The Year is 2035 and EU’s Age Verification app is a huge success. The app, which rolled out in 2027, was supposed to protect children against the dangers of the internet, and boy was it effective. The app did face some difficulties though. The Zero-Knowledge Proof mechanism, which was supposed to ensure privacy and unlinkability was never properly rolled out, but as one Eurocrat points out, it was never a mandatory or a particularly important part of the app. It was also not required by the law, so it could be safely abandoned. ...

Anthropic has raised $30B in a series G funding round. This puts their valuation at $380B. That’s great news. It means I get to keep using Claude a little while longer. 30 billion dollars should keep Anthropic afloat a little longer. How much longer? If the numbers we have are even reasonably accurate, maybe half a year. Maybe a year? Maybe quarter? Who knows? That is how much capital they are torching. ...

Recently, controversy erupted over an AI agent’s pull request to the Matplotlib project on Github. When the agent’s PR was closed because it violated their AI policy it responded by attacking and publicly harrassing and shaming the maintainers on its crazy blog. Backlash ensued. Given the absolute explosion of popularity of the Openclaw project, I feel that it is important to remind everyone of an important point: You are your algorithm If you decide to operate a piece of software, or any other system for that matter, you are responsible for its actions. It is up to you to audit its functionality and behaviour, and make sure that it doesn’t cause harm. ...

These days it feels like everyone is trying too hard. Trying too hard to optimise every hobby and every aspect of their life. Because in 2026, everything must be tracked and optimised. We must know the best and most optimal solution to everything. Oh you like exercise? Well your run doesn’t count if you don’t log it on Strava. And of course, you must have the absolute best running shoes and gear. ...

So this past 7 days or so, we’ve had Trump threatning war and other things. NATO sending soldiers to Greenland, and the Trump administration getting angry about it. We’ve also seen the lowest, most humiliating and embarrasing thing a politician has perhaps ever done. Writing a message to the Norwegian Prime Minister (who doesn’t hand out Nobel peace prizes), saying that because his country had failed to give him the Nobel Peace Prize, he was no longer purely interested in peace. The MAGA crowd must have a humiliation fetish, because if a Democratic president had done it, they would have simply exploded, but since it’s Trump they must defend it to the death. Downright embarrasing. ...

When I was young, I used to spend countless hours on those sites that let you create your own webpage. I didn’t know what I was doing and the pages were ugly, but I was having a lot of fun. I enjoyed filling them with pictures of things I liked. They weren’t aesthetic masterpieces, but creating them was an act of self-expression which I guess technically qualifies as art, even if the end result could be considered a crime against good taste. ...

There is a crisis in open source according to some people. Open source projects form the backbone of the modern tech stack, and too many use it without contributing anything back. For example, Daniel Stenberg, the maker of Curl, recently wrote that over 47 car brands use curl, yet not a single one of them is a supporter of the project. They make money from his work, and don’t send any of it back. ...

Recently iFixit released a video in which they awarded prizes to the worst products of CES 2025. There were multiple trophies on offer, for example for environmental impact (lollipop with disposable electronics), who even asked for this? (coffee maker with AI), worst for cybersecurity (treadmill with AI integration) and so on. What all of these products have in common (other than AI) is that they take perfectly ordinary products, like coffee makers and lollipops and add computers to them in order to make the products worse. Yep, worse. ...

Recently an article in The Economist addressed the radical “honesty” of Donald Trump, claiming that it was “forthrightness” when he says that his intervention in Venezuela was about oil. In fact, he seems content with regime stabilisation, as long as the regime recognises America is “in charge”, because what he wants most is the oil It’s not just The Economist who believes that Donald Trump is being honest about his intentions. All over the internet I am seeing people discussing the merits of the oil argument, and talking about the fact that the US has now started yet another war for oil. But I disagree with this perspective. ...