Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
This was an intense week with some very deep lows and some very nice highs. I’m exhausted and annoyed and exhilarated at the same time. Long dog walks are really an awesome invention, so much better for the mind than any app. The high-point of the week was Friday, when our oldest daughter came home from Vienna to stay here for two weeks before taking off to Munich where she’ll start her Master’s program. It’s so great to have her back home and see the four kids together, strengthening their bonds and cherishing the time with each other.
One quick remark on politics in Germany: people are fed up with politics, that’s why they vote for the extreme left and right, which lead to a total stalemate in politics as the centrist parties have too many predetermined breaking points and need to find too many bad compromises that won’t help anyone, which will lead to more people being fed up with politics. The conservative party is getting crushed by the right-wing AfD, the Social Democrats are getting run over by the Leftists and everybody ignores the Greens at the polls as the economy is going down the drain and too many people think that good environmental policies are just something for good times. The outcome will be bad and hopefully people realize it soon enough so that the pendulum swings back, but I am not too sure about that.
Europe Can’t Get Out of Its Own Way
The same pattern holds across several other industries: the EU’s legacy companies have become less competitive and have lost ground to foreign competitors. A quarter century ago, European companies accounted for 36 percent of the total market capitalization of the world’s 100 most valuable companies. By the end of 2025, this figure had fallen below ten percent. In a 2026 speech, Draghi made clear the consequences if these trends are not reversed: “This is a future in which Europe risks becoming subordinated, divided, and deindustrialized at once. And a Europe that cannot defend its interests will not preserve its values for long.”
Apart from the typical and unnecessary bitching about GDPR and the EU AI Act, this article has plenty of valid points about Europe not doing enough to get ahead. It pains me to see that we continue to lose our best brains to Silicon Valley instead of letting them invent awesome things here on the continent. At the same time we have small countries that push harder than the bigger countries, so I remain hopeful that we can really ignite the innovative spark again in Europe, just not at VW or SAP.
150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Were Dumped in The Atlantic. Decades Later, It’s Visibly Oozing.
So, between 1949 and 1982, that’s where it went – more than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste, totaling more than 150,000 tons, mostly dumped at depths between 3,000 and 5,000 meters (9,840 and 16,400 feet).
For decades, no one really knew what had become of them.
Now, scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate – and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor.
Surprisingly, this isn’t necessarily a subversion of the original plan.
Radioactive waste categorized as low-level, or LLW, doesn’t mean that it’s not hazardous. It comes from sources such as medical and industrial use and typically contains lower levels of long-lived radionuclides.
Yikes. This is exactly the reason why I do not want nuclear power to be seen as a solution for the energy demands of the future. We still haven’t found a solution that really works and we will just continue to pass on the problems to the next generations, which is not a fair deal.
Germany pledges to phase out fossil fuels for first time with target of 2045
In a roadmap published on Wednesday, the German government set out for the first time an explicit promise of “transitioning away” from fossil fuels. Previous pledges were only for “carbon neutrality”.
The plans include ramping up renewable energy from 55% to 80% of electricity generation by 2030, with an additional 12GW of onshore wind, and a target of 215GW of solar energy by 2030. The previously stated target of winding down coal use in the next decade, with a view to an exit from coal in 2038, was also reaffirmed, with the potential for an earlier target of 2035.
The German government might have set this goal, championed by the Federal Minister for Environmental Affairs, but the current initiatives championed by the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy are the exact opposite of this. She wants more natural gas, coal and nuclear power. Which is crazy and expensive.
Now Entering: The Era Of Bleh
Across knowledge work companies, employees increasingly rely on armies, or swarms, of agents to execute their work, and they aren’t just helping humans execute administrative tasks: they’re writing code, developing marketing strategy, designing products, advising on client escalations, executing financial analysis, providing legal advice and coaching, and defining brand identities. An increasingly large portion of the cognitive load employees were paid to execute just a year ago is now outsourced to AI.
This is what every AI-bullish tech executive describes as what great looks like when it comes to AI adoption: everyone using AI for everything; human knowledge workers sitting above teams of agents all built on the same small ecosystem of LLMs.
Hmm. This article hit hard, as I rely on AI for many things in my daily work these days. Obviously, there is the risk of sameness, but I do value the speed with which I can generate outputs that I really want. It enables small companies to get a ton more done than before and I think this is really important.
The way we talk to bots matters even if they aren’t conscious
Chatbot interactions are, for habit formation, close to ideal. When you have a question and open an AI-based chatbot app, there is little friction or waiting. Often the reward is nearly instantaneous. The register that many of us use when we get there – direct, brief, transactional – is already familiar from voice assistants: instructing Siri to set a timer, commanding ‘Alexa, stop!’ when the smart speaker gets it wrong. The little chatbot prompt box invites the same: cut the fluff and demand what you need. It seems to get results, too. Some studies on prompt tone suggest the systems themselves often respond better to it. And when the machine fails or frustrates the user, the user gets irritated, or even abandons the conversation mid-sentence, as I did.
I always says please and thank you, because I secretly hope that the machines will remember this when they take over and maybe spare me. Seriously, I do think that human-machine interaction is rapidly changing right now as the interfaces are getting better and also more personal.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico