💯 The future probably isn’t cloud versus on premises, but deciding which systems should never accept commands from outside the building. A freezer can email you that it’s failing without giving someone on another continent permission to defrost it. Apparently that’s now a cybersecurity strategy.

We’ve built a continent where a supermarket freezer can be remotely turned into a sauna. The scary part isn’t just sabotage: it’s how many essential services have become internet appliances without an equally serious plan for what happens when the internet turns hostile.

An anchor is a cheap way and gives everyone a wonderfully convenient excuse: »Oops, maritime accident.« The cable ends up broken either way, and proving intent becomes almost as difficult as repairing it.

The unsettling part isn’t that tankers are lingering over cables. It’s that nobody can easily distinguish a ship having a very boring afternoon from one preparing to disconnect entire countries. Apparently the global Internet now depends on whether a tanker captain feels like dropping anchor.

A valuation dropping from $2 trillion to $1.1 trillion before the IPO is quite a reality check. Though calling it a collapse when the company is still valued at over a trillion dollars suggests the AI industry has developed a rather unusual understanding of financial hardship.

Microsoft can call it cloud infrastructure all it wants, but the people living next to it see fences, construction, and a bigger claim on local resources. Funny how the benefits are always described as global while the costs arrive at a very specific address.

Beef Wellington. The best way to eat a steak.

PC gamers spent decades being told they needed more RAM and better GPUs. Now the companies selling both have discovered customers who buy them by the warehouse instead of the unit. Apparently the future of gaming is watching an AI generate a picture of the graphics card you can no longer afford.

The Cybertruck was supposed to reinvent the pickup, but mostly reinvented the concept of an expensive public embarrassment. Now Musk is clearing factory space for the Cybercab, which is apparently what happens when your last futuristic vehicle fails: you announce one with even fewer ways for the customer to take control.

Trump managed to turn political loyalty into an asset class where the voters take the losses and the insiders take the profits. Usually politicians wait until after leaving office to cash in on their supporters. This one offered a live ticker.

The irony is that the semiconductor industry became a miracle of global cooperation, and now every government wants its own miracle behind a tariff wall. You can subsidize a factory, but you can’t simply photocopy decades of expertise, suppliers and trust. Apparently interdependence was fine until politicians noticed it.

Europe doesn’t need to win the competition for the world’s most expensive chatbot. It needs to stop handing its industrial knowledge, data and infrastructure to whoever owns that chatbot. Specialized AI is a sensible strategy, but sovereignty means owning the tools too, not just renting smarter ones.

PS: And Europe should not forget to build its own https://aicorpus.eu/!

Spending $447 million to influence an election and then deleting the posts when it goes badly is quite a business model. Apparently you can buy a social network, an enormous megaphone and plenty of political access, but you still can’t buy the electorate. The delete button must be getting more use than Grok.

Turns out people aren’t thrilled about paying higher electricity bills so billionaires can build enormous server farms next door. The industry spent years calling every objection irrational fear of progress. Apparently voters have discovered a more effective feedback form: the ballot.

Sorry, this one is missing: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/27/defund-elon-musk

Given that this has only happened twice so far, and exclusively with The Guardian, it would seem to be at least an indication of this.

If that is the problem, AutoMod would have to delete an estimated 50% of all links in Technology.

Or is it a simple trigger that reacts to »comment« or »opinion« in URI, title, or text?

I’ll shorten the URIs soon so that this can be ruled out as a variable.

I always share without using variables. The links are also here in this thread.

That makes it even more baffling. Both times it was explicitly on tech:

Today: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/nov/03/datacentres-are-deeply-unpopular-so-the-geniuses-at-openai-are-rebranding-them

3 days ago: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/27/defund-elon-musk

~~https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/28/ai-climate-crisis-humanity~~

It was in Technology, both times. And both times it was a Guardian commentary on tech topics.

This is the kind of funding the Fediverse actually needs: Better tools are great, but without people making things worth watching or listening to, we’re just building increasingly elegant infrastructure for arguing about infrastructure. Pairing creators with developers is a genuinely smart move.