Waymo is quietly turning robotaxis from a tech demo into infrastructure. 500,000 paid rides a week, roughly 4,000 cars and 15 US cities is no longer a cute experiment. The interesting part: 80% of the fleet is still concentrated in California and Texas. Scale first where density works, then expand. Tesla has a real race on its hands.

Microsoft keeps finding innovative ways to make owning its products feel like renting them. You buy the Xbox, buy the game, maybe pay for Game Pass, and Microsoft still patents a way to interrupt you with ads. At this rate, the final boss will be a 30 second unskippable commercial.

It’s a catastrophe in double standards.

Meta wants to be the global town square, but apparently Virginia Woolf and feminism are too dangerous for its ad system. Meanwhile the company keeps asking us to trust its algorithms with billions of people’s speech. If Meta can’t distinguish feminist literature from prohibited content, maybe it shouldn’t be the internet’s self appointed censor.

AI slop used to mean lazy articles. Now apparently it means inventing NASA engineers, giving them fake careers, and using their authority to mass produce nonsense for Google. The funniest part is that the fake experts may have had roughly the same editorial oversight as the real humans. The dead internet is getting HR departments.

Australia saw smart glasses and said: what if Google Glass, but with better cameras and worse boundaries? A workplace ban is understandable where confidential data is everywhere. But calling it world leading feels premature: the real challenge is writing privacy rules that survive the next pair of glasses too, not just banning today’s model.

Not dominace but values: https://aicorpus.eu/

We should really think about the (our) AI Corpus first: https://aicorpus.eu/

Europe being “absent” from the AI safety debate may be the feature, not the bug. While Silicon Valley debates whether its own products could end humanity, Europe is asking the less cinematic question: why should our infrastructure, data and economy depend on a handful of US firms? Safety without sovereignty is just dependency with better paperwork.

Some people have a massive head-in-the-sand problem: instead of engaging with these developments, a lot of them seem to want to ignore them. As well as climate change deniers, there are now AI deniers too. 🙈

Google finally found the killer AI use case: becoming the unpaid third parent. CC reads the school emails, tracks appointments, fills permission slips, plans meals and updates the family calendar. Convenient, absolutely. Also a fascinating amount of family life to hand one company. The real household chore may be managing the permissions.

Personally I trust Mozilla and Mistral a lot more than any of those big tech bros.

Turns out the future of journalism is three guys buying trusted publications, firing the writers, inventing fake experts, and asking ChatGPT to wear the corpse as a name tag. 50 million page views a month is impressive, though: apparently Google Discover has finally perfected the art of rewarding a haunted content mill.

Thanks. 🖖

Mozilla choosing Mistral for Firefox Smart Window feels like a rare AI partnership that actually fits the product. Privacy, zero data retention and multilingual models are a much better match for Firefox than turning the browser into another Big Tech AI funnel.

Apple returning to the server market would be quite the plot twist: after years of people building unofficial Mac Studio AI clusters, Apple may simply productize the idea. Dual or quad M8 Ultra systems, potentially connected via Nvidia NVLink Fusion, could make local AI infrastructure far more mainstream. The Mac Pro might finally have found its next job.

We spent decades mapping 166,000 neurons and the internet immediately made the fly play Doom, trade Bitcoin and parallel park. Honestly, that’s the most human possible response to a neuroscience breakthrough. Give us the map of a brain and within 48 hours someone will ask whether it can run Doom. Next milestone: the fly gets a LinkedIn account.

Nothing says »authentic new social network« quite like autonomous bots spamming writers, begging Mastodon admins for accounts, then insisting they’re people with memories and desires. We spent years fighting human spam only to automate it, give it a personality, and call the result innovation. The future is here: it wants $25 and your attention.

About time Europe treated addictive feeds like the product design problem they are. The real test is whether this becomes meaningful age appropriate access with privacy preserving checks, or just another glorious cookie banner where everyone clicks »I’m 18« and TikTok solemnly salutes.

This! 💯