graveyard.
Ob xkcd:
ht…

Utah State University professor Robert Davies calculated that the heat from the completed Stratos AI Datacenter would raise local daytime temperature by five degrees Fahrenheit
and a staggering 28 degrees at night.
Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University,
warned that these temperature spikes would transform the local environment from semiarid into something more closely resembling the Sahara Desert.
There were also additional concerns that the cen…

This Data Center Is Everything That Everyone Hates About AI
Utah’s Stratos Project is showing how everyone loses in the unregulated rush to build these Big Tech behemoths—even investors.

Ireland is big tech's lapdog - and that compromises its EU presidency (Johnny Ryan/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/30/ireland-big-tech-lapdog-eu-presidency-digital-sovereignty
http://www.memeorandum.com/260630/p3#a260630p3

Today we visited the Calder exhibit at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, an extraordinary retrospective. I now appreciate the evolution of his career much more, also the diversity of his works. Phenomenally staged exhibit, really great.
The big moment in his life was visiting Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930. After that he abandons anything figurative and focuses on abstract sculptures, mostly the mobiles. But he also had some variety: his wire figure sculptures are delightful.

Now we know just how much Big Tech’s pursuit of AI is costing the environment.
Both Google and Amazon released their sustainability reports this week,
and the numbers aren’t pretty.
Each company has pledged to zero-out its carbon emissions in the coming years,
but AI has made those goals a lot harder to hit.
🔥Google’s total carbon emissions are up 25% since last year, and
Amazon’s are up 16%.
A close reading of the reports suggests that both Amazon …

A warning sign about AI’s real cost, courtesy of Google and Amazon | TechCrunch
AI has made it a lot harder for tech companies like Amazon and Google to deliver on their net-zero pledges.

Analysis: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, the top spenders on new US data centers, collectively added ~$350B in debt over the past five years (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-10/big-te…

Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube launch the Streaming Access and Choice Alliance, led by trade group TechNet, to advocate for "technology-neutral policies" (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/14/netflix-amazon-youtube-streaming-coalition

Exclusive: Netflix, Amazon, YouTube launch new streaming coalition
The alliance is led by TechNet, a trade group that represents Big Tech companies.

The first lesson many new engineers learn is that you have to take credit for your work.
If you silently jump in to help a struggling project and get it back on track, there’s no guarantee of reward.
Credit will naturally flow to the project lead, not you.
In fact, if this project is outside of your direct team, it’s likely you will be punished for it:
to your manager, it will look like you’re simply doing nothing at all.
Even when your manager is watching you…

Giving and taking credit in big tech companies

Big Tech's AI boom echoes the 1870s railroad expansion, and Nvidia shifting risk to institutional capital may expose investors if revenues fail to materialize (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)
https://stratechery.com/2026/nvidias-risky-business/

Nvidia’s Risky Business
Nvidia is finding new ways for its customers to raise money, and it’s expanding the risk of the AI buildout significantly.

You don't need Big Tech to communicate with others.
You don't need an expensive data center to exist online.
Bits are just extensions of our voice.
#LittleFedi
https://rpi0w.s…

You don't need Big Tech to communicate with others.
You don't need an expensive data center to exist online.
Bits are just extensions of our voice.
https://rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it/@stefano/01a03e3d-1e73-7928-b396-db17b7f0f60b…

The EU General Court dismisses Apple's legal challenges against its designation as a DMA "gatekeeper" for its App Store and iOS; Apple filed the case in 2024 (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/eu-court-rej

Reminder that when I take trips like this one, I post postcard thoughts in a big Mastodon Thread. And then I unroll them in a nice web page. Click through for some cool photos from Malta!

Ofcom Chair Ian Cheshire says he is overseeing a "wide-ranging" review aimed at refitting the regulator to new duties overseeing Big Tech and enforcing the OSA (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/69d55b1b-fa3f-420c-905a-6699d28a7b89…

One thing that's unpleasant about a Linux desktop is you often end up looking at log files. And every big app is spamming all sorts of warnings and errors to the log files all the time. Like Chrome logs an error every 2 seconds. All of this is a very bad code smell. The engineers are clearly ignoring their own error logs.

Big Tech reported Q2 "other income" rose significantly to $160B , driven by investments in AI companies, raising concerns of paper gains overstating the AI boom (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/a5a0081f-e998-4c80-b967-cc535cbc4933

Amazon's emissions rose 16% YoY in 2025, driven by data center construction and delivery fuel, while Google's "ambition-based" emissions jumped 18% YoY in 2025 (Bloomberg)

FIling: Lone Palm Labs, the startup behind friend-focused photo sharing app Retro, raised a $21M Series A from Thrive Capital and others (Sydney Bradley/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/alternative-social-media-ap…

Instagram alternative Retro raises $21M for close friends sharing
In 2023, ex-Instagram employees launched a new app called Retro. It's one of many new social media apps taking on Big Tech platforms.

Microsoft introduces MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, an AI model trained for cybersecurity, and launches Perception, an agentic security system to patch vulnerabilities (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/techno…

Microsoft Unveils A.I. Cybersecurity Tools
As some executives fret over the safety of new A.I. systems, protecting against them could be a big business for tech companies.

Preliminary findings: the EU says Azure and AWS are "the largest and second largest" cloud services in the EU, as the bloc weighs up tougher DMA oversight (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20