A good take in understanding a (developing) new order: greed, pride & cliques www.politico.com/news/magazin...

"Greenland [...] is a second order issue". Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. One might wonder what is for today's Tories a first order issue www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

Are you in media or open tech? Interested in exploring the future together? Based in the UK or Europe, or willing to travel there? @protocolsforpublishers.com in London next month should be awesome - and the conversations are ever more important. I’d love to see you there.

Profile of George Borjas and his influence - Marginal REVOLUTION

🚨 BREAKING: EU countries have approved the Mercosur trade deal after 25 years of talks. Read the story: politi.co/4suWWNO

What if using American cloud services becomes untenable for Europe due to deteriorating geopolitics? It's hypothetical for now, but no longer unthinkable. By @quentinsf.com: statusq.org/archives/202... Local-first software to the rescue?

An advance look at Barry Blitt’s “Guzzler,” the cover for next week’s issue. #NewYorkerCovers

The rise and fall of Stack Overflow. Graph shows number of questions posted per month. Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4648...

“Palantir, a technology company with close ties to the Trump administration has cemented its role analyzing data for the U.K.’s military — despite an ongoing standoff between the two governments over trade and digital regulations.” www.politico.eu/article/pala...

If you follow this argument through to its logical conclusion there should be a UK Government channel on pornhub.

So, what did we achieve for 🇪🇺's cloud situation in 2025? It is now crystal clear our governments can't continue to run on 🇺🇸 clouds. Yet even now, neither buyers or sellers of cloud tech in 🇪🇺 sense the urgency. Below I elaborate & discuss an unorthodox way out of this mess: berthub.eu/articles/pos...

Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

Great title, although a reverse rationality is likely more accurate

Announcing eurosky.social accounts - launching January 2026. ✅ Managed by Eurosky, a European non-profit initiative ✅ Hosted on European cloud ✅ Governed by European law www.eurosky.social/register

If you want to make a copy of the entire Bluesky network (or some subset of it, or some other app built on atproto), Tap is now the best way do do it. I hope this will enable more people do do, for example, interesting social network analysis research

Spain's ISPs block IPs used by pirate streaming sites during the Spanish league football matches. IP-level blocks impact the many unrelated sites that are behind each IP. Adding insult to injury, Movistar keeps the blocks for 14 HOURS after the match is over. bandaancha.eu/articulos/mo...

New blog post! ✨ I argue that AI will make formal verification go mainstream. martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/a... Three reasons for this: 1. LLMs are getting increasingly good at writing proofs using proof assistants. This will make formal verification vastly cheaper than it's been to date.

‘una investigación realizada por IMDEA Networks (España), … reveló que “Meta utilizó durante casi un año un mecanismo oculto para rastrear la actividad web de usuarios de dispositivos Android a través de las aplicaciones de Facebook e Instagram”.’ elpais.com/espana/2025-...

A really nice figure of population and partisan malapportionment in national legislatures around the world from Beramendi, Boix, Guinjoan, and Rogers (yassified by The Economist) priceschool.usc.edu/wp-content/u...

Dutch tax agency today justified uploading all their email to the US by (wait for it) assuring us the CLOUD Act represents a very small risk. No word on the other legislation of course. Following the Microsoft suggested narrative:

Useful if terrifying read on the Chinese brand of smart watches for kids, Little Genius, which is forming an entire, insular — and seemingly pretty socially unhealthy — platformised and corporatised world. substack.com/@ivyyang/p-1...

Fully-funded PhD studentships available in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. www.st-andrews.ac.uk/study/fees-a... Interested? Please see www.st-andrews.ac.uk/computer-sci... first and have a chat with prospective supervisors. Applications due 1 Feb.

Join us on Tuesday, December 2 (12 pm CET / 6 am ET), for a @technis4.bsky.social webinar 📝 Paper: "Looking for #Innovation Beyond the #Patent System: Evidence from Research Disclosures" 🔍 Zoom info at technisnet.org/seminars.html #EconSky @zew.de @macci-mannheim.bsky.social

Now over 61,000 🚀

We are calling on the UK Government to not introduce a levy on higher education provider income from international students, reduce visa costs to attract global talent, and to review higher education funding to create a sustainable model www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/58...

This is quite a victory - universities (particularly research intensives) have been lobbying for real terms protection of QR for ages It's a classic government give with one hand (QR) and take with the other (international student levy)

They line up perfectly.

AI is looking peaky, and Larry Ellison’s Oracle is in the contagion zone. Turns out, having OpenAI as one of your biggest customers isn’t always a golden ticket. An @alphaville.ft.com and #FTEdit 🧵 on the software company’s perilous position 👉

But small boats

Data collection at scale is a national security issue. This trading is happening even with GDPR protections. And yet the Commission is advocating changes that would remove such data from the scope of the regulation.

How clear does it need to be that Europe needs independent digital infrastructure before we actually take credible action? The need is as clear for cloud as it is for the rest of our critical digital systems. www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a...

Steve Banon's populism: the american constitution represents the popular will, therefore anything that represents the popular will is constitutional www.economist.com/insider/the-...

I was looking for a good explanation of 'curtailment' (paying renewable generators to turn off and gas turbines to turn on because supply and demand rarely match geographically) and this piece about the issues driving what seems like crazy behaviour is great on the historical background

Hell!

"The move will effectively make WhatsApp unavailable [from January] as a platform to distribute AI solutions like assistants or agents. It also means Meta AI is the only assistant available on the chat app" techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/w...

🚀 PhD position open in my SPEAR lab @tudelfteemcs.bsky.social We build systems that become startups and shape Internet standards. Our research becomes startups, influences RFC discussions, and powers real edge deployments. Join us to create the self-organizing Internet of tomorrow 👇

The costs of the UK’s Global Talent Visa looks a trifle high in comparison to competitor countries - largely through the Immigration Health Surcharge (which critics say is a form of double taxation as they contribute to the NHS through normal tax on their earnings)

Interesting: Greenland picks French company Eutelsat over Elon Musk’s Starlink. Greenland's government-owned telecommunications company Tusass signed the agreement with Eutelsat to provide east and north Greenland with better and more reliable internet connectivity. www.dr.dk/nyheder/indl...

No regrets, the Trojans said, we needed wooden horses

New: How mega batteries are unlocking an energy revolution. A boom in grid-scale storage is solving renewables’ reliability problem and extending the use of clean power. Latest visual story w/ @nassosstylianou.bsky.social @samlearner.bsky.social @inari-ta.bsky.social 🔋👉 ig.ft.com/mega-batteri...

No words

Our European-focused work, under the brand of @eurosky.social is taking off. Our first in-person event happens in Berlin on November 19, to discuss and share opportunities for European open social #atrproto infrastructure operated in Europe. We're announcing our speakers here!

Ginius

Are you a lawyer? Do you enjoy working on small teams tackling big things? We’re hiring a senior counsel. jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9i...

California passed AB 566! It's a law that mandates browsers support the GPC signal that can be used to exercise privacy rights automatically in jurisdictions that have them. Apple Safari and Google Chrome are reluctantly going to have to improve your privacy. www.gov.ca.gov/2025/10/08/g...

It's #NetLdn tomorrow night, come join us for 2 great talks, interesting chat, and a bonus lightning talk! netldn.uk/2025/10/03/n...

Many of the deals are circular and have given an immediate share price boost to the start-up’s partners. For example, Nvidia plans to invest $100bn in OpenAI over the next decade, providing OpenAI with cash to buy Nvidia’s chips.