a picture is, it turns out, worth a lot more than a thousand words

“the future of European rightwing parties lies in Europe” and that relations with other Europeans “are always more important to us than any special hotline to Moscow, Beijing, or Washington” -Jean-Pascal Hohm, AfD’s youth leader.

Explicación (breve) de que es Bluesky y de la caída del servicio por un ataque de DDoS

"For services to the European project, there should be a statue of Nigel Farage in Brussels, at least the equal of Manneken Pis in dignity and craftsmanship."

Personally I think writing formal proofs is one of the best applications of AI, and I think we're going to see a lot more of it in the future, as I wrote a few months ago (martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/a...). I've adjusted my own research agenda for the coming years to help make this happen.

Interesting working paper on effect of CEO having connections ot Epstein. Makes me want to break things papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

My cartoon in the first issue of Now Voyager, a new print magazine dedicated to long form international reporting, photography and art. Plus cartoons!

<<Trump was “rather hysterical”>> sounds accurate

Top cover 10/10

"(...) the barrier to scale is not competition policy, but the fact that the single market remains incomplete."

Chat Control 1.0 has been rejected by the #EU Parliament. Good news! www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/docume...

Standards work is notoriously hard to track. Let’s explore if grounding AI in working group records can make that history more accessible. https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/03/25/using_ai

The Ministry of Justice of Finland has decided to halt the plans to move Finland’s election platform to Amazon Web Services due to the changed international political situation over the past year yle.fi/a/74-20217101

I wrote about the ICML LLM witch hunt and why it's paradigmatic of the absurd bureaucratic scaling of peer review.

Spain: football-match-induced online censorship regularly prevents installation of Postgres on Docker for fear of illicit streaming https://alecmuffett.com/article/151241 #OnlineSafetyAct #censorship #spain

USA bans foreign-made consumer network routers, considering those produced outside the US a national security risk, and prohibits them from being imported or sold. docs.fcc.gov/public/attac...

Why did UK trade policy fail? Unrealistic expectations, tariff and secrecy obsessions, poor appointments, pressure from Number 10 for announcements over actual substance of them, difficult global environment, lack of good objectives - a lot really.

Big mistakes are being made.

Did a bubble meet a prick?

Good on ENTSO report on the iberian blackout: - renevables not to blame - renewables and could have absorved more of the tension excess that caused the KO - thermal power plants absorved less than agreed (and paid for)

This reads quite dangerous - according to @politico.com, Putin has proposed to Trump to stop intelligence sharing with Iran if the US stops intelligence sharing with Ukraine. According to the report, the US rejected this, but for the Europeans it is quite a poisonous idea:

Survey finds that 86% of Europeans think a sudden US move to restrict EU access to digital services is "plausible" and "shouldn’t be ruled out," and 59% called it “already a real and concrete risk.” Another case of European public opinion being ahead of its leaders. www.politico.eu/article/euro...

"commoditization and decentralization shift the balance of power. Dependency creates leverage, whether it's a country's gas supply or a company's cloud provider, and the engineering choices we make determine who holds that leverage"

Some very exciting news - it looks like the working group for AT Protocol at the IETF has been approved! (though not formalized in the datatracker just yet) This is a big milestone in the standards process. But is also just the start of the actual process - years of meetings & work ahead!

Meanwhile EU looks at US and wonders how Americans never thought leopards would eat their face

Menos golpes de pecho contra Trump y más defender la arquitectura crítica del estado del trumpismo. Palantir debe ser vetada de un contrato así por razón de seguridad nacional, no seamos tan pardillos forbes.es/ultima-hora/...

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Mick Stevens. #NewYorkerCartoons

Hyperloop. Finally

3. We need to learn from the way the web died. The web is organised under a form of completely libertarian decentralisation. This means that the moment that a centralising force emerged, there was no collective mechanism to organise ways of containing it — and so you get runaway concentration.

I wrote up a piece on how standards are made, because of some folks being very negative about the grant on other social networks: writings.thisismissem.social/how-standard...

Almost 5k 🚀 let’s get there today - tell your friends! 🇫🇷 On passe les 5,000 aujourd’hui? Parlez d’Eurosky à vos amis! 🇪🇸 ¿Llegamos a 5,000 hoy? ¡Cuéntaselo a tus amigos! 🇩🇪 Schaffen wir heute 5,000? Erzählt euren Freunden von Eurosky! 🇳🇱 Halen we vandaag de 5,000? Vertel je vrienden over Eurosky!

"Sovereign cloud" by US Big Tech here in Europe is their last desperate attempt to keep this cash cow (and our data) for themselves and the US government. Kudos to @berthubert.bsky.social for putting this whitewashing of risky US-controlled services in the spotlight.

This is the Gov looking for your input on the BBC. It takes a while to complete (15/20 mins) but it’s pretty comprehensive and covers most aspects. Please share. I’m surprised many people haven’t seen it yet. www.gov.uk/government/c...

The WaPo motto remains valid: Democracy dies in darkness, ergo...

I've made a new starter pack of people to follow for news and commentary on Iran. Got the idea from a request by @kakape.bsky.social

🚨🚨🚨 We're hiring on my team at @theobserveruk.bsky.social 🚨🚨🚨 Details on how to apply are in the job ad, but feel free to DM me here or send me an email at [email protected] with any questions. (More info below) observer.co.uk/about-us/car...

atproto *personal* data has a ton of potential. this is stuff backed up and synchronized between devices, but not shared with others. personal notes and annotations, sure. what about all your photos? health data? laptop backups? lots of questions for PDS ops.

This Hungarian veto is poised to trigger outrage because: - The loan was agreed at the highest level by EU leaders - Hungary secured an opt-out through enhanced cooperation - Ukraine needs the money no later than April - Von der Leyen and Costa will be in Kyiv next week for the fourth anniversary

Great thread on the need for an industrial strategy worth the name in the UK.

So, any good Substack alternatives that are completely idiot proof to transfer? I have paid subs and my own domain.

A cartoon by Patrick McKelvie. #NewYorkerCartoons

The one thing left for Britain is soft power, as the country slowly fades into dumb chauvinism and stagnation. They decided to dismantle that too.

Check out the latest edition of my @financialtimes.com newsletter (1/2) Britain's penchant for self-destruction: as.ft.com/r/a17bbe0e-b... With insights from @peterallen.bsky.social, Tina Fordham and Kallum Pickering

"A review of the published documents reveals a pronounced double standard: tech platform employees’ names are systematically redacted, while civil society participants and commission officials remain fully identified"

Eurosky-ing feels good

Google are *proactively* supporting ICE by voluntarily providing data without legal requirement to do so. Look at this list: "Google also turned over Thomas-Johnson’s IP addresses, phone numbers, subscriber numbers and identities, and credit card and bank account numbers linked to his account." 🧵

Democracy isn’t restored by good intentions defeating bad ones. Historically it returns when new binding institutions emerge that can again convert truth into constraint and participation into legitimacy

Amazing chart with horrible acronyms - for the first time in my living memory, unemployment in Northern Europe and Southern Europe seems to have converged. Seemed unthinkable during the Eurozone crisis.