This edition of Five Things Tech is a bit different. The focus is not as much Big Tech as I normally focus on, but instead I found some really interesting articles about solar energy, some weird bio tech, more bio tech, also some really interesting research about artificial meat and finally about an alternative to Teams. Teams is my arch-nemesis. I don’t know why this crappy software is even allowed to be sold legally, but apparently there are worse options out there.

I hope you like these Five Things (Bio-)Tech!

Germany smashes PV record, produces three times more solar power than Australia so far this year

By 27 September, Germany’s net electricity generation from solar in 2026 had reached 90.2 terawatt hours (TWh), exceeding last year’s total of 90 TWh, BSW-Solar said, citing data from the research institute Fraunhofer ISE.

By comparison, this is almost triple the amount of PV produced in Australia over the same period, with 31.5 TWh of rooftop and large scale solar generation on the main grid, and a further 3.2 TWh on the separate main grid in Western Australia, according to data from Open Electricity.

It’s always so sunny in Germany! Somehow this didn’t make the news in Germany, but I think it is huge. Obviously, this is not without challenges as the grid needs to improve quickly and we need more batteries, but I am confident that we will find solutions for that and then benefit even more from solar and wind energy.

(…continue reading.)

A Digital Cell Predicts Which Drugs Will Be Most Effective in Deadly Breast Cancer

Researchers have long sought to speed up the process of tailoring treatments to patients, and AI might lend a hand. This month, a Chinese team developed an AI-based virtual cell for triple-negative breast cancer—a challenging form of the disease that often evades standard treatments—to predict how individuals will respond to different drugs.

Rather than reconstructing every detail of a cell’s inner workings, the virtual cell focused on just proteins. Trained on a massive, curated dataset tracking protein changes before and after drug treatments, the model outperformed existing drug-tailoring approaches and discovered new combinations that could work even better.

This is not that easy to wrap my head around, but I assume the implications could be massive when it comes to improving cancer therapy.

(…continue reading.)

Tech to Replace Animal Testing Is Almost Ready. Scientists Are Not

A host of these kinds of alternatives to experiments on animals have been developed over the years. Collectively they’re known as NAMs, an acronym that stands, depending on whom you’re talking to, for new approach methodologies, novel alternative methods, or nonanimal methods. Most NAMs have yet to be rigorously tested, but early studies suggest their potential.

As NAMs have become more sophisticated, the question of how they will be implemented has become less about their technical qualities and more about the practical next steps needed to realize their potential. Validating NAMs—standardizing the systems, conducting head-to-head comparisons with animal experiments—is an enormous challenge. Moreover, simply outperforming animal models is necessary but not sufficient. The adoption of NAMs will require changes in policy, training, and culture.

A lung the size of a USB stick that actually breathes - this is not science fiction anymore. How crazy is that?

(…continue reading.)

Where’s The Beef?

The event—the theatrical reveal, the PR spectacle—triggered a kind of gold rush. One hundred and forty companies sprang up in six continents, trying to replicate what Post had done with beef across a range of other species: chicken, pork, fish, even quail. Investment to the tune of $3 billion flooded into the sector. True believers claimed that cellular agriculture would not only fight climate change and global food insecurity but also slow the spread of zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance. A company called Upside Foods touted its plans to “set the new standard for meat” and to “make meat a force of good in the world.” A company called Vow created an enormous woolly-mammoth meatball, though no one was allowed to eat it, since the DNA came from a fossil and the company didn’t know whether it was actually fit for human consumption. The think tank RethinkX predicted that cultivated meat would decimate the U.S. beef industry by 2030, reducing demand for the conventional variety by a whopping 70 percent. As the organization wrote, “We are already on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago.”

This article really sparked my curiousity as I remember vividly how lab-grown meat, 3D-printed fish and all sorts of new ways to produce artificial meat was the coolest tech trend with the greatest impact on farming and what not. I still haven’t tried any of that, but I do find it interesting that this didn’t take off at all. Instead, people started eating less meat.

(…continue reading.)

‘Absolute s–t’: EU’s Microsoft Teams alternative draws bad reviews from officials

The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams — but officials using it aren’t impressed, with one describing the tool as “absolute shit.”

The Commission introduced Element Pro over the summer as a “sovereign back-up to Teams,” according to an internal staff memo seen by POLITICO. The platform is intended to provide a fallback for Commission communications if U.S.-based Teams becomes unavailable.

While Teams remains the Commission’s main communications tool, Element Pro is an “internal back-up... that helps ensure our business continuity” in the event of a “disruption,” the memo says.

How can a product be worse than Teams?

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

Here’s your Sunday morning smörgåsbord of the latest developments in tech. As always, it is a seemingly random selection of topics, but actually all these topics are tied together. Tech is moving rapidly and I think it makes a ton of sense to at least try to understand what is going on. This is what I am trying to accomplish every week.

I hope you like these Five Things Tech!

The ASML Monopoly: Platform and Ecosystem Leadership in EUV Lithography

Based in the Netherlands, ASML (the acronym name is derived from Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography) is Europe’s most valuable technology company. It produces approximately 90% of all lithography tools and is the only supplier of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems, a critical manufacturing technology. ASML has a market value of approximately $677 billion, with more than $37 billion in FY 2025 revenues, $11 billion in profits, and 44,000 employees. But the company’s de facto monopoly is not based on a single breakthrough innovation. Rather, it results from decades of foresighted investment combined with extraordinary platform leadership and ecosystem management skills. No competitor has yet been able to reproduce the core technology or the full stack of system capabilities needed for EUV lithography.

ASML is one impressive company. Yet while Europe has the company that makes the chip industry happen, it made zero revenue last quarter from European companies.

(…continue reading.)

“Offensively cheap”: Solar power is looking up

Cheaper panels enabled a vast rollout in China itself and helped solar generation evolve from a subsidized technology deployed mostly in markets looking to decarbonize to a vital source of electricity in areas where power is scarce, expensive or unreliable. That process started in countries like Pakistan, Brazil, and South Africa and has now spread to other parts of Africa and the Philippines.

Based on analysis of customs data, Ember estimates that Africa will install around 17 gigawatts of new solar this year. It believes most of that will be small-scale installations at factories or other businesses. “If you’re a business, you’re using electricity during the day—it’s a natural fit for you to use solar,” says Jones.

But solar is also a boon for households. “A home goes from burning two or three kerosene lanterns to a light that is 20 to 40 times brighter, [turned] on every day,” says Anish Thakkar, co-founder of Sun King, a Kenyan business which lends families money to pay for solar and battery installations.

This is so awesome. Just imagine what is possible now. Cheap energy available virtually everywhere, now we just need to get battery storage a lot cheaper, but this will happen next.

(…continue reading.)

Cracks in Oracle’s AI Data-Center Build-Out Appear in Massive New Mexico Project

Around a year ago, OpenAI signed a contract with Oracle to buy $300 billion in cloud-computing services over the following five years. Oracle didn’t yet have the data-center footprint to deliver that kind of capacity, so it quickly signed leases to occupy new mega-facilities that would be developed in Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Mexico, representing around 4.5 gigawatts of computing capacity.

Banks signed on to provide tens of billions of dollars in loans to build the facilities, which were branded as being part of OpenAI’s Stargate initiative. For the New Mexico campus, a group of about 20 banks provided $18 billion in construction financing. Blue Owl funds contributed about $3 billion of equity.

Pulling the force majeure lever buys Oracle some time but doesn’t reduce its financial exposure to the data center. Oracle can defer payments until the power comes on, but that triggers an automatic extension of the duration of its lease, meaning that the ultimate amount it pays to Stack wouldn’t decline.

I do not want to sound too much like I am full of Schadenfreude here, but I think we need to make sure Larry Ellison doesn’t succeed in his bit to control even more of the tech industry.

(…continue reading.)

No cities on the Moon — there isn’t enough water, scientists say

There are potential solutions. We could improve the efficiency of water recycling by a factor of five or more; lower water usage from new techniques such as vertical farming; import water, probably from accessible asteroids; or, simply, find more water. Of these it may be this last hope that is most promising. Current water surveying techniques do not reach below the surface more than a few meters, while the rubble-like rocks of the surface regolith typically extend tens of meters down and may contain water in the cold traps. If the ambitious plans of the space billionaires are to be realized, then finding more water will be the first step.

While I think a city on a moon is a fascinating tech challenge, I really am not the least bit interest in relocating there.

(…continue reading.)

GDPR trap Smart Glasses: Data protectionists warn wearers of legal violations

The data protection officers particularly criticize the further processing of the recorded information for AI applications. If captured image material is used to train the artificial intelligence of the glasses manufacturers, there is usually no legal basis for this. Automatic, AI-supported facial recognition in public spaces is also impermissible.

Despite the criticism, the supervisory authorities are not closing their eyes to the opportunities offered by the technology. Smart glasses can be useful, for example, as a hands-free navigation aid at work or as support for blind people in everyday life. Nevertheless, the DSK warns that what is technically feasible should not be equated with what is legally permissible. Secret filming, photographing, and especially publishing such recordings on the internet can have significant legal consequences, as the infringement of fundamental rights is serious.

Most people think people who wear AI glasses are “glassholes”, but I think this will change over time. Why? Because we are still really early in the development of this product category and we will figure out to get AI glasses more useful and less privacy evasive.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

When I started to look through the pile of articles I had assembled for this newsletter, I noticed a trend. There weren’t many positive articles around, it was mostly a sober assessment of what’s going on in tech. And I think that’s fine. We need to be aware of what can happen when tech (and the tech bros) are unleashed.

Still, I think tech is amazing and I enjoy reading about all the cool stuff happening. Next week will be brighter. I hope. :)

Mark

Mark Zuckerberg is suspended in midair. He is not floating or sinking, nor is he ascending anywhere. He is being hoisted like a trophy.

Outside, the lake is still in the morning air and banked by turgid grass studded with ceramic decoys in the shape of coyotes, used to deter bears and geese. Everything in a Zuckerberg residence—the flora, the doors, the bookshelves, the light—seems uncannily enlarged, like on a movie set. After walking across the vast lawns of his summer palace and entering one of its smaller structures, it is jarring to find him held aloft like this, the sovereign of history’s largest nonterritorial empire being heaved against his will.

I actually met Mark Zuckerberg in Berlin for a meet & greet when facebook just had launched in Germany some 20 years ago. He was nice, a bit shy, seemed very tired and very nerdy. I don’t think that one person should have that much power and money, we really messed up the last two decades by not putting the right rules and regulations in place.

(…continue reading.)

Inside the Chaos That Turned Tesla Into an Actual Car Manufacturer

In some ways, the tZero was a hit. When a VC would ride shotgun in the car with Eberhard at the wheel, Eberhard would implore them to touch the dashboard. As they reached forward, he’d punch the accelerator. As the car accelerated and the g forces piled up, the VC was literally unable to touch the dashboard. That was how powerful the tZero’s acceleration was, Eberhard would say.

Many of the VCs were astounded. Some even questioned whether the car was really electric. Many owned Ferraris or Lamborghinis. They knew sports cars—but this? They could never have imagined it was possible to do this with an electric drivetrain.

We should never forget that Elon Musk was never the founder of Tesla, but the guy who outmanouvered the founder.

(…continue reading.)

Bitcoin’s Quantum Migration Debate

Bitcoin’s quantum debate is quite a quagmire. This is not merely a technical debate regarding the trade-offs of different types of cryptography and their strengths against a theoretical quantum computer. It is a debate about which properties of Bitcoin’s ethos are strongest when it is faced with a difficult dilemma: uphold the promise that valid coins remain spendable by their owners, or favor supporting the security of the system by not allowing a significant portion of its monetary supply to be raided via a vulnerability that was well known for many years.

The conundrum at the crux of this controversy is that every serious option violates a principle that Bitcoin users care about. Doing nothing may preserve today’s consensus rules while allowing future quantum-capable actors to take coins whose owners never consented. Freezing vulnerable coins may prevent that theft, but it retroactively invalidates long-standing spending conditions. A forced migration to quantum-resistant signatures may be prudent engineering, but it can also look like a deadline-backed confiscation regime. The debate is ugly because there is no clean path that perfectly preserves property rights, economic predictability, censorship resistance, backward compatibility, and user sovereignty all at once.

Quantum Computing sure poses interesting challenges. Good luck, crypto-bros!

(…continue reading.)

How a Chinese Hacking Firm Tapped AI to Supercharge Cyber-Spying

A trove of internal data belonging to a China-based cybersecurity company, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, provides a new window into an evolution that international cybersecurity experts have tracked in recent years.

The material turns the table on hackers by providing an inside view of how they operate. It shows the company, Zhengzhou Zhirong Network Technology Co., or ZRON, offering a menu of sensitive data that is presented as coming from the government email systems of China’s rivals and friends alike. Documents in the trove include Russian diplomatic correspondence, preparations for foreign leaders’ visits to the Philippines and confidential minutes from a meeting in the Pakistan prime minister’s office.

The trove seen by the Journal also contains intelligence reports that appear to be based in part on stolen data, internal company chat logs and a company slide deck that appears aimed at prospective clients.

Yikes. I am pretty sure we will have more and more bad actors embracing AI to wreak havoc - and we need to increase our cybersecurity defenses, ideally powered by AI.

(…continue reading.)

As the coast begins to crumble, the clock ticks on moving San Onofre’s radioactive waste

Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant’s owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge.

But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors.

Well, I wanted to end this newsletter on a happier note, but to me this is really important. Nuclear is not the solution for the energy demand of the future. It’s too dangerous and also too expensive.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

Sorry, I won’t be talking about Apple’s foldable phone here, even though everybody else is excited or irritated about it. Instead, you can read about European Space Tech, how Israeli tech is securing Europe, what a city in Denmark is doing with the heat from a data center, how researchers at Stanford found out how to massively reduce the heat emissions from CPUs, and how a disembodied fly brain is doing some crypto speculation.

Enjoy.

Europe may finally have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment

After working for the traditional European space industry for about a decade, at heavyweights Airbus and ArianeGroup, Huby founded The Exploration Company five years ago. Initially, the company focused on building a relatively small cargo capsule to deliver supplies to, and return from, low-Earth orbit. This work has resulted in the Nyx spacecraft, which is now undergoing NASA safety reviews for a cargo mission to the International Space Station as early as November 2028.

But Huby’s bigger passion has always been human spaceflight, and her company has begun preliminary work on a crew spacecraft that could serve either the International Space Station or private space stations under development by US companies.

$450 million in Series C funding is incredible - and it will push forward the European space industry. I am sure this will spark a whole bunch of interesting new startups that will lead to new advances in space tech.

(…continue reading.)

How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security

A complete picture of Israel’s role in European defense is difficult to establish. Many contracts are undisclosed on national-security grounds, and some Israeli companies operate through European subsidiaries. But dozens of entries in the European tender database reviewed by POLITICO show Israeli firms becoming go-to suppliers for military communications, surveillance and electronic warfare.

While I wish we didn’t need all the cybersecurity and military tech, I am glad we partner closely with innovative Israeli companies who give us a serious tech advantage.

(…continue reading.)

A data center in Denmark gives away heat that data centers often waste. It runs water from the city’s heating network through its cooling units and into heat pumps that raise it enough to fill the radiators of 11,000 homes

The method is less exotic than it sounds. Water from the city’s district-heating network is run through the data center’s cooling units, where it picks up the low warmth coming off the servers. It then travels to a nearby plant full of heat pumps, which lift the temperature the rest of the way before the water goes out to homes.

The engineering consultancy Ramboll, which designed the recovery system for the district-heating company Fjernvarme Fyn, says the ammonia heat pumps raise the water to 70 to 75°C, hot enough for radiators, before it enters the network.

I think we need to treat data centers more like factories and not like an evil new thing. They will be around for a while now and it is smart to think about how to integrate them into environments.

(…continue reading.)

To make computers more energy efficient, SLAC researchers follow the heat

As data centers proliferate, researchers are racing to find ways to make computing more energy efficient. One way to do that is to increase the percentage of energy that does useful work.

But first, researchers must find a way to measure heat dissipation at the smallest levels. That’s no small feat, considering that even personal computers contain billions of transistors – where much of the energy leaks away into heat via mechanisms that are difficult to track.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University developed a new way to measure just how much energy has dissipated into heat in an electrical system.

The team, led by Stanford professor Aaron Lindenberg, also optimized the shape of the voltage pattern used to control the device, which reduced the waste heat by more than 60 percent.

Of course then the data centers won’t be able to heat cities, but I guess we cross the bridge when we come to it.

(…continue reading.)

Disembodied fruit fly brain joins the crypto speculation swarm

Stonkfly is different. It uses a model of a male fly’s brain and ventral nerve cord, rather than the female brain scan used in the earlier experiment. It has no body, and engineered interfaces feed it market information and translate neural activity into trading decisions.

The explanation on GitHub – it is an open source project – makes clear that the model uses engineered reinforcement signals, not modeled pain receptors, while synaptic changes “do not establish that it learns to trade profitably.”

The underlying network is substantial, comprising 166,700 nodes, 25,582,938 directed connections, and 124,177,617 synaptic contacts.

Sure, why not? How do people come up with these kinds of ideas?

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

If you look at the subject, it’s kind of hard to understand how all these topics are connected to each other.

Please read on and find out.

See what I am doing here? I am really trying hard to get you to read the rest of the newsletter.

Enjoy.

Big Tech Can Build Data Centers People Won’t Hate

We could be living in a golden age of data centers, one in which communities welcome the contributions to their tax base and have little to fear in terms of noise, air pollution or rising utility rates. Decades-in-the-making technologies are now becoming viable alternatives to outdated systems for cooling and power. Data centers that blend into their communities and don’t overtax local resources actually exist, they just don’t make news.

Instead, pushback from communities over noise, electricity costs and secretive development processes across the U.S. is leaving many builders with a stark choice: Do better, or face indefinite delay—even cancellation.

It’s interesting how hated data-centers are. Have you every see a refinery or a large automotive plant? It’s not entirely paradise at all, either.

(…continue reading.)

Ukraine’s Most Potent Weapon: The Software Orchestrating Its Drone Army

Col. Artem Martynenko, who oversees the development of the software for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, called Delta the “nervous system” of the army of drones that have brought Russian advances to a near standstill.

Western militaries have begun to take note. Daniel Driscoll, the U.S. Army secretary, has called the software “absolutely incredible” and acknowledged that American forces were playing catch-up.

Delta’s battlefield management system “fully integrates every single drone, every sensor and every shooting platform into just one single network,” Mr. Driscoll told the Senate in May, adding, “Ours does not.”

Ukrainian ingenuity is really amazing and they are so innovative, because they have to. I am sure Ukraine will push Europe forward and lead the way into a new tech push for the continent.

(…continue reading.)

VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital

We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.

There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.

AI will shake up VC and bootstrapping will be the new normal. VC will need to reinvent itself or become asset-class of the past.

(…continue reading.)

Solar panels bolted over 2 working irrigation canals in California’s Central Valley cut evaporation beneath them by as much as 70 percent, and the aquatic weed that fouls those channels dropped by about 85 percent

Sun on open water drives two processes at once. It lifts vapor off the surface, and it feeds the plants growing in the channel.

Block the light and both slow down together.

The panels intercept radiation that would otherwise warm the top few inches, so less water leaves before it reaches a field. The same shadow withholds the light algae and submerged plants need to photosynthesize, a separate mechanism with a separate payoff.

Heat and wind matter as well, and a canal running fast loses less than one standing still. But sunlight is the input both processes share, and it is the only one a canopy removes.

Just imagine how many solar panels we can deploy and get shade and energy at the same time, plus other unintended consequences.

(…continue reading.)

Dyson made a camera-equipped toothbrush that flosses for you

Just below the brush head is a tiny camera with a 100,000-pixel resolution and a strobing light. The toothbrush’s AI analyzes 28 live images from the camera every second as part of a feature Dyson calls Gap Optical Targeting, without storing them on the device or sending them to the cloud. Within 100 milliseconds of a gap between your teeth being detected, the CameraJet emits a cone-shaped blast of mouthwash to clean out the space. Dyson uses a wider blast than what water flossers typically employ so it can effectively remove plaque with less pressure, making the CameraJet’s flossing mechanism gentler on enamel and gums

What a time to be alive.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

The tech sector is mostly AI and datacenters right now, at least that’s what it feels like when you read too much about the industry. I tried to find Five Things Tech that are a bit different and look to other aspects of the tech industry.

Would you like to use Twitter again? I’m old enough to remember a Twitter without bots and right-wing trolls. Also, learn about charging the grid with your EV, the first biological computing rack in operation, the cybersecurity thread quantum computing will pose and a wild discussion about computer science without computers.

Five Things Tech for you - read them now!

New Twitter launches, says Musk’s X gave up the name

“We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product,” Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird’s cofounders, told Ars. “And we have waited months and months to launch, and we are not going to wait anymore.”

As Ars reported in December 2025, Coates and his coterie believe that when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and quickly changed the company’s name to X, the Twitter identity and intellectual property were abandoned.

Musk’s decision, they claim, created the opening for Operation Bluebird to claim Twitter’s trademarks.

I wish them the best of luck and much success with the new Twitter, but I actually do think that the old Twitter is dead and I have moved on. I am not sure that it will be able to reclaim the space Twitter had when it started 20 years ago.

(…continue reading.)

Why plugging in all those EVs could actually save the power grid

This would, in turn, reduce the costs that utilities typically pass on to customers through rate hikes. The trick, the report notes, is determining a compensation structure. Paying EV owners to provide backup power would incentivize participation, but paying too much would start to drive up costs, possibly exceeding what it would take to build more battery facilities. While only a fraction of California’s EV owners would need to opt in to make an impact, the more vehicles a utility can call on, the less energy it will have to draw from each. In any case, owners wouldn’t wake up to a drained battery: They could specify when they typically need their car fully charged. Even people without EVs would benefit, as rates shouldn’t rise if utilities can avoid building extra infrastructure. “We need to make sure that we set these incentives at levels in which everybody wins,” Skala said.

This is something that is really hard to comprehend - instead of driving to a gas station to get your tank filled up, EV owners charge their car at home through solar energy, then drive to work, park their car there, connect it to the grid and get paid for charging the grid. And obviously they will keep enough battery power to make it back home…

(…continue reading.)

Singapore Switches On Biological Computing Rack With Living Human Neurons

Each CL1 combines living human neurons with silicon hardware and a microelectrode interface. The neurons grow across a chip that sends and receives electrical impulses, while Cortical Labs’ software creates a digital environment through which neural activity can interact with software.

The biological component also requires life support. NUS technicians feed the cultures every three days, while the CL1 regulates their environment. Cortical Labs says the neurons can remain viable for up to six months.

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds like a mad scientist’s bad experiment from some 70s science-fiction movie? It’s fascinating, but also a bit weird, methinks.

(…continue reading.)

Why Quantum Computing Is a Threat to Cybersecurity

You may have heard it before—when quantum computing gets here, it’s going to upend cybersecurity.

That’s because this emerging class of superpowerful computers will be able to solve many complex math problems more efficiently than standard computers, making it easier to crack the encryption codes that currently protect our data.

What threat does this technology pose, and when is it coming? And how can you protect yourself?

It currently feels as if AI and Quantum are in a race to figure out which technology can do the most harm when it falls into the wrong hands.

(…continue reading.)

Does Computer Science Need Computers?

The pioneering computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, winner of the 1972 A.M. Turing Award and inventor of one of the most iconic algorithms in all of computing, was nothing if not opinionated. Certain programming languages drew his ire, for example: He once dubbed Fortran “the infantile disorder” and stated that “the use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.” In justifying his disdain for using computers in his own work, he wrote, “Medical researchers are not required to suffer from the diseases they investigate.”

Oh, this is an interesting debate. Maybe a bit abstract and theoretical, but interesting nonetheless, at least for all those math geeks out there.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

Three trillion dollars of AI commitments, tucked into footnotes where nobody has to call them capex - ain’t the world of finance grand? Meanwhile a town in Finland heats itself with 2,000 tons of sand, and solar quietly out-performed everything else while European nuclear plants ran short of cooling water. One of these approaches is going to look stupid in ten years. Also in this issue: a guy in Brussels tried to live three days without US tech, and ICE decided Meta's smart glasses are too toxic even for ICE.

Five Things Tech for you - read them now!

Why Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems

Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings.

There is so much obvious financial engineering going on that one wonders who will ever be held accountable for all this.

(…continue reading.)

‘The real challenge starts after sundown’: Europe’s heatwave boosted solar by up to 17% on hot days

Ember’s analysis found that during the late-June heatwave this summer, daily electricity demand rose byup to 28 per cent in Italy, 23 per cent in Hungary, 14 per cent in France and 13 per cent in Spain compared with pre-heatwave days.

It says as heatwave-driven demand increased, solar was the only major power source to perform “better than usual”. Compared with other days in June and July, average daily solar generation during the heatwaves was 17 per cent higher in France and Hungary, five per cent higher in Spain and the same in Italy.

“Solar is already doing heavy lifting during heatwaves, but the real challenge starts after sundown,” says senior energy analyst Chris Rosslowe.

While nuclear power plants don’t have enough water for cooling during heatwaves, solar just does what it is supposed to be doing,

(…continue reading.)

Finland’s radical answer to renewable energy’s biggest headache: The world’s largest sand battery

A small town in southern Finland has turned to the world’s largest commercial sand battery to fix what many see as the most critical problem facing renewable energy: intermittency.

Standing at 13 meters tall and 15 meters wide, the eye-catching facility uses 2,000 metric tons of crushed soapstone to store clean energy in the form of heat to provide 100 megawatt-hours of thermal energy.

That’s enough to provide the 5,000 residents of Pornainen with nearly one month of heat demand through the summer — and roughly one week of demand in the winter.

Give this some time and we will see super-efficient sand-based energy storage outside of towns and villages. This is just a start and we have enough sand everywhere.

(…continue reading.)

Flipping the kill switch: I survived 72 hours without US tech

No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.

I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk.

For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight. It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?”

What now seems to be impossible, used to be a bit simpler. My first mobile phone was a Siemens S3, some 30 years ago, then a few Nokias. I also remember the ZX Spectrum and the Schneider CPC64, but then somehow Europeans thought that there is no money to be made in consumer tech anymore.

(…continue reading.)

ICE Bars Its Workers From Wearing Meta’s Smart Glasses on the Job

ICE does not have a partnership with Meta, but its agents have come under fire in the last year for wearing the company’s smart glasses to protests and during immigration raids. ICE initially told employees the glasses were banned in June, according to an internal email obtained by The New York Times.

In the Department of Homeland Security’s budget proposal in April, the agency requested $7.5 million to develop its own smart glasses prototype to help with immigration enforcement, including glasses that can “enable biometric identification of illegal aliens.”

I assume that RayBan was thrilled about the partnership with Meta and now they see all the backlash, so I wonder how this will hurt their brand. Just imagine your product is so hated that not even the most hated organisation in the USA is allowed to wear it.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

Again I have a Smörgåsbord of tech topics picked out for you. And while I found all articles fascinating, I can say that the first one is the one that really impressed me. People are taking matters into their own hands, figure out how it works and get it done. Fiber to the home, even if the home is somewhere very remote. If you have electricity, you can have fiber. That is so cool.

Read on, there is more!

🤓

A Remote Indigenous Community Built One of Canada’s Fastest Fiber Networks

Nakogee says ownership remains the key advantage. Unlike earlier telecom providers that leased infrastructure or delivered service wirelessly, WJBTN owns the backbone fiber, the right-of-way, and the poles carrying the network. That makes it far harder for outside telecom companies to displace the service. “That’s our secret weapon,” he says.

Fundamentally, it’s about sovereignty. By controlling the infrastructure that carries internet traffic, the communities can govern and maintain the network according to their own priorities rather than the financial goals of distant providers.

We have largely forgotten that the core idea of the internet was to have a decentralized network. It’s refreshing to see a community building their own fiber access to get the necessary bandwidth they need.

(…continue reading.)

Mozilla’s CTO thinks AI should be built like the internet

When you talk about open source in certain circles, usually governmental policy circles, they would say things like, “Oh, it’s just some kid in the basement, right?” This ecosystem is not that. These businesses are building huge economies, infrastructure, products, and technology.

It’s like Linux, which started with just a kernel, not being taken very seriously. But Google was able to take Linux and make Android, and now, for all practical purposes, every computer on the planet runs on Linux. Every single new vending machine probably is running on Linux.

We are seeing the same thing in the open-source, open-weight AI world. It is because of the marketing blitz of the big frontier labs that we all view AI just as something that Anthropic, OpenAI, and a few other companies are doing. There’s actually a burgeoning ecosystem on the open-source, open-weight side that a lot of people actually do know about.

It’s potentially one of the best well-kept secrets right now when it comes to technology.

I am very sure that the majority of AI usage will be on open weights models soon that are being hosted somewhere in your region, under your region’s jurisdiction.

(…continue reading.)

While the world builds more memory chips, Israel could reinvent them

AI has now turned what was once an industry constraint into a strategic bottleneck. The industry is responding by increasing production and finding more sophisticated ways to connect memory to processors. These solutions can improve performance, but they do not solve the underlying problem: even HBM ultimately relies on the same DRAM technology.

This matters strategically because the memory industry is dominated by a small group of companies based mainly in South Korea, the United States and Japan. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron account for most of the DRAM market, while Samsung, SK Hynix, Kioxia, Micron and SanDisk are major players in NAND. HBM is more concentrated still: according to Counterpoint Research, South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix together account for roughly 80% of the global market by revenue.

That concentration is already creating vulnerabilities. As supply tightens and prices rise, technology companies are looking beyond the traditional suppliers. Apple is testing memory chips from China’s CXMT, while some PC makers have already begun using its products. This could deepen reliance on Chinese suppliers at a time when US policy is seeking to reduce such dependencies in critical technologies.

This is really smart thinking. We cannot rely on just building more factories, we need to rethink the core technologies that are in high demand right now and figure out new, innovative ways to come up with solutions for the next decade to come. And yes, I am betting on the Israelis to deliver.

(…continue reading.)

Chatbots Are Pushing Us Toward a Post-Human Internet

The dead internet theory, a concept popular in tech circles, holds that most digital traffic will eventually be software, leaving humans as a minority voice. We may now have a corollary of that prediction — let’s call it a bot loop — when the humans on both sides of an interaction hand over their role to artificial intelligence. These recursive exchanges can be eerie and error-prone, a single mistake bouncing back and forth uncorrected over and over. Stranger still, they flip our conversational dynamic inside out, turning chatbots into the interlocutors and humans into their enablers.

Depending on whom you ask, bot loops might be banal, dystopian or genuinely useful. No matter how people feel about them, researchers say we’re going to see bot loops much more often as we deputize A.I. systems to do our bidding.

This will happen sooner than we think, but it will take us a lot longer to really understand the impact this paradigm shift is going to have.

(…continue reading.)

Physicists are closing in on the origin of matter

Physicists have now found a new clue about the source of this mismatch by studying quarks and gluons—the building blocks of baryonic matter. Nature, it seems, is set askew not through either quarks or gluons alone but via their intermingling. The research, which appears today in Science, used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. (RHIC was permanently shuttered earlier this year to make way for a new, better particle collider at Brookhaven.)

“This is one of the most significant results achieved by the RHIC program,” says Dmitri Kharzeev, a physicist at Stony Brook University, who was not involved with the new paper but is mentioned in its acknowledgments. “It reshapes our understanding of baryon structure and how baryonic matter emerged.”

This is so cool. Just imagine for a second you work on these kind of projects, then everything else feels kind of pointless…

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

I tried to be a bit on the positive side today and just show you really cool developments that will help us lead better lifes and that couldn’t be possible without science and technology. I am not so sure about the drone example, but I am truly fascinated about that nonetheless. And imagine your car can literally run forever, or until you need a bathroom break. Amazing tech.

Check it out!

Germany Records Historic 12 Billion kWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026

During July, average midday solar power output exceeded 40,000 MW, equivalent to the generating capacity of more than 40 nuclear power plants rated at 1,000 MW each. According to the IWR, this level of generation displaced a significant share of electricity that would otherwise have been produced by coal- and gas-fired power plants.

The organization said the milestone represents a structural shift in Germany’s power system, with photovoltaics evolving from a supplementary energy source into one of the country’s key pillars of electricity supply. It attributed this growth to investments made over the past two decades by millions of homeowners, farmers, commercial enterprises, and small and medium-sized businesses.

The equivalent of 40 nuclear power plants. Wow. Let that sink in. And then add all the wind energy to it. We haven’t even started with putting solar panels on large warehouse roofs or on top of other large buildings at scale. I always think this development needs to go faster, but I am also happy that we finally have reached a point where solar really matters.

(…continue reading.)

New spinning drone hides in plain sight

For years, researchers have tried to design invisible drones and robots using camouflage, transparent materials or light-bending optical systems. But the Northwestern team instead used a concept called “motion blur” — the same effect that makes fast-spinning fans and propellers seem to disappear.

Called the “Phantom Twist,” the drone spins up to 25 times per second, which is too fast for the human eye to see clearly. While it isn’t completely invisible, it morphs into a ghostly smudge that seamlessly blends into the background. The work eventually could lead to drones that monitor wildlife, survey the environment and inspect infrastructure with less visual disruption.

This is fascinating and scary at the same time. Just imagine that in a few years from now lots of drones will be flying across our heads and we won’t be able to see them. I do not even want to get into the many use cases in military conflicts around the world.

(…continue reading.)

How One Startup Built a (Mostly) China-Free Robot

The startup was founded in 2017 to develop motors for self-driving cars. Years later, it zeroed in on making its own robots, including tuggers and pallet movers that cart tons of materials throughout big facilities. Ati developed its own hardware, believing that it would lead to better functionality, a bet that Chandra says many of his advisers cautioned against but one that wound up naturally limiting reliance on China.

It has begun to pay off. Ati has several hundred robots currently in operation at warehouses and factories and more than 50 customers in total, Chandra says. Ati’s first humanoid, which moves heavy bins around, will go into service later this year.

The geopolitical reality is that while out markets are globally intertwined, we need to untangle parts again. This is not a simple endeavor, but I am sure this will pay off in times where we shouldn’t blindy trust that all interests with other countries are always aligned.

(…continue reading.)

Apple Vision Pro in Surgery

In my experience, the Apple Vision is criticized for two things: being too big/heavy and being too expensive.

The data above shows that within the context of the operating room, the Apple Vision Pro is notable for being very small and very cheap. It is less than 1% of the cost and smaller than almost any piece of equipment.

When the iPhone was new it was considered a very expensive phone. At $500 most people, including, famously, Steve Ballmer, considered it too premium for the mass market. It turned out to be the most popular phone in most markets even when twice the price. It all depends on what it does and how easy it is to use.

For a hospital the cost of the Vision Pro is not insignificant. The paper considered what it can do, and, for that, it’s a bargain.

This is the Gartner Hype Cycle in action. The tech is exciting, but the intended use cases made little sense, then everyone was disappointed and now they are figuring out how to actually use the Vision Pro.

(…continue reading.)

wrapped in a photovoltaic skin, this student-designed EV creates more energy than it uses

Deep Orange 17 becomes more convincing once the numbers move beyond the solar skin. Luminetta weighs just 550 kilograms, or 1,212 pounds, roughly a quarter of the weight of many similarly sized production vehicles. That low mass reduces how much energy the car needs in the first place, allowing the relatively small amount of power gathered from sunlight to have a much larger effect on its range.

The chassis uses structural steel around passenger safety zones, while aluminum cuts weight through other sections. Carbon-fiber structural members connect through 3D-printed metal joints, giving the students another place to strip away unnecessary mass. Regenerative braking feeds energy back into the system, while intelligent torque distribution works with drivetrain controls to reduce losses as the car moves. Inside, a custom interface displays live vehicle data and energy information to the driver.

Sure, this car looks about as elegant as the Tesla Cybertruck, but this is a really cool and innovative idea. Now you can safely assume that in 5 to 10 years time our cars will just auto-charge. How amazing is that? We will see, or rather not see, solar panels on surfaces everywhere.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

Strange week. At the top end, Larry Ellison is reaching for everything not nailed down — compute, the White House, Hollywood — while Leopold Aschenbrenner just demonstrated how fast one can burn through $45 billion when leverage runs the wrong way. Meanwhile a court told Google it doesn't actually own the internet it scraped, which is my favorite kind of irony this year. And at the completely other end of the spectrum, thousands of solo founders are quietly building million-dollar companies without a single employee. Oh, and quantum computing remains five years away, as it has been for fifteen years. Power is concentrating and dispersing at the same time right now, and I honestly couldn't tell you which trend wins.

Let's get into it. 🤓

Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?

Ellison had come around to Trump long before many other tech leaders. After the 2020 election, he joined a strategy call of Trump confidants about how to overturn the results, and in 2024, he gave tens of millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaign. But OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, who was on hand at the White House too, was a Democratic donor and Trump critic. Ellison had helped arrange a call between the two men to tee up the event.

For Ellison, it was the capstone of a mad two-year scramble to transform Oracle into an A.I. juggernaut. The effort began in late 2022 when the launch of ChatGPT stunned the world and set in motion a race to master and control the most transformative new technology since the birth of the internet. Ellison, a founding father of Silicon Valley and the last of his generation still in the game, was desperate to avoid getting left behind. He’d moved quickly and aggressively — some might even say recklessly — to turn Oracle into a “hyperscaler,” one of the handful of companies providing the critical infrastructure that would power the A.I. boom.

Ellison is trying to do a huge powergrab right now, including dominating Hollywood. I sure hope he fails.

(…continue reading.)

Why full-fledged quantum computers might always be five years away

Quantum computers are also much closer to being useful devices than they were just a handful of years ago. Sure, they haven’t yet changed the world by aiding the discovery of some groundbreaking drug or battery redesign, but you could access a quantum computer through the cloud right now and use it as a scientific tool if you happen to be a chemist or a material scientist.

It’s probably a lot like mobile - everyone talked about it all the time and it just wasn’t there yet. And then, boom, it was there. When will that moment be for Quantum?

(…continue reading.)

How Leopold Aschenbrenner built a $45 billion AI hedge fund — and lost most of it in days

At its peak earlier this month, his fund sat atop $45 billion in assets. By Thursday, however, after being forced to offload all of his leveraged stock bets — including hard-hit names like SK Hynix and CoreWeave — to Ken Griffin’s Citadel at a discount, the fund’s holdings plunged to around $10 billion, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

The story of Aschenbrenner’s meteoric rise and sudden fall has captivated both Wall Street and tech circles, making him the most high-profile casualty yet of the volatility accompanying the AI boom.

I think Larry Ellison will be watching this closely. I don’t want to too sound too negative this week, but there sure are too many people out there who hand out cash too loosely in hope of huge rewards.

(…continue reading.)

“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet,” web scraper says after court win

Meredith Rose, a senior policy counsel with expertise in the DMCA for a nonprofit public interest group called Public Knowledge, told Ars that Google and Reddit seem to be “sort of grasping at whatever tool is available” in the face of the sudden, continuous rise of AI scraping over the past three years. And while the way they’re using the DMCA is “bizarre”—and “not what the law had sort of contemplated as a use case”—she says it’s not “surprising.” Historically, the DMCA has been an effective tool to quickly stop disfavored content uses and force discussions around licensing, so turning to it may have been an obvious starting point, given Google’s goals.

But Google’s and Reddit’s unusual DMCA arguments don’t seem to be winning ones. Last week, a court took the somewhat rare step of granting SerpApi’s motion to dismiss very early on in Google’s lawsuit. In that case, the judge found that Google had no DMCA standing to sue SerpApi, since it didn’t own any of the content in the search results and has not shown that it’s acting on behalf of any rights holders.

This really is a very interesting case and I assume Google will fight back with everything they have to protect the content they scraped off the interwebs. How ironic.

(…continue reading.)

The Rise of Million-Dollar Companies With Just One Employee

Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down, and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone.

Tech has seen an explosion of solo founders in the past year. Broca said he likes being able to work at his own speed, unencumbered by a team. Jonah Reenders for WSJ

An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span.

It’s amazing how much AI is changing the way we work and it allows small companies to do stuff that used to be only possible for larger companies. This is a huge shift.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

This week is a mixed bag and I like it that way. I strap an Oura ring to my finger and an AirTag to my dog, and I still want camera glasses, so I am clearly not the guy to lecture anyone about surveillance. Meanwhile coders are getting hammered while I happily build my whole stack in Rust with agents, which feels a bit unfair and I know it. Airbus walked away from AWS and I really hope more European companies grow a spine and do the same. And the Cybertruck turns out to be about as beloved as a tax audit.

Grab a coffee and dig in! 🧑🏻‍💻

Surveillance Is Trendy Now

Around the turn of the millennium, fashion went through what designer and academic Eric Howeler called “ Paranoid Chic ” in 2002: Versace ads styled as grainy security camera footage or a Givenchy perfume line named RWD, PLAY, and FFWD or an Estée Lauder campaign starring Elizabeth Hurley looking startled and overexposed in the camera flash. The ads were selling the glamour of being watched. But they were selling the image of surveillance, rather than actual surveillance. The clothes weren’t tracking your heart rate or telling you whether Amazon dropped off a package. The cameras then belonged to the state and the tabloid.

In the last decade, things have flipped. Consumers control the camera, but they continuously point it back at themselves. Ring doorbell camera footage has become its own style of video. Jack Harlow (a man present at many consumer surveillance events, it seems) shot a music video through one in 2024, and “fit checks” filmed on doorbell cams are an entire genre on social media. The Oura ring and smartwatches turned biometric self-monitoring into jewelry. Parents track their teenagers by default through apps like FindMy or Life360 (I don’t have kids yet, but my dog wears an AirTag collar.) Now, Meta sells glasses that track every move around you when activated (and play music) with a frame shape from Kylie Jenner, one of the most photographed people of all time.

A friend of mine, who grew up in East Germany, is staying away from social media for good, he says that he experienced surveillance before and doesn’t want to experience again. I, on the other hand, have my oura ring, post photos wherever I eat food or go running. I’d love to be able to take photos with my glasses. Even better: I’d love to have glasses that record stuff for me and that show me who I am talking to and how I know that person. I think we are still a long time away from really useful glasses.

(…continue reading.)

Chasing new skills, going back to basics and pushing for collective action: how software engineers are adapting to AI

Software engineering was one of the biggest and best-paying professions in the US in 2022, with 1.5 million practitioners earning twice the national median salary, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Pay had risen amid escalating talent wars, during which companies offered bonuses of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars to snag and retain top programmers. Last year, nearly 50 million people worldwide worked as developers, according to the market research firm SlashData.

But since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, more than 600,000 US tech workers have lost their jobs, according to the tech layoff tracker Layoff.fyi. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for computer science graduates rose to 7% in 2024, up from 6.1% the previous year, and their underemployment rate was more than 19%, data from the New York Fed shows. US tech job postings on Indeed also dropped 36% from 2020 to 2025.

I was never really a developer, my code sucked. For me, Agentic Engineering is wonderful as I know what to build, but I know that agents can code much better than I ever will. So I welcome this change. For coders, this must feel completely different and I don’t envy them right now.

(…continue reading.)

‘Rust makes coding fun again’: Why Linux is moving away from C, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman

So, Kroah-Hartman has moved from being a Rust skeptic to one of its strongest champions inside the kernel. He now regards Rust as a permanent part of Linux, not an experiment. His case is straightforward: Rust's ownership and type system can eliminate most of the "stupid little tiny things" that dominate kernel Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), while making life easier for overworked maintainers. "Rust," in short, "makes my life so much easier."

When Rust got started, I took a look at it and was intrigued. But I am not a developer, so I didn’t really bother. Now, some 20 years later, I am building my Agentic AI stack in Rust and it is so amazing to see how well it works and how it just outperforms the typical Python-based stack.

(…continue reading.)

Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

Airbus has shown that the cloud service market can work with digital sovereignty, and it did it the old-fashioned way by announcing a tendering process, in itself a market-making event. It could do the same elsewhere, but while even a big migration is a tasty target for a competent cloud service, there’s no such sector for productivity and desktop stuff.

Yes, yes, of course there’s Linux and LibreOffice and all that, but there’s no organization that can respond to a competitive tender request for a tightly specified Office/Workspace replacement. Nobody’s done that before, which, for a risk-averse outfit like Airbus, is a big red flag. There are people who have the track record of managing large projects at that level, and there are people who understand building open source, but they don’t live at the same address.

This is so huge. I hope other companies will follow suit and ditch AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other offerings. This will make competition from Europe possible.

(…continue reading.)

It’s Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History

For all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s grandiose claims that the pickup would be an “apocalypse-proof” tank capable of winning its driver style points wherever they go, it’s instead earned a reputation for being incredibly unreliable and just about the opposite of “easy on the eyes” — probably because you can imagine the numerous sharp edges that define its low-poly design poking you in them as soon as you see it.

Most unforgivable in the capitalist society Musk champions, it hasn’t sold well. He once estimated that Tesla would sell up to 500,000 Cybertrucks annually, but it hasn’t even come close to that number in the nearly three years since it first started shipping, and at this point it probably won’t in its entire lifetime.

So the Cybertruck is about as successful as DOGE. I genuinely wish people to succeed, but I do make an exception with Elon Musk. I hope he fails big time.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

This week's Five Things Tech has a theme, and the theme is "Europe would like its seat at the table back, please." We have France admitting that technological sovereignty means autonomy in the parts that matter rather than divorcing Silicon Valley entirely, Germany's richest man building a cloud empire out of supermarket infrastructure with the excellent line that if you are not at the table you end up on the menu, and a reminder that the German public sector hands Microsoft 6-8 billion EUR a year that could be funding something of our own. Then things get delightfully weird: a spirited defense of not understanding your own codebase (relatable), and thermodynamic computers that harness entropy itself, which I read three times while nodding along and understanding roughly none of it. If your brain likes a mix of geopolitics, cloud strategy, engineering philosophy and physics that sounds made up but apparently is not, you are in the right place.

Pour the coffee. Let's get into it.

The Quest for ‘Technological Sovereignty’ in Europe (and Why It’s So Hard)

Ms. Bouverot said Europe would never cast itself off completely from Silicon Valley. She said the idea was for European countries to carve out autonomy in strategic digital areas — making them less vulnerable, for example, to an interruption of service or a breach of sensitive data.

That’s very different from the full vision of digital independence some leaders are promising. And it is not enough for those who say that Europe needs to break free of America and China for a purely economic reason — to profit from the next wave of booming technology sales.

It’s hard, but it makes so much sense. The German public sector alone pays Microsoft 6-8 billion € annually instead of using open source software. Just imagine what we could build with 8 billion € each and every year…

(…continue reading.)

Germany’s richest man takes on Big Tech

Now the Schwarz Group is making headlines with a new story — one about digital independence and Germany as a hub for innovation. “If you’re not at the table, you end up on the menu,” says Wagner from his air-conditioned office.

Schwarz Digits has spent recent years primarily managing the IT infrastructure of some 14,500 supermarkets worldwide. Now, the company is offering its cloud and security solutions to businesses and government agencies as well.

The goal, says Wagner, is to ensure that Germany and Europe regain their seat at the table and are no longer entirely dependent on technology from the United States or China: “We want to restore Europe’s ability to act.”

I went to Heilbronn last year to see in person how the Schwarz Group is transforming German tech. It is really impressive, but many more companies need to follow suit. It can only be the beginning.

(…continue reading.)

The fight against AI data centers is important – but it’s just a starting point

Opposition to AI datacenters has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that – surprisingly – doesn’t fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these datacenters bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on datacenters obscures the larger impacts of AI on people’s lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence.

Local datacenter opposition is grounded in legitimate concerns about misallocation of land resources when housing is at a premium, pressures on already higher energy prices, and localized environmental impact. Unlike other resource-consuming and polluting industrial facilities, datacenters produce very few jobs. The fact that US opposition to datacenters seems to be most fierce among lower-income communities reflects righteous indignation with an inequitable bargain, where tech companies and developers profit from exploiting local resources but offer little in return. On a global scale, their carbon footprint could grow unsustainably if usage accelerates. And all this is in aid of a technology that many fear will propagate misinformation, take their jobs, or even cause existential risks for humanity.

We need both: more datacenters and more regulation. I understand the backlash, but I don’t think Tech and AI has to become an evil thing, quite the contrary.

(…continue reading.)

In defense of not understanding your codebase

My guess is that people who work on small codebases with low-turnover teams (say, Redis or games like The Witness) would say “obviously you have to understand it completely, otherwise you can’t do good work”. I’d also guess that people who work on large codebases with high-turnover teams (say, the Google web search backend or GitHub) would say “obviously you can’t understand it completely, you just have to do the best you can in your local area”.

These are two largely different ways of programming with different methods, practices and cultures¹. However, the first group is over-represented in online discussion about software engineering². I want to defend the second group against the first. In many software engineering environments, there’s nothing wrong with being in a state of partial understanding. In fact, in large systems a partial understanding is the best you can do.

I think we are in the beginning of a huge paradigm shift where AI engineers will deliver a new abstraction layer for us humans, which allows us to build software with much more complexity than ever before.

(…continue reading.)

Thermodynamic Computers Go With the (Energy) Flow

Thermodynamic computing would make use of thermodynamic processes, which distribute and dissipate energy and inevitably increase randomness at the microscopic scale. “The field is about designing computers that exploit thermodynamics as a computational resource,” said Patrick Coles, a physicist at the startup Normal Computing in New York. If it works, it could transform not only the computing industry but the very way we think about computation itself.

This is one of those articles that I read, scratch my head multiple times and think to myself: “sure, why not?” while I do not really understand how this is supposed to work.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

This week in tech: the grown-ups finally showed up. It has been a banner week for stating the obvious out loud. Brussels has looked at infinite scroll and concluded, after extensive investigation, that it is designed to keep you scrolling - a finding that will shock absolutely no one who has ever opened Instagram “for two minutes.” Meanwhile humanoid robots are being engineered to collapse politely instead of flattening you, Silicon Valley’s workforce is quietly burning out while insisting the tools are great, AI giants are back to buying loyalty with free compute like it is 2013 and we are all rediscovering cloud credits, and EV batteries have committed the ultimate sin of simply refusing to die on schedule. Turns out the machines are more stable than the industry selling them.

Let us dig in.

Disable autoplay and infinite scroll or risk massive fines, EU tells Meta

At this stage, the EC recommended that Meta consider “disabling key addictive features such as ‘autoplay’ and ‘infinite scroll’ by default, implementing effective ‘screen time breaks,’ and adapting its recommender system to make it less engagement-oriented.”

If Meta fails to make changes to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act, the company risks fines up to 6 percent of its global annual turnover when the EC makes its final decision in the coming months.

“Our starting point is that, based on our findings, this design is too addictive and changes need to be made,” Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s tech chief, told Reuters.

“The next step is either that Meta changes its design or a non-compliance decision will follow,” she said, noting in the press release that the EU’s priority is “protecting the physical and mental health of Europeans.”

This is so long overdue. And TikTok should be next.

(…continue reading.)

The Quest to Make Humanoid Robots Safe Enough for Humans

The possible consequences of a humanoid robot losing stability have led an expert panel at the International Organization for Standardization, which creates safety guidelines, to examine the subject. It expects to publish a standard by mid-2028.

Humanoid makers, meanwhile, are coming up with their own solutions.

Neura Robotics, a German company, makes a two-legged, 176-pound model it calls 4NE1. Founder David Reger said it has been engineered to minimize the risk to people nearby. If the robot detects a problem, such as a knee joint that stops responding, it will try to recover its balance; if it can’t, he said, it will collapse onto itself like an imploding building.

I have the feeling that humanoid robots will be everywhere, soonish.

(…continue reading.)

How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two

The 2026 workforce is more burned out and less optimistic than a year ago, splitting along the fault line of AI into those who are thriving and those who are struggling, and a large, ambivalent middle caught between. Tech workers are mostly afraid of being squeezed by their jobs and increasing productivity expectations, privately convinced the field is no longer worth recommending to newcomers, while individually still finding real power and even joy in the tools. It’s a complicated moment. It’s also not a hopeless one.

It must be tough to work in tech in Silicon Valley, when all of a sudden execs turn to AI and people are stuck with absurdly high costs of living and then no jobs to be found.

(…continue reading.)

AI Giants Are Handing Out Tons of Free Computing Power to Grab Startup Share

The pitched battle for business users comes as AI companies seek lasting streams of revenue. They hope that by winning startups as customers early in the life of new companies, their tools will become integral to the venture’s growth over time.

OpenAI and Anthropic are offering a string of promotions and one-time bonuses, even as both companies face enormous pressure to improve their margins ahead of expected initial public offerings. They also face competition from increasingly powerful “open weight,” or free models, as well as cheaper ones, many of which were developed in China.

It’s the cloud credit game redux.

(…continue reading.)

EV batteries are lasting much longer than the industry expected

Battery analytics company Recurrent estimates that after five years of ownership, the average EV still retains up to 95 percent of its original driving range, exceeding many early expectations. That improvement is largely due to advances in battery chemistry, thermal management systems, and sophisticated battery-management software that better protects cells from long-term wear.

Just another piece of FUD debunked. I really do not understand why people are so afraid of EV.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

The internet did not build itself. Neither will whatever comes next. We spend our days talking about the shiny layer on top. The models, the apps, the demos. This week is about the layer underneath. The man who wrote the rules that let networks talk to each other is finally retiring. The data centers powering the boom are drinking more water than they admit. Quantum is speeding up but still years from mattering. The robots are learning to fold our laundry. And the rules for all of it remain unwritten. The foundation is never the headline. It should be.

Here are five things tech worth your attention.

The ‘Father of the Internet’ is finally retiring

Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as being the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know today. His work developing and popularizing TCP/IP — the basic set of rules that lets different computer networks talk to each other — beginning in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Turing Award, among other honors.

Since 2005, Cerf has served as vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. (At this point, we can safely say the internet is fully evangelized, for good or ill.)

I had the pleasure to meet Vint Cerf some ten years ago or so at a luncheon in Berlin where we discussed tech regulation. It was a delight to listen to him talk about the inner workings of the internet.

(…continue reading.)

AI Data Centers Use Far More Water Than Most Tech Giants Report

Recently, Nvidia said it had solved the data-center water issue, showing off a closed-loop cooling system that doesn’t require additional water once filled. This design appears to be a win on two levels, says Gillingham, the Yale professor: It zeroes out direct use of water while also reducing the total amount of energy required for cooling.

Microsoft has committed to similar closed-loop tech. In 2024, the company announced that all its new data centers would use it, starting in 2027.

Unfortunately, most existing data centers use evaporative cooling systems that are energy-efficient but water-hungry, according to data from the 2024 Lawrence Berkeley report. Experts say retrofitting those could be prohibitively expensive.

Data centers are creating huge problems. But data centers are also hugely important and they need to be run profitably. So clever engineers will find solution to all the issues we currently see: too much water usage, to much power usage, too much noise - the list goes on and will be addressed.

(…continue reading.)

Quantum computing is about to get a lot more real

Capital is only one accelerant. The generative AI boom is also helping quantum developers move faster. Artificial intelligence coding tools are helping scientists accelerate the development of materials and components used in quantum designs, says Heather West, an analyst at IDC. That, in turn, is shortening the timelines on product road maps.

Industry consolidation has also helped, often by bringing different parts of the quantum stack under one roof.

Even is Quantum development is speeding up, I do not think we’ll notice anything really happening in this space in the next 5 years. It is still very early.

(…continue reading.)

We Didn’t Build the Atomic Bomb This Way

Artificial intelligence, funded overwhelmingly by private capital, has careened forward despite immense concerns about the effects it will have on labor, education, science, defense and civic life. A.I. companies have outpaced public oversight and, at times, successfully lobbied against it. The central achievements of the industry, the proprietary “frontier models” developed by companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, are guarded intellectual properties even as they are incorporated into schools, offices, hospitals, courts, commerce and our everyday devices. The public did not ask for these A.I. tools and now can hardly opt out of them.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to addressing the impacts that may be coming. But the scale of the concerns requires ambitious responses that serve the public. The United States can start by building a national A.I. laboratory.

This debate is just a few years too late, but it is still necessary that we discuss this.

(…continue reading.)

This Soft Robot Wants to Fold Laundry Without Pretending to be Human

Isaac 1 is meant to handle its main tasks autonomously, though Weave says teleoperation support can step in when needed. That point may be one of the more realistic parts of the project. Homes are inconsistent environments, full of changing furniture positions, loose objects, and edge cases that are difficult to predict. A robot that can ask for help may be more plausible than one claiming to solve every room by itself.

Folding laundry and picking up stuff my kids drop everywhere - this could be awesome. A professional cleaner is still cheaper though…

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

Here are five things tech worth your attention.

The state of the AI economy

These revenues are growing faster than previous IT-oriented waves, roughly three times more rapidly than the mobile or Internet waves.

While many companies have moved beyond occasional pilots, they are still in the early stages of scaling and deepening. In conversations Azeem has had with senior execs across a range of industries in Europe and the US (from industrials to insurance, from finance to pharma), the consistent message is that they intend to invest more heavily in AI in the coming years. Companies are also becoming more vocal about the impact of AI on earnings calls, with the caveat that half of the surveyed CEOs believe their jobs depend on getting AI right.

I don’t think this AI thing is going away anytime soon.

(…continue reading.)

The New Software Lifecycle

Static context is loaded on every turn, so it’s reliable and expensive. Dynamic context is loaded on demand, so you only pay for what a task needs.

Static context is loaded every turn: system instructions, rule files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md), global memory, core guardrails. It’s reliable, and it’s expensive, because you pay for it on every single call. Dynamic context is loaded on demand: skills that fire when a task matches, tool results, documents pulled from RAG. You only pay for the bits a given task touches.

Get that balance wrong in one direction and you burn tokens and bury the signal. Wrong in the other and the agent forgets the rules that keep it safe. The paper’s advice, which I agree with, is to treat the boundary as a real architectural decision: reviewed in a pull request, versioned like code.

The trick that makes dynamic context scale is Agent Skills with progressive disclosure. The agent sees a little metadata at startup, loads the full instructions when a task matches, and only pulls in the heavy reference material when it actually needs it. That’s how one agent can carry dozens of skills and still only pay for the one it’s using.

We truly live in interesting times. I am constantly revising my setup and while it is getting more complex every week, the tools to manage the complexity are also getting so much better. Some I even write myself, or at least tell the agents to write them…

(…continue reading.)

The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet

The advent of A.I. has caused Silicon Valley types to fixate on the concept of “taste”; when machines can spit out images and words instantaneously, the thinking goes, humans must be discerning enough to separate the quality output from the slop. Ström-Awn described Claude’s default design choices as a mark of complacency, “a filtering mechanism” that exposes “people who didn’t spend the time” creating something unique. Nguyen brought up a credo of the mid-century American designers Charles and Ray Eames that defined the ideals of modernism: “The best for the most for the least.” What Claude Design offers, Nguyen said, is “the pretty good for the most for the least effort, and pretty low cost.” She continued, “You’re just paying a twenty dollar a month Claude Pro subscription instead of hiring a designer. Is this the modernist world we wanted?”

I actually think that this phenomenon is nothing new - we have a new wave in design and soon we will see the next wave and then everything will be a bit more sophisticated. The really cool thing is: even people like myself (I called myself web-designer 30 years ago just because I could do very basic website design) can now create pretty complex websites with good UX/UI.

(…continue reading.)

Smartglasses Are Inevitable. But What—or Who—Are They For?

Since the start, the idea of a face-worn computer has garnered skepticism, even hostility, and it’s understandable.

When most of us are trying to reduce our time in front of screens, it seems absurd to mount them right in front of our eyeballs. And why should we be OK with everyone we meet pointing internet-connected cameras at us? It feels like an assault on what little privacy we have left.

Then there’s the built-in AI. Artificial intelligence lets these glasses identify objects in our field of view, like a ficus tree or a Southern African meerkat. But there’s a growing unease with companies sticking generative-AI features into any and all products, and having a little AI djinn always whispering in our ear seems like a cautionary tale—or a “Twilight Zone” episode.

And yet there will be smartglasses, and you and I might even choose to wear them. They’re a technological inevitability, a new consumer-tech arms race for the last and best real estate on our bodies.

I will buy smartglasses as soon as they get progressive lenses, automagic shading and, most importantly, will be self-cleaning.

(…continue reading.)

Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

So what happened to bank tellers? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.

But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?

Technology hits differently. But it brings constant change and disruption - yet we are still not getting used to it.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

disposable software: software is now just paper plates

a year ago the best AI coding tools could finish a function. today it can read an entire codebase, plan a change, edit dozens of files at once, run the tests, fix what breaks, and ship a working version of whatever was asked for. that did not exist twelve months ago.

the engineer typing the code used to be the bottleneck. that is gone. describe what you want in plain english and a working app shows up. one human plus one model ships on a saturday what used to take a team a quarter.

anything that takes a week to ship today will take a day to ship by december.

so what is the point of building it to last?

So the big question is: how will we keep everything running if it is easier to build new stuff than keeping the old stuff alive? We need to figure out consistency, otherwise we will play catchup all the time with an everychanging code stack.

(…continue reading.)

How to tame AI’s voracious appetite for energy

Though experts say the fastest energy savings will come from software tweaks, some are also taking aim at the energy-hungry processing chips that fuel AI computations. Engineers have made chips increasingly efficient over time by packing more computing capacity into individual processors — reducing the energy required to shuttle data between chips that are working together to perform AI computations. Engineers have done this by shrinking the size of transistors — microscopic electrical switches that process data — inside the chips.

But because engineers are reaching the physical limits of how small transistors can be, “we need to think of alternate ideas to improve the designs,” says computer architect Ajay Joshi of the Boston University Photonics Center.

The recent boom in data centers is really posing some interesting problems that need to get solved. I assume that this will happen quickly, otherwise the costs of running these data centers would just be too high. And these advancements will benefit our daily lives in tremendous ways, from the electric grid to more energy efficiency to small language models on personal devices.

(…continue reading.)

Solar Beat Coal in US Electricity Mix for the First Time in May

Despite the Trump administration’s attempts to drive a coal revival, it has been steadily losing ground to other energy sources in recent years, squeezed out by cheap natural gas and rapidly falling renewable energy prices. Solar power, in particular, has been on a tear as prices drop exponentially.

Last month, the two lines finally crossed. Solar supplied 12.8 percent of US electricity in May, edging past coal’s 12.2 percent share to become the country’s third-largest source of power behind natural gas and nuclear, according to recent data from energy think tank Ember.

Well, it just makes more sense to do wind and solar than digging for coal or pumping oil and then ship it around the globe.

(…continue reading.)

The Secret Revolution in Battery Technology: 3-D Printing

In 2025, researchers published around 25,000 papers about 3-D printing of batteries and their components, yet only a handful of startups have even proposed commercializing the technology.

Attempting to beat existing battery giants has doomed many a company to the graveyard. New battery tech must compete on lifespan, durability, energy density, safety and cost—which is dependent on massive scale.

Some are trying to use 3-D printing to create efficiencies in existing battery manufacturing systems. A brave handful of startups are pursuing radical new designs and approaches. They’re starting with defense applications, where cost and scale are less of an issue.

A few months ago I met a startup founder who was building really small batteries for drones and other small devices. I was blown away by what they were doing and how powerful really tiny batteries have gotten. So incredible.

(…continue reading.)

AI and brain-computer interface allow speechless ALS patient to work a full-time job

A team of scientists from the University of California, Davis, published a paper Monday detailing a years-long study of a brain computer interface (BCI) system implanted in a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), which destroys motor neurons and causes loss of motor control and eventual paralysis. According to the team, their patient, Casey Harrell, has been living with BCI implants since 2023 that are still working today, giving him the ability not only to control a computer cursor with his thoughts, but also to speak.

I have serious concerns about brain-computer interfaces, but this is really awesome. I mean, just imagine how this can change the lifes of so many people for the better!

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology

The moves are widespread—and growing. Last week, the European Commission launched its official long-term plans to rely less on US technology. The European Parliament has switched the default search engine on its devices from Google to the French alternative Qwant. Thousands of workers in the French government are using its own open-source office software —dubbed LaSuite—as officials aim to “break free” from dependence on American tech firms. An open-source documents offering from more than a dozen European tech companies, called Euro-Office, is due to launch imminently. Cities across the Netherlands, France, and Germany are all moving away from Microsoft Office and Google Docs

It’s not just productivity software, either. The Dutch government is moving its code away from Microsoft-owned Github to its own repository. In a series of decisions, Finland reportedly decided not to move its election data to Amazon’s cloud services, while the organization behind Belgium’s.be top-level domain has said it will move away from AWS. Meanwhile, Eurosky has been spun up as an interoperable alternative to Bluesky on the AT Protocol that underlies both social networks.

Don’t get me wrong, there a lots of really great US tech products. But we need to find our own path in Europe and reduce the dependency on US tech.

(…continue reading.)

AI can design and run thousands of lab experiments without human hands. Humanity isn’t ready for the new risks this brings to biology

Hands-on work in the lab has traditionally been a bottleneck to translating designs into results. Even a brilliant study plan still depends on skilled human hands to carry out. That may not last, as cloud laboratories and robotic automation become cheaper and more accessible, allowing researchers to send AI-generated experimental designs to remote facilities for execution.

AI systems are now able to run experiments autonomously and at scale, but existing regulations were not designed for this. Rules governing biological research do not account for AI-driven automation, and rules governing AI do not specifically address its use in biology.

We need so many new ways to define guardrails, otherwise we cannot keep up with AI.

(…continue reading.)

The Real Cost Of Cooling GPUs In Space Might Shock You

Proponents tout the many wonders of computing in space: abundant solar energy, free cooling, and freedom from Earth-based disturbances like earthquakes, floods, and protesters. But a sober look at the physics of space-based computing paints a much more nuanced picture.

Free cooling is perhaps the biggest misconception. Space is cold, but it also has no atmosphere. That means the best heat-removal mechanisms, conduction and convection, are off the table. The only option is radiation. To prevent a chip from overheating in space, a large, costly surface area is required to dissipate the energy and then radiate it.

Solar energy is abundant, but collecting it with functional solar panels that maintain perfect alignment toward the sun is a complex task requiring extensive attitude control systems. On top of that, ionizing radiation in space from cosmic rays and other sources poses a unique challenge, degrading the solar panels, the radiative coolers, and the chips themselves. Because regular maintenance in space is difficult, redundancy has to be built in at launch, and cost estimates have to account for efficiency degradation over time.

I really don’t see why people remain so optimistic about datacenters in space. So much hype, just for one IPO…

(…continue reading.)

Pokémon Go data trained AI that could assist military drones in war zones

Niantic Spatial – a spin-off company from Niantic – announced its partnership with Vantor, a company that specialises in spatial detection software for drones, including those used by some militaries, in December.

The agreement is designed to allow drones to navigate and coordinate precisely in areas where GPS is not available.

Pokemon generated so much data and this is now being used to train drones that could get deployed across our cities. What a time to be alive.

(…continue reading.)

Making a vintage LLM from scratch

In short, to build an LLM you need 4 things:

• the data -- an LLM has no discernment or understanding. It will learn from anything you tell it to, good or bad. This is the longest process.

• tokenization -- the Tokenizer is a little program that converts words or letters into numbers (tokens). LLMs don’t understand words, they only understand numbers.

• pre-training -- it’s a confusing expression and it means “base-training”, where the LLM learns to autocomplete text. If you’re going for a 300m+ params, this is the most expensive process.

• fine-tuning -- where the LLM learns how to chat in turns, question & answer.

This is so cool. Not really useful, but I guess if you really want to understand how an LLM works, you have to build it yourself.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

That gap is the most interesting story in tech right now, and it runs through everything below: Europe waking up to its tech dependency, data centers quietly becoming the most powerful buyers in hard tech, startups stuffing servers into homes to spare the grid, and a billionaire whose track record on big promises is worth counting. The hype is loud. The infrastructure is where the real fight is.

Grab a coffee and read this now! And hug a data center near you!

EU plots long game against US digital supremacy

Instead, the tech sovereignty package — motivated in no small part by U.S. President Donald Trump’s weaponization of Europe’s dependence on American firms — takes a longer-term view: boost the continent’s players so they can eventually challenge their U.S. rivals.

“We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. “This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests and making our own choices.”

Ever since I started using Linux some 30 years ago, I had this eerie feeling that our dependency on US tech is not in the best interest of Europe. Now finally politicians have come to understand just how import tech is for our everyday lives, our economy and our society. And just think about the gazillions of dollars the EU spends on crappy products from Microsoft that just lead to frustration…

(…continue reading.)

Thank God For Data Centers

This is true for obvious things like GPUs, inference chips, and DRAM, but it’s also true for companies that you wouldn’t typically associate with AI data centers, like supersonic turbines, enhanced geothermal, modular construction, high-voltage direct current grids, solid-state transformers, silicon photonics, optical fiber, lasers, batteries, and nuclear.

Many of these technologies have the potential to be better and cheaper than the incumbent technologies they aim to replace, but they have been too expensive and unproven to compete. With backlogs in all of the traditional inputs to Data Centers, however, developers are willing to pay up for new technologies that can deliver fast, which gives them the opportunity to scale up and cost down.

For these technologies, Data Centers act as a third type of Buyer of Capabilities, a commercial analog operating on DoD-style procurement logic but commercial timescales.

Given the size of the budgets, the relative smallness of any one input’s cost relative to the overall project cost and revenue opportunity, and the speed with which Data Centers are making decisions and putting down deposits, Data Centers may meaningfully increase the odds of success of hard tech companies and Vertical Integrators more than the market realizes.

I have to agree here, even though I do not want data centers taking over the landscape everywhere. They are huge and operating them poses many interesting new challenges. Solving these challenges will have plenty of amazing side-effects. Cheaper energy will be one of them.

(…continue reading.)

Startups are installing tiny data centers in people’s homes to reduce strain on the beleaguered electrical grid

Span’s XFRA models are part of a wider distributed network of AI infrastructure, using a home’s underused electrical capacity to create something similar to a cloud of compute that can be given to service providers. Span can install nodes at six-times the speed of centralized 100-megawatt data centers and at about one-fifth of the cost of construction.

The company charges a flat monthly fee of about $150. In return, it essentially pays a host’s electricity and internet bills. The computing power generated from the nodes are distributed to customers like hyperscalers and AI companies. XFRA is not designed to replace commercial data centers, according to the company, but rather to reduce strain on the grid.

And if those small datacenters all have some networking and proxy elements to them, they could also reduce the bandwith needed on the data networks.

(…continue reading.)

There’s Never Been a Better Time to Study Computer Science

At the same time, new courses could offer students an introduction to software development without the theoretical baggage and proof-writing they might have otherwise had to wade through. Geoffrey Challen, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, plans to offer a new course this fall in which he will teach students to develop software “without writing, reading, debugging, or viewing a single line of code,” he told me. Northwestern is also slated to offer an “entry-level creative coding” class for students without technical backgrounds. For all the talk of AI-literacy programs that teach students how to use chatbots, the real innovation might be in developing courses that train students in basic software-development skills. Most colleges require introductory writing courses because it’s understood that clear written communication is an important cross-disciplinary skill—even for students who plan to study physics or math. Classes that teach students how to use AI coding tools could become commonplace, providing students of all backgrounds with a baseline software-engineering skill set.

I think this is an amazing time to study computer science and of course it helps to understand how software works even if you will never have to write it yourself.

(…continue reading.)

Elon Musk Laid Out 602 Goals. We Counted How Many He Hit.

Strikingly, Mr. Musk’s annual rate of success declined over time, even as he made more promises. Of the 13 goals he declared in 2015, he later achieved nearly three-quarters of them, The Times found. But of the 27 claims he made in 2020, fewer than half have been accomplished on time. Some still have deadlines far in the future.

I think we should regulate and tax billionaires more. This is not healthy. Neither for them nor for our societies.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

Europe cannot outspend Silicon Valley and Big Tech has to learn to talk to regulators like everyone else. Google is winning on efficiency while Mistral is winning on principles. Quantum computers are now generating randomness so pure it could secure your secrets. And somewhere between the infrastructure battles and the geopolitical posturing, a tech worker is writing the most honest job description in the industry. Five things this week that range from genuinely important to genuinely cathartic.

Grab a coffee and read this now!

France’s Answer to OpenAI Warns of Dangers of U.S. Tech Dominance

Mistral Chief Executive Arthur Mensch said his company’s—and Europe’s—biggest obstacle to tech independence was the scale of investment that is necessary. The company lines up debt to pay for data centers based on revenue it expects from signed contracts.

“We can’t put 50 billion [dollars] on the table to build a gigawatt ahead of demand,” Mensch said. “That’s potentially our biggest bottleneck.”

For a long time I was not that worried about US tech dominance, but that changed rapidly during the first Trump administration. And Mensch really stresses the biggest issue here: Europe has different spending habits and going all in on tech is not really what we are known for. This truly is a gigantic obstacle right now.

(…continue reading.)

Your AI bill is out of control. Google has been waiting for this moment.

The timing of Google’s new model is no coincidence. As companies embrace token-hungry AI agents they’re also paying closer attention to their bills. Meanwhile, smaller AI companies under pressure to generate revenue are cranking up the cost of their products, pushing customers to reconsider their AI spend.

That presents an opportunity to win on value rather than raw capability. It’s also where Google has an edge that will be hard for rivals to replicate — one it’s been working on for a quarter-century.

Google has played catch-up for the last two years and it starts to pay off. But we shouldn’t forget that Google was totally taken by surprise when the launch of ChatGOT 3.5 had such a huge impact. As a response, Google has totally revamped its core products, even search.

(…continue reading.)

AI companies want power fast. The electric grid’s gatekeeper wants them to learn the rules.

“The hyperscalers, when they do come speak to us, they don’t speak FERC,” Swett said. “Their complaints about the utilities, quite frankly, to me show a lack of understanding of how the utilities normally function and how the grid functions.”

Since that March gathering, those AI developers have been learning the language, according to multiple people in the tech industry. Swett’s remarks set off a two-month sprint to further engage with FERC in face-to-face meetings as the commission approaches a June release for its proposal that aims to bring data centers onto the big regional electric grids — at a faster pace than the likely five- to-10-year timeline that frontier AI companies say is too slow for the fast-moving technology.

Oh no, Big Tech has to talk to regulators, just like other business have done for decades. Cry me a river.

(…continue reading.)

A quantum computing system’s perfect randomness could keep your secrets safe

The scientists entangled two qubits kept at temperatures near absolute zero at the opposing ends of a 30-meter-long tube. When the two qubits were entangled, they shared the same positioning—in other words, if you measured both, you’d get the same output. The long tube was necessary to ensure enough physical separation so that no outside variables could bias the results, Renner says.

“To really be sure that it’s not predictable, I need to have a process where I’m really sure that this process is not described by classical physics,” Renner says.

That’s probably exactly how I would have done it. How random!
(…continue reading.)

Tech sucks

I’ve worked at three tech startups so far. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “tech startup,” has Latin roots which means, “to make no money.” Basically, a bunch of investors (people who seem to make all their decisions via putting up pictures and throwing them at dart boards) are going to keep beating a dead horse a little longer until it delivers on the proof of concept. Or, maybe it’ll all go bankrupt and somehow they’ll still retain some of that investment, possibly through taxes. I don’t know, I don’t claim to understand it.

What this means for the day-to-day of a tech worker, is you’re under pressure to perform, to do really, really good. To make long complicated lists about your goals and hopes and dreams and how they tie into the grand vision of the company. If you work really really hard, and show up for your company and treat your coworkers you won’t get a sizable raise. Image and ego stroking are the only things that matter.

What a glorious rant! And full of truth.
(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

Five tech things (see what I did there?) that made me think this week. One involves particles in the stratosphere. One involves developers losing their edge. And one is the best community response to a corporate collapse I have seen in years.

The throughline, if there is one: technology keeps moving faster than our ability to govern it, understand it, or even agree on whether it is good for us. Geoengineering gets trialed before regulation exists. AI gets mandated before anyone asks developers what it does to their craft. Cars ship as software black boxes and owners only find out what that means when the company goes under. The Fisker community figured it out anyway, and that gives me more hope than most funded startups I see right now.

Enjoy Five Things Tech!

Can Some Very Tiny Particles Cool the Planet? One Tech Company Says Yes.

The materials produced by Stardust are made from amorphous silica, which is used as a food additive and in some consumer products, and calcium carbonate, a compound found in eggshells and limestone. The company said its particles were biodegradable, were not harmful to people or animals, and would not accumulate in the oceans or soil. Released in the upper atmosphere, the particles could reflect a small amount of sunlight away from Earth, the company said.

Geoengineering - is it good or bad? This idea certainly sounds like something a mad scientist in a dystopian science-fiction movie would try to develop, only to be stopped by the good guys. Or can we really safely use this globally to keep the temperatures down and make hotter regions livable again?

(…continue reading.)

Venture Capital Is Concentrating Faster Than Ever. What Happens To Everyone Else?

The fundamental question for the venture world now is: Does the rapid growth and capital concentration for the largest companies come at the expense of smaller startups, or does the success of OpenAI, Anthropic and the like expand the total addressable market for tech startups so drastically that it promises to grow and reshape opportunities across the entire ecosystem?

Everybody wants to be in on the mega-rounds, the safe bets of the probable industry leaders. It makes it very hard for startups that target specialist niches to gain any traction in their fundraising efforts.

(…continue reading.)

Fisker went bankrupt and owners built open source car company from the ashes

Within months of the bankruptcy filing, thousands of Ocean owners formed the Fisker Owners Association (FOA) — a nonprofit that quickly grew to 4,000 members and began operating as something between a car club, a tech startup, and an independent automaker.

The FOA hired independent tech experts who began reverse-engineering Fisker’s proprietary software patches. Members taught each other how to flash firmware. They organized bulk purchases of replacement parts — negotiating the price of key fobs down from roughly $1,000 each to a fraction of that through coordinated group buys. They hosted free global key fob pairing events, saving each owner $100 to $250.

This is a genuinely cool response to what could have been a total desaster. Cars are software black boxes and we need to better regulate this. Also, I’d love to be able to configure my own Android Auto or whatever it is called, because the latest release, which was 2 months ago, ruined my bluetooth…

(…continue reading.)

Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.

Oh well, get used to it. I really am not that sympathetic. Change is coming fast and we have to embrace it. The job of a developer will change tremendously, but developers will stay valuable, or becoming even more valuable when we do agentic coding and need to orchestrate agents to build software.

(…continue reading.)

World’s first native color LiDAR gives machines human-like vision

Ouster's technology is built around its new L4 chip, which embeds Fujifilm 's color science – the same expertise behind the company's imaging technology – to deliver hardware-level color processing. It integrates 42.9 GMACs of processing capacity, detects up to 20 trillion photons per second, and operates at 40 kHz with picosecond-level precision. Those numbers are dense, but they mean a single sensor can now read a traffic sign, detect whether the car ahead is braking by the color of its brake lights or produce topographic maps with real-world color data – all without additional hardware or calibration.

That is just really amazing and will improve the safety of autonomous vehicles even more.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now