Verge headline: Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want by Elizabeth Lopatto Illustration of a brain melting in the sun

"In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and LLMs. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich."

Read more: buff.ly/Yu2AUFy

Second, I’m angry because nobody in the media bothered to discuss the privacy questions at all. I read multiple articles that might as well have been World / OpenAI press releases.

And third, I’m angry because this is an entirely predictable privacy disaster.

We Should Not Have to Prove We're Human to Sam Altman Worldcoin, Sam Altman, privacy, and why I hate being right sometimes.

On Substack, @samillingworth.com shared a note about how Sam Altman is trying to shill a Sam Altman-funded solution to a Sam Altman-created problem: namely, he wants to use his World iris-scanning orbs to prove whether you’re a bot or not.

insights.priva.cat/p/we-should-...

Sacrifice your job for the glorious AI future How tech CEOs use the threat of job loss to distract from how AI is really used against workers

Perplexity’s CEO is just the latest tech leader to tell the public their jobs will be sacrificed on the altar of the glorious AI future.

It’s a compelling narrative, but it distracts us from the real impact of AI: not to take the human out of the loop, but to take away their power and cut their pay

EU: The European Union will require sale of mobile phones with “user-replaceable and longer-lasting batteries” starting in 2027.

The regulation demands “availability of spare parts and manuals for 10 years to curb planned obsolescence”.

Written like a man who has discovered his local wine shop has been restocked entirely with Barca’s Breezer.

i simply find it a little hard to believe that shortly after every website implemented ai code and fired a bunch of engineers they all started breaking constantly every single day but its not related to the ai code or the skeleton crew

Screen shot of the linked page, that's all.

Quick plug for a panel discussion on social media restrictions for children: Trinity College Dublin on the evening of 28th April, registration here: www.eventbrite.ie/e/behind-the...

Wind farms provided 41% of country's electricity in March The average wholesale price in March 2026 was €128.77 per megawatt-hour of electricity. Prices fell to an average of €94.20 on the days with the most wind energy while increased to €179.10 when the country relied on imported fossil fuels.

Our high energy prices are set by our high dependence on imported fossil fuels. The only way to reduce energy prices is by investing in more renewables. Lower prices, more energy security, more peace. Win win win.

Yeah.
The Catholic Church has survived as an entity since the before the collapse of the Roman Empire by being famously apolitical.

“It's a shame that the Pope has made the Catholic Church political” is one of the most amazing sentences ever uttered by a politician. Elite stuff. Arguably the most wrong a person could be, including rejecting basic arithmetic.

a blue train with a surprised look on its face stands in front of a brick building ALT: a blue train with a surprised look on its face stands in front of a brick building

"Tankies" is a derogatory term for diehard fans of Thomas the Tank Engine

a screenshot of the "New Bestsellers" list from Substack, with Andrew Tate in the #1 position

Hey, look at Substack promoting Andrew Tate as the #1 new bestseller. The company's amoral leadership & backers will platform anyone, even ludicrously toxic rapists & human traffickers.

Can you see my shocked face? My visage of Agogness? No? Well.

He is truly the aquatic Chuck Norris

The state has *deliberately* stepped aside and let this grow to the point where far-right figures now feel so emboldened that they can openly incite riots, take over public buildings, and burn down makeshift shelter for asylum seekers. The story below is from September. Has anything been learned?

Ireland is actually 13th

A reminder (via the RAC website) that Ireland is nowhere near the top of the cost league for fuel - nor is it for duty levied. #fuelprotests

www.rac.co.uk/drive/travel...

OpenAI pauses UK investment deal over energy costs and regulation The project was part of a package of tech investment promising the UK could become an AI superpower.

Companies have been blaming AI for cutbacks which are really caused by economic conditions & weaknesses in their business model.

Now we have an AI giant blaming wider economic & regulatory conditions for a cutback actually caused by weaknesses in its own business model

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Hmm. Sam Altman wants people to pay for intelligence.

disconnect.blog/make-em-dumb...

When people buy books I write, I get paid for the intelligence I have given them access to.
Generative AI (OpenAI and Anthropic) took that intelligence without paying when they used pirated copies of my work.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

Frank Herbert, Dune (Dune #1)

Hopefully some good people get selected or invited to participate. But I won’t hold my breath.

AI in Schools External Advisory Taskforce to be established

Hmm. This is a really important task force the Irish Dept of Education www.gov.ie/en/departmen.... No details of how people can apply or how punters will be recruited. I predict: usual suspects and tech-friendly “advisors”. Needs sceptics!

Yup. The reflective learning realizations are affirming my research. Pity I can’t use data from students in University A gathered for Purpose A in research in University B.

Easter weekend was spent writing up some of my research on human factors in data governance. Today I am correcting group assignments and personal reflective learning essays from a Masters course I teach on #DataGovernance. Student insights support my research. (Back to writing after lunch)

Building new infrastructure to switch from coal to LNG is like quitting cigarettes by smoking ten a day instead of twenty.

Can you Ctrl-Alt-Del Major Tom?
Turn it off and then switch back on?

No, you didn’t. And no. We shouldn’t. Bugger off.

Outlook Classic and New (I can’t believe it’s not) Outlook are often both installed on devices because MS are making an arse of changing outlook’s architecture and features.

I tried doing something similar in my research. I found it difficult to get data sets I could stand over. So I would really love to be able to use this research in my work but I’ll need to talk to the author first to make sure the results here can actually be replicated.