The Braindump Blog

Technology

2026-03-20

Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute Reverberates in European Capitals: ‘It puts a very stark light on technological dependency and the need for some form of sovereignty, autonomy and control in Europe’.

2026-03-14

What do coders do after AI?: Somewhat depends on whether you like coding as a craft in itself or endure it as a means to an end.

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

2026-03-04: A GUI for the Substack archiving process

2026-02-25: 📚 Finished reading This Is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee.

2026-02-21: Companies are trying to force their employees to use generative AI

2026-02-20

Accenture ‘links staff promotions to use of AI tools’

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

2026-02-17

The left is missing out on AI: ‘…ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right.’

2026-02-16: How to archive even paid Substacks - converting them into an eBook

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

2026-02-04: The enshittification of the United States of America

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: Well, the inevitable shark-jumping exercise happened, and now there exists a social network …

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: 📚 Finished reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari.

2025-12-31

When Online Content Disappears: On link-rot - ‘A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible’

2025-12-30: Tech bros seem obsessed with Lord of The Rings. Perhaps they should read it.

2025-12-28

Okay, so age verification is pretty painless. It’s still not a good thing. At all.: ‘It doesn’t work. It’s intrusive. It creates new vulnerabilities.’

2025-12-27

Why RSS matters: RSS has always seemed like one of the increasingly few unconditionally good aspects of the internet to me.