The Braindump Blog

Bad tech

2026-05-17: The Open Rights Group's very comprehensive report on the importance of Digital Sovereignty

2026-05-16: Britain's dependence on US technology makes us vulnerable

2026-05-02: When my OneDrive sync started seemingly permanently destroying some of my files I was surprised to …

2026-05-02

UN warns women in public life face increasingly sophisticated online violence

2026-04-27

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys: ‘Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?"’

2026-04-18

US tech firms successfully lobbied EU to keep datacentre emissions secret: ‘legally questionable’

2026-04-09: Anthropic develops an AI model that is extremely good at finding and exploiting previously unknown security bugs in software

2026-04-08

AI-generated Lego videos and Trump’s poo-bombing: welcome to the Iran-US slopaganda wars: ‘When it’s hard or impossible to identify trustworthy sources, you can choose to believe whatever you find comforting, invigorating or infuriating’.

2026-04-03: The British Home Secretary's lust for the panopticon

2026-03-29

‘The era of invincibility is over’: the week big tech was brought to heel: If only.

2026-03-27

Four Steps to Hell: ‘…if you’re seeking the most influential aesthetic vision on the 21st century, this is it. It’s simple to describe–but it’s ugly as sin.’

2026-03-10: Noted 6 decades ago: '...extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people'

2026-03-08: One reason LLMs hallucinate is because we incentivise them to give any answer over saying they don't know

2026-02-25: The inventor of the world wide web implores us to remember that 'This Is For Everyone'

2026-02-19: Researchers find that using X's algorithm shifts people's political views to the right

2026-02-10

Stop generating, start thinking: Arguments against letting Claude Code et al just blindly do your whole job for you.

2026-02-08: A non-exhaustive list of cases where it is alleged that generative AI may have played some part in humans committing fatal violence to themselves or others

2026-02-07: An experiment suggests that using AI 'impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities' when it comes to mastering programming tasks

2026-02-07: AI companies are happily releasing products that they don't know how to test the safety of

2026-01-31

Only the Metrics Care: ‘The user isn’t the customer. And they’re not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization–metrics on a dashboard’

The Who Cares Era: ‘…where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.’

Abusers using AI and digital tech to attack and control women, charity warns: ‘Smartwatches, Oura rings, smart home devices and Fitbits being weaponised’

2026-01-30

How liberals lost the internet: ‘cutting-edge propagandists now focus less on policy messaging and more on massaging vibes.’

2026-01-29: When it came down to it, totally predictably, big tech chose to support the baddies

2026-01-23: In Nexus, Harari explains the criticality of information networks - and why the rise of AI might endanger them, and hence humanity