I don’t think Europeans fully appreciate what is happening to the European Union right now. The EU is under an extraordinary, multi-front assault, both from outside and from within. And I struggle to think of another period in its history when so many powerful actors had an interest in weakening it simultaneously. Russia has spent years waging hybrid warfare against Europe. Weaponised migration, sabotage, cyberattacks, coordinated disinformation campaigns, bot networks and political interference. The objective is clear: undermine trust in democratic institutions, deepen social divisions and weaken European unity. China has different motivations, primarily economic and geopolitical. A fragmented Europe is easier to pressure, easier to negotiate with individually and less capable of defending its economic interests. And then there is the United States. Perhaps the most disturbing development of all. Under Trump and MAGA, a country that helped rebuild the old continent and then spent decades supporting European integration now has an administration openly hostile to much of what the EU represents. Its own National Security Strategy even calls for cultivating resistance to Europe’s current political direction. Think about that for a moment. Meanwhile, within Europe, parts of the far right and far left amplify these divisions, whether through ideological alignment, political opportunism or outright sympathy for authoritarian regimes. This doesn’t mean Russia, China and MAGA are all following some jointly coordinated master plan. They don’t have to. Their interests increasingly overlap, and Europe’s internal divisions make their work considerably easier. What makes this particularly alarming is what is actually at stake. For all its flaws, the EU remains one of the world’s most consequential projects built around liberal democracy, the rule of law, individual freedoms and cooperation between nations. At a time when authoritarianism is gaining ground and even longstanding democracies are showing disturbing tendencies, that matters enormously. Europe is far from perfect. Its bureaucracy, indecision and inability to act decisively are real problems. But the answer cannot be to retreat into 27 competing nation-states, each too small to meaningfully influence a world increasingly dominated by continental powers. Quite the opposite. Europe needs deeper integration, stronger common institutions, genuine strategic autonomy and the political courage to defend its interests and values. Because fragmentation is precisely what so many external actors want. And perhaps that’s the central irony of our time: people are being deliberately manipulated into believing that the reverse is true — that national identity and sovereignty can only be protected by weakening European cooperation. In reality, a divided Europe is less sovereign, less secure and far easier for outside powers to pressure. Therefore the very thing that will make Europe stronger is the thing its adversaries are working hardest to prevent. A united Europe is a geopolitical power. A divided Europe is a collection of countries waiting to be played against one another.

A fly that died years ago is flying around a harbor that doesn't exist. Here's what's going on. Scientists took one female fruit fly and sliced its brain into about 7,000 pieces, each roughly 2,000 times thinner than a human hair. They photographed those slices 21 million times under an electron microscope. Then hundreds of people spent years tracing every connection by hand until they had the whole thing, all 139,255 neurons and 54.5 million synapses. That map is called FlyWire. Odyssey hasn't said exactly which map it used, but FlyWire is the one most of these projects build on. Earlier this year a startup called Eon ran that map as a simulation with zero training and got a virtual fly that walks and grooms on its own. Now Odyssey has put the brain somewhere new. The harbor in this clip isn't sitting on a server as a 3D model or a game level. Odyssey-3 is a 14-billion-parameter AI that learned how water and light behave by watching a ton of video, and it invents each frame as the fly steers through it. This is kind of a big deal for a nerdy reason. For as long as people have tried to build a mind, there have been two camps. One says copy a real brain. The other says train a giant model on tons of data. Those camps have mostly fought each other, and in this clip one is living inside the other. And here's a fun bit of math. The fly has 54.5 million synapses. The AI dreaming up its world has 14 billion parameters. Line those up and the world is about 250 times bigger than the brain living in it. That's what happens when one approach rides on GPUs and the other rides on grad students with microscopes. The trained side ballooned in a couple of years. The copied side took the better part of a decade to get one fly. What really got me is how little it takes to fool a fly. A fruit fly sees through about 800 tiny lenses per eye, so its whole view of the world is around 1,600 pixels. Each of your eyes sends about a million nerve fibers to your brain. Keeping a fly convinced means the AI only has to look right across 1,600 pixels, which is a pretty low bar, and it's clearing it. The fake world will look good enough for human eyes long before anybody can slice up a human brain and rebuild all 86 billion neurons.

After upgrading to macOS 27.0.1, my 2017 LG UltraFine started acting weird! Randomly going black, USB controller no longer being recognized... etc... Downloaded LG Screen Manager from the App Store (1-star rating lol) and noticed a firmware update was available. But the updater kept crashing. Apparently, this has been a known issue on Apple Silicon since the M3 and macOS 26, but @LGUS hasn't given a shit about fixing it for two years. So I gave Codex Astra the IPS crash report. It identified a double-free memory error, downloaded the latest firmware, patched the updater with a 30-line Python script, and code-signed it ("untrusted developer" warning, but who cares). Ran the patched updater, and my monitor is back to life. All issues gone. Wild times. All of that took me 15 minutes. What a time to be a dev. Shame on LG, though.

This is the kind of Vision Pro demo that makes me want a racing wheel. Apple showed iRacing streaming from a PC, with your real hands and steering wheel tracked inside the virtual cockpit. Imagine racing like this in your living room. Video: Apple / iRacing

So it's official. Reuters has confirmed that the White House gave the order to disrupt Starlink so Russia could attack Kiev with no advanced warning. The US aided & abetted Putin's killings of numerous civilians in Ukraine. Trump is a traitor, a Russian asset, helping our enemy.

EXCLUSIVE: Elon Musk came to Donald Trump with the plan to throttle Ukraine’s use of SpaceX’s Starshield satellite internet network, sources have told the Telegraph. The tech billionaire made the proposal during the US President’s row with Volodymyr Zelensky over strikes on Russian oil refineries. ‘The reality is that they were both in it,’ a senior source said of Musk’s and Trump’s involvement. But after a night of carnage in Kyiv caused by the slowdown, Musk was alarmed about the possibility of adverse consumer reaction in Europe. The SpaceX boss then proceeded to tweet, blaming the US administration, and ultimately, President Trump for authorising the slowdown. ‘He tweeted out that he was innocent and that it was the US administration that did it,’ the source said.

Cuck coding

Every week someone tells me they vibe-coded their app over the weekend and don't need developers anymore. Before it touches a paying customer, make sure it includes: > a schema someone designed, instead of one the AI improvised table by table > login that still works when someone puts a plus sign in their email > password reset links that expire and work once > MFA, plus a recovery path for the user who lost their phone > sessions that time out, and a way to kill every session for one user > SSO for the enterprise customer who won't sign without it > SAML, because that customer's IT team doesn't do magic links > SCIM, so a fired employee loses access the moment IT offboards them > roles and permissions deeper than "admin" and "everyone else" > checks that stop user A from reading user B's data by changing one number in the URL > tenant isolation, so one customer's bug never shows another customer's records > an admin "log in as this user" button for support, with an audit trail on every use > rate limits on login, so nobody can guess passwords at scale > lockouts that stop attackers without locking out your CFO the night before the board meeting > database migrations that run forward and roll back > migrations that don't lock the main table at 2pm on a Tuesday > indexes, because the query that was instant on 50 test rows times out on 5 million real ones > connection pooling, so a traffic spike doesn't exhaust the database > backups every night > a restore from those backups, tested, because a backup you've never restored is a hope > point-in-time recovery for the day someone runs a delete without a where clause > soft deletes, so "I deleted it by accident" is a support ticket and not an incident > validation on the server, not just in the form > timezones stored right, so the 9am reminder doesn't fire at 4am > the customer with an apostrophe in their last name > emoji, accents and right-to-left text in every field > money stored as integers, because 0.1 + 0.2 doesn't equal 0.3 in floating point > currency, rounding and tax rules for every country you sell into > a data model that survives your second customer asking for "one small change" > idempotency keys, so a retried payment doesn't charge the card twice > deduplication for the user who clicks submit four times > pagination that still works on page 400 > exports, because sooner or later every customer wants their data in a spreadsheet > imports that survive the CSV someone saved in 2009 > retention rules, and code that deletes what your contract says you'll delete > secrets out of the code, out of the repo and out of the AI chat history > rotating every key the AI pasted into a config file last month > confirming every package the AI installed exists and is the one you meant > dependency scanning, because the AI pulled in libraries nobody reviewed > input sanitization everywhere a user can type > protection against SQL injection, XSS, CSRF and the rest of the OWASP list > file uploads that get scanned, size-limited and stored where they can't execute > CORS rules that aren't "allow everything" > security headers on every response > encryption at rest and in transit > least-privilege access for everyone, including the AI agent holding production credentials > logs that record who did what, without recording passwords, tokens or card numbers > a penetration test before your enterprise customer's security team runs their own > answers to the security questionnaire every enterprise buyer sends, with evidence behind each one > a disclosure process for the day a stranger emails you a vulnerability > a plan for the day a laptop with production access gets stolen > SOC 2, which means policies, evidence and an auditor, not a checkbox > HIPAA, the moment a single patient record touches your system > a BAA with every vendor that touches that data, including your AI model provider > audit trails that show who viewed a record, not just who changed it > PCI scope, and card numbers kept out of your database > GDPR deletion requests that reach every table, backup and log > data residency for the customer whose contract says EU only > quarterly access reviews someone signs off on > dev, staging and production environments that match each other > infrastructure written as code, so the setup lives somewhere other than one person's memory > a deploy pipeline that runs the tests before anything reaches customers > one-click rollbacks, because Friday deploys happen > zero-downtime deploys, because your customers don't have maintenance windows > feature flags, so you can ship the code without shipping the feature > autoscaling for the Monday morning spike > a CDN, so the app loads fast in Singapore too > DNS, SSL certificates, and renewals that don't expire on a Sunday > background job queues, so slow work doesn't freeze the page > retries with backoff, so one flaky API call doesn't become a lost order > a dead-letter queue for the jobs that fail every retry > cron jobs that don't run twice the day you add a second server > caching, and clearing that cache when the data changes > SPF, DKIM and DMARC, so your password resets don't land in spam > bounce and complaint handling on every transactional email > storage rules, so you stop paying to keep 2021's temp files > cost alerts, so a runaway agent loop shows up the same day and not on the invoice (we learned this one for $1,382.59) > a disaster recovery plan, written down and tested once a year > a second region, if your contract promises uptime one region can't deliver > structured logs you can search at 3am > error tracking that groups the same bug instead of sending you 4,000 emails > uptime checks from outside your own network > alerts that page a human, tuned until they stop paging for nothing > dashboards for latency, error rate and throughput > tracing for one slow request across every service it touches > an on-call rotation, and a person who picks up > runbooks, so the engineer on call knows what "queue depth critical" means > postmortems that change something > a status page customers check before they email you > unit tests written by someone who knows what the logic should do > integration tests for every third-party API you depend on > end-to-end tests for signup, checkout and the other flows that make you money > load testing before the launch email goes out > test data that looks like production without being production data > regression tests, so fixing bug 41 doesn't bring back bug 12 > testing on the five-year-old laptop your biggest customer's ops team still uses > accessibility compliance, because the enterprise contract requires it > subscriptions, upgrades, downgrades and proration > failed-payment retries and dunning emails > invoices with the customer's PO number on them, because procurement won't pay without it > sales tax and VAT > refunds, credits and partial refunds > usage metering that matches what you bill, to the cent > annual contracts with custom terms your billing logic never planned for > revenue reports your finance team can reconcile > webhooks that verify signatures > webhooks that retry, with a log of every failed delivery > a versioned API, so you can change it without breaking your customers' integrations > API keys customers can create and revoke > API rate limits that protect you without blocking real integrations > a plan for the day a third-party API changes its response format without telling you > OAuth token refresh, because tokens expire at the worst possible moment > a sandbox where customers can test their integration > protection against prompt injection in every field that reaches the model > customer and patient data kept out of prompts that leave your network > a model spend cap per customer, so one heavy user can't run up your bill > evals, so you find out when a model update makes your answers worse > a fallback for the afternoon your model provider goes down > a migration plan for the day your model gets deprecated > prompt and output logs for debugging, minus whatever you're not allowed to keep > a human approval step for anything the AI does that can't be undone > pages that load on hotel wifi > empty states, loading states and error states on every screen > error messages a customer can act on, instead of "something went wrong" > forms that keep what people typed when one field fails validation > emails that render in every mail client your customers use > notifications people can turn off > undo > keyboard navigation and screen reader support > translations, with dates and numbers formatted for each locale > a back button that does what people expect > code a human can read > code review on every change > a branching strategy, so two people can work without overwriting each other > monthly dependency upgrades, so you're never two major versions behind > framework upgrades before the old version stops getting security patches > deleting the dead code the AI left behind from its first three attempts > splitting up the 2,000-line file the AI kept appending to > architecture decisions written down, with the reasons > a README that gets a new engineer running locally in under an hour > documentation for whoever inherits this > an admin panel for your ops team > support tooling, so customer success can answer questions without pinging engineering > a changelog customers can read > terms and a privacy policy that match what the code does > every account, domain and repo in the company's name, not the name of whoever built the prototype > a bus factor higher than one Oh, and besides keeping all of this working every day, forever… your vibe-coded app will still need people who know what they're doing: > reading every line the AI wrote before it ships (a senior engineer) > designing the data model before your second customer breaks it (a backend engineer) > explaining why the AI's fix for one bug created two new ones (a senior engineer, again) > deploys, rollbacks, servers and the cloud bill (a DevOps engineer) > answering the page at 3am when payments stop (whoever's on call) > patching the framework the week a vulnerability goes public (security) > walking an auditor through how patient data moves (security and compliance) > testing what the AI says it tested (QA) > running a migration on a live database without losing a row (a backend engineer) > saying no to the feature that breaks three others (a tech lead) > turning "works on my laptop" into "works for every customer at once" (an architect) > debugging the code when the AI that wrote it can't (a senior engineer) > remembering why it's built this way, a year from now (someone who was there) …wishing them the best 🫡

But it’s just a concept? Hate concept cars…they’re like push up bras.

Can Porsche take on Ferrari ? With the Mission S

youtu.be/g6LYcgaQ46c?si=Ho89… like this vehicule. Under the car fans creating succion.