David Meyer

Oof

Why you go to law school…..

More than just McSteamy: Eric Dane was masterful in Grey’s Anatomy – the real man of everyone’s dreams | Anna Spargo-Ryan Dane was initially only contracted to appear in one episode of series. He starred in a further 138, revolutionising the show along the way

The horniest obit I’ve ever read www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

Major Cabinet row over planned age verification for social media A major Cabinet row has erupted over plans to rely on the European Union to legislate for the rollout of social media age verification.

Some behind the scenes on why the Irish plan for a ‘social media ban for teens’ has been so muddled. TL;DR - there’s no agreement in government on this, with one minister off on a solo run and lots of contrary briefing. extra.ie/2026/02/19/n...

Big Birther

Very interesting post - I went for the EU capabilities details, but ended up registering with the service and posting a part request for my 1998 Jeep (can't upload a photo though, seems the EU infrastructure isn't perfect yet).

"Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought. I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.

Good post about what it's like actually doing the digital sovereignty thing www.coinerella.com/made-in-eu-i...

Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter. The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”. Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the “outage” of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

Amazon outaged itself by unleashing its own AI agent on its systems - slow clap www.ft.com/content/00c2...

b/w photo of an absolutely huge bloke in a huge fur coat (polar bear, apparently, which he shot himself) next to a diminutive woman in a hat (his wife Dagmar Cohn)

It’s the 140th anniversary of the birth of Peter Freuchen, anthropologist, arctic explorer, writer, WWII resistance fighter, quiz show contestant, film star, friend of Mae West, fucking enormous geezer, and maker of tools from his own frozen excrement... 🧵

YouTube video by Tech Gets Real Germany's Merz wants to end online anonymity: A rant

Friedrich Merz wants a real-names mandate and I do not think this is a good idea youtu.be/3OsLmoAxjJ0

Still the face of a spoiled kid at the age of 66

UK Close to Imposing Hash Matching for Revenge Porn The United Kingdom inched closer to requiring tech firms to scan all user-uploaded images, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer said sexualized deepfakes and so-called

The UK may soon be forcing large and small services to scan all user-uploaded images
www.bankinfosecurity.com/uk-close-to-...

YouTube video by Tech Gets Real Germany's Merz wants to end online anonymity: A rant

Friedrich Merz wants a real-names mandate and I do not think this is a good idea youtu.be/3OsLmoAxjJ0

So SCOTUS, with its fabricated-out-of-thin-air immunity doctrine, has actually made American presidents less accountable than LITERAL royalty.

Pls note: we do not have an advertising regulator. We have an industry body which they hold out as an effective self-regulator.

The sentencing of ex-President Yoon in Korea for insurrection reads like one long subtweet.

This is a good thing. Even better would be for the UK government and all others that oppose racism, Nazism, sexual assault and paedophilia to come off platforms that enable them.

Yoon Suk-yeol has been sentenced to life imprisonment.

I don't know why, but the judge is now citing the historical precedent of Charles I of England. This is an incredibly ominous sign for Yoon.

gosh

I imagine it was extremely disturbing

I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland.

And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.

DOG AT THE OLYMPICS
FULL COMPETITION HIGHLIGHTS

... Riding the backlash has significant political potential, though I do agree that we need an alternative positive story to tell/sell about AI as well - one that plays up safety and addresses the concerns behind the backlash, rather than simply going AI=bad

Another framing would be that the hard right is associating itself with slop and degrading its own credibility (I know, bear with me here) in a way that leaves it open to attack from a leftist candidate who is willing to play that up...

🇪🇹
"Bethelhem gave up driving her taxi 2 yrs ago. Rising cost of gas & spare parts needed to keep her old car meant that she couldn’t earn enough to make ends meet.
“It was no longer worth it,”

6 months later, she was back on the road, this time in a brand new BenBen E-Star, an EV made by Chang’an."

The basic line between Restore Britain and Reform UK is simple: Restore is openly racist, Reform veils its racism.

Even the BNP wasn't as openly racist as Restore; for them to have Parliamentary and significant local govt representation feels a Rubicon crossed.

This is neat - here's my new Blento page (and yes I think I will also make this my homepage) blento.app/did:plc:53xy...

FT article: Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/0c9ec7b1-f9a6-41db-9493-3ff09f6943ef But across the US, citizens, clergy and elected officials in conservative communities are leading a grassroots rebellion against the rapid rollout of the technology. Political strategists fear this could wreck Republicans’ chance of maintaining their majority in Congress this November and become a defining issue in the 2028 presidential race. Brad Littlejohn, a director at the conservative think-tank American Compass, said: “There’s a real danger here that you get a Democratic candidate who really builds their message around this . . . and wipes the floor because the Republicans have been pigeonholed as the friends of the AI companies.”

A useful point to note in the debate over whether the left is making a huge mistake by not being "willing to engage seriously with AI" www.ft.com/content/0c9e...

I don’t particularly care what anyone misses out on in their personal lives. But if one set of activists/institutions/candidates makes use of AI, and another doesn’t because they’re a priori convinced it can’t possibly have any utility for any function, I’m concerned insofar as I care who wins.