Link tags: eu

Piccia Neri’s post on LinkedIn

What a slap in the face of every tech conference that claims it is simply not possible to have a truly representative line-up: multiple perspectives, multiple faces, multiple experiences, rather than the same default one we’ve all been staring at for decades (that’s a white middle aged man in case you’re wondering. I do love you, white middle aged man, but we’ve heard from you, and keep hearing from you. Time to hear from others, too).

Yes, my friend. It is possible. UX London has done it. The Clearleft team has done it. Go look for yourself.

Let’s Use the Nonexistent ::nth-letter Selector Now | CSS-Tricks

Eight years ago, I asked some questions. Here are some answers.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Apple at 50: my top five Apple moments

Never forget:

• The time Apple lied to the UK regulator
• The time when Apple told the EU that Safari is 3 different browsers
• When Apple tried to shut the UK investigation down
• When Apple’s VP of Finance got caught lying under oath
• When Apple tried to wreck all EU Web Apps

The Mythology Of Conscious AI

This superb essay by Anil Seth won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition.

The future history of AI is not yet written. There is no inevitability to the directions AI might yet take. To think otherwise is to be overly constrained by our conceptual inheritance, weighed down by the baggage of bad science fiction and submissive to the self-serving narrative of tech companies laboring to make it to the next financial quarter. Time is short, but collectively we can still decide which kinds of AI we really want and which we really don’t.

eurollm.io

A different world is possible. Here, for example, is an open-source large language model from Europe, designed to support the 24 official languages of the European Union.

I have no idea why their top level domain is for the British Indian Ocean Territory, soon to be no more. That doesn’t instil confidence.

Toolmen | A Working Library

Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.

👏👏👏

Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used | Frank Elavsky

Must be something in the air.

EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis - Irish Council for Civil Liberties

It’s official. No matter how many annoying cookie consent banners you slap on a website, real-time bidding for behavioural adverts is illegal in Europe.

And before you go crying about advertising-supported businesses, this only applies to behavioural advertising, not contextual advertising …which works better anyway.

[this is aaronland] a tale of gummy snakes (and spunk)

About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:

I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.

What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.

If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.

If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.

una.im | Updates to the customizable select API

It’s great to see the evolution of HTML happening in response to real use-cases—the turbo-charging of the select element just gets better and better!

CCC | Ban tracking and personalised advertising

YES! THIS!!!

A ban on tracking-based personalised advertising will provide an incentive to reinforce sustainable alternative models and, in fact, will be a condition for making them viable. The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising).

Living In A Lucid Dream

I love the way that Claire L. Evans writes.

Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays

We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.

Patternsday 2024 – Photos by Marc Thiele

Lovely photos by Marc from Patterns Day!

Patterns Day Patterns | Trys Mudford

Trys threads the themes of Patterns Day together:

Jeremy did a top job of combining big picture and nitty-gritty talks into the packed schedule.

Breadcrumbs, buttons and buy-in: Patterns Day 3 | hidde.blog

A nice write-up of Patterns Day from Hidde.

Facing reality, whether it’s about Apple or the EU, is a core requirement for good management – Baldur Bjarnason

The EU is not the FCC. I wish every American tech pundit would read and digest this explainer before writing their thinkpieces.

It’s very common for US punditry to completely misunderstand the EU and analyse it as if it were a US political entity – imagining that its actions are driven by the same political and social dynamics as a protectionist industry within the US.

Apple backs off killing web apps, but the fight continues - Open Web Advocacy

Hallelujah! Apple have backed down on their petulant plan to sabatoge homescreen apps.

I’m very grateful to the Open Web Advocacy group for standing up to this bullying.

Home Screen Advantage - Infrequently Noted

This is exactly what it looks like: a single-fingered salute to the web and web developers.

Read Alex’s thorough explanation of the current situation and then sign this open letter.

Cupertino’s not just trying to vandalise PWAs and critical re-engagement features for Safari; it’s working to prevent any browser from ever offering them on iOS. If Apple succeeds in the next two weeks, it will cement a future in which the mobile web will never be permitted to grow beyond marketing pages for native apps.

Also, remember this and don’t fall for it:

Apple apparently hopes it can convince users to blame regulators for its own choices.

Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the scrolls! | Vesuvius Challenge

The thoughts of our ancestors, locked in mud and ash for 2000 years, hidden in darkness — now, with the light of a worldwide effort shining upon them, finally seen again.

An impressive piece of work from three coders to try to read the contents of a Herculanean scroll without unfurling (and thereby destroying) it.

Scholars might call it a philosophical treatise. But it seems familiar to us, and we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.