Chris Powers

Another day of buying too much book 📚😅

The Berlin bookshop that refuses to die How Saint George's survived Amazon, e-readers, the pandemic, and Brexit.

Missing Berlin very much, including this bookshop!
open.substack.com/pub/lolsos/p...

Brussels wants to define cider – not everyone likes the recipe | Euractiv French purists have repeatedly stated that it is either "100% apple juice or nothing"

Enjoyed reading this piece by @sofiamazzanaro.bsky.social on cider, one of my go to drinks :-)

www.euractiv.com/news/brussel...

5 people told Politico “the planned 🇺🇸🇩🇪 meeting collapsed after State Department officials told the German Embassy in Washington that it was prepared to receive only Christian Democratic and AfD lawmakers, excluding the SPD and the Greens.“

Norbert Röttgen (CDU) rejected that idea. Good on him!

1. How is this acceptable?!
2. It’s February !

And last part of the @greens-efa.eu EU Tech Stars event: Keynote from @hennavirkkunen.bsky.social flanked by MEPs Sergey Lagodinsky @alexandrageese.bsky.social

And 2. When asked for a concrete example of EU law not being applied: offered dinner in a place and time of the audience’s choosing to anyone who can make Ecosia their default search engine at the operating system level of their Windows laptop.

Something existing law says should be easy to do.

Oels goes on with a couple of amazing points:

1. For him the omnibus discussion in the EU is a distraction from the fight against monopoly power.

Looks like German manufacturing has turned the corner.
www.destatis.de/EN/Press/202...

Wolfgang Oels of Ecosia makes a good point about how monopolies distort distribution unfairly.

Microsoft Bing – 0.4% of European search on mobile, BUT 12% for Desktop. Why?

Oels points towards Microsoft Windows.

Mistral's New Ultra-Fast Translation Model Gives Big AI Labs a Run for Their Money “Too many GPUs makes you lazy,” says the French startup’s vice president of science operations, as the company carves out a different path than the major US AI companies.

Good coverage of Mistral AI in here @wired.com :-)

www.wired.com/story/mistra...

Pretty cool panel joining Sergey Lagodinsky this afternoon. @proton.me & @ecosiasearch.bsky.social and more, talking about scaling up tech in Europe – the biggest challenge.

And already a short list of addictive design features to knock out 😀

Excellent panel underway on moving social media recommender systems away from engagement-based ranking.

Powerful opener from @alexandrageese.bsky.social on the need for this,

And concrete push to optimise for values and real feedback from users from Katarzyna Szymielewicz

Recurring theme: even when European innovates, scaling up with capital remains a key bottleneck where the US jumps in.

@alexandrageese.bsky.social posed it as a question, and then Anne Duboscq of OVH Cloud flagged it as an issue too.

Good Rapporteur this morning from @euractiv.com with some insight into the political dynamics in Slovenia 🇸🇮 , and the moves and blockages around Moldova’s EU accession process 🇲🇩

Nicely done @nicolettaionta.bsky.social et al 🎩

newsletter.euractiv.com/mail/583ab6f...

Quoted from the panel:

“I’m against more billionaires”
“ I know, me too”

Me three 😅

🇪🇺 Commission finds that Apple Maps doesn’t qualify as a gatekeeper under the DMA because it’s not used very much in the EU 🍏 🔥

CEO of Q.Ant Michael Förtsch said on the panel (very nicely chaired by @kimvsparrentak.bsky.social ), that the EU can’t catch up with an NVIDIA or an AIM.

Better to bet on future technologies and leapfrog, which for him means photonic computing – on which I am open to reading recommendations! 📚

Solution cannot be personal responsibility @robin.berjon.com says.

Makes sense, and is exactly where solid behavioural economics comes in, which was also featured in this week’s @weeklyshowpodcast.bsky.social

Nudges, incentives, and interventions at the level of society. Poke poke

“Authoritarian infrastructure leads to an authoritarian society” @robin.berjon.com said, in reference to our current tech stack.

And he also brought up the infamous Technate, a “deeply rooted ideology that keeps reappearing”.

Before giving several recommendations for ‘regime change’

US tech giants pressuring EU to keep us addicted to social media "They can leverage Trump's America First policies, framing EU digital laws as foreign extortion, censorship or discrimination."

Great read from @brusselstimes.com on the @corporateeurope.org report on big tech platforms’ push to water down the EU’s legislation, and the planned DFA in particular..

www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/1952810/us-tech-giants-pressuring-eu-to-keep-us-addicted-to-social-media/

Nice to be back in the European Parliament for the EU Tech Stars Summit, organised by @greens-efa.eu.

It’s bringing together some of those working to make European tech sovereignty (one of my fave topics), a reality. 🦾

Very sad news out of Luxembourg and Rheinland-Pfalz about the killing of a train conductor.

www.luxtimes.lu/luxembourg/s...

Read all the way through the thread to the 2nd derogation, which is key! 🔑

Which goes to show how it’s all relative in the end 😅

Still, I won’t begrudge the Gen-Z for liking Pokémon Go (back before we knew it was sending all the geolocation data to Saudi Arabia).

2016 was the traumatising year of Trump and Brexit. I thought I had everything figured out in 2016, until *that* referendum screwed up my ‘plans’.

And it followed a refugee crisis, a euro crisis, and so.

Maybe 2010 was the last good year. But it immediately followed the Great Recession.

This morning’s newsletter from @eurcorrespond.bsky.social mostly reminded me that I’m not as young as I think.

newsletter-cdn.europeancorrespondent.com/go/09m1miu5g...

It expressed nostalgia for 2016 as the turning point before things got bad. But for me history reads a little differently (1/2)

The Diverse Voices Trust Indicator® helps you spot journalism that seeks out a range of perspectives, not just the most familiar ones.

CheckThe8 here: thetrustproject.org/trust-indica...

#CheckThe8 #TheTrustProject #Trustworthynews

Anyone still wanting to give Bill Gates a free-pass or soft treatment in relation to the other American oligarchs should watch this.

Twisted.

P.S. His book Source Code is supposed to have a sequel. He's gonna have a hell of a time spinning this.