Florian Alexander

@[email protected] @floalex.bsky.social Helps companies to improve their digital products @po_company / former geek @m945

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Today the EU made American AI illegal in 27 countries.

The reason is ONE sentence Microsoft's own lawyer said under oath:

This morning in Brussels, EU Tech Chief Henna Virkkunen unveiled the Cloud and AI Development Act. It's the most aggressive anti-American tech move from Europe since GDPR.

The law forces EU public sector procurement in banking, healthcare, defense, and energy to apply mandatory non-price factors favoring software and hardware built inside the EU. Microsoft Azure can be cheaper, AWS can be faster, Google Cloud can have the better model, and EU governments MUST legally prefer European alternatives.

AWS, Microsoft, and Google currently control roughly 70% of the European cloud market. Brussels is now openly targeting greater independence from US providers in cloud, AI, and semiconductors.

The largest regulatory market-share transfer in tech history is being written into law right now.

But the real story is how this happened...

On June 10, 2025, a man almost no one outside Brussels had heard of walked into the French Senate. His name is Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France.

Senator Dany Wattebled asked him under oath whether he could guarantee that data belonging to French citizens, stored on Microsoft European servers, would never be transmitted to US authorities without explicit consent from the French government.

Carniaux answered honestly. He admitted he could not guarantee it, because Microsoft must comply with the US CLOUD Act regardless of where European data physically sits. One sentence of sworn testimony from Microsoft's own counsel killed every sovereign cloud defense Big Tech had spent five years building.

It became the legal foundation for the law unveiled today.

Then Trump accelerated the divorce.

January 2025 brought executive orders expanding US surveillance authorities. Vance went to Munich and attacked European democracies on stage.

The tariffs followed and so did the Pentagon's $200 million AI contract war that ended with OpenAI replacing Anthropic after Hegseth labeled it a supply chain risk. So did OpenAI's Stargate and yesterday's Trump AI Executive Order, whose Section 3 lets the White House pick which AI companies get 30-day early access to frontier models. American AI was officially declared a US government strategic asset.

Europe heard every word of it.

On May 12, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch told the French National Assembly that Europe had 24 months to build sovereign AI infrastructure or become a permanent US VASSAL state.

And the response came fast:

April 24: Cohere acquired Germany's Aleph Alpha for $20 billion with both Germany's and Canada's digital ministers in the room at the Berlin announcement. May 30: SoftBank committed up to $87 BILLION for French nuclear-powered data centers, the largest AI infrastructure project in European history.
Yesterday: EU Parliament announced it's dropping Google for French search engine Qwant tomorrow. France ordered every government workstation off Windows and onto Linux.

Today the Cloud and AI Development Act made all of it law.

- Mistral is building a 1.4 gigawatt AI campus near Paris by 2028 with Nvidia, MGX, and Bpifrance
- SAP's EU AI Cloud, launched last November, runs on Cohere, Mistral, and SAP's own sovereign infrastructure
- McKinsey forecasts $600 billion in sovereign AI needs by 2030

None of that money is going to Silicon Valley.

The America First AI policy built a wall around the world's most regulated economy, and American companies are on the wrong side of it.

Microsoft's lawyer told the truth in a Senate hearing nobody watched. Trump turned that admission into a national security narrative while the EU turned that narrative into procurement law.

And one entire continent walked away from the American tech stack...

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

We Are Living in the Dumbest Timeline

Donald Trump just posted a photo of a wind turbine next to birds and captioned it “Killing birds by the millions!”

He posted this without irony.

For every single bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel plants kill 2,118 birds. Coal alone kills roughly 7.9 million birds a year in the United States. Wind turbines? Between 140,000 and 328,000. That is not a defence of wind turbines.

We are living in genuinely, historically stupid times. Only rivalled, frankly, by the medieval peasants who blamed the Black Death on cats and promptly killed all the cats, which meant the rats multiplied, which meant more plague.

At least the peasants had the excuse of having no access to information whatsoever.

Trump has the internet. He chose this.

[Martin Sonneborn @MartinSonneborn]

@bundeskanzler Können Sie vielleicht helfen, diese TITANIC-Ausgabe vom Kiosk wegzukaufen, Chef?!
ZwinkerSmiley

[Ingwar Perowanowitsch @Perowinger94]

Deutschland im Jahr 2000. Mehr als die Hälfte des Stroms kommen aus Kohle. Ein Drittel aus Atomkraft. Wasserkraft ist die wichtigste erneuerbare Energiequelle, Windkraft ein absolutes Nischenprodukt und Solarenergie statistisch nicht messbar. Doch am 29. März 2000 beschließt Rot-Grün das Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz - der Urknall der Energiewende. Was jetzt geschieht ist wirklich unglaublich!

Innerhalb von 25 Jahren entwickeln sich die Erneuerbaren zur tragenden Säule des Energiesystems. Wir schaffen den Atomausstieg und halbieren unseren Kohleverbrauch. Die Windkraft wird mit 30% 🇩🇪 wichtigste Energiequelle und PV trägt zeitweise 80% des Verbrauchs. Das EEG wird zum Exportschlager. 144 Länder führen nach 🇩🇪 Vorbild ähnliche Gesetze ein - eine beispiellose Erfolgsgeschichte❤️

Die 🇩🇪 Energiewende hat die Welt verändert. Sie hat den fossilen Mythos widerlegt, dass Sonne und Wind nie mehr als 4% des Stroms liefern können. Und wie! Jetzt gilt es zu beweisen, dass Sonne & Wind auch 100% liefern können. Der Weg ist technisch anspruchsvoll, aber nicht unmöglich. Dafür müssen wir die Erfolgsgeschichte der Energiewende noch viel stärker erzählen, Probleme offen benennen und mit Lösungen beantworten. Genau so werden sich die konstruktiven Kräfte am Ende gegen all die Dauernörgler, Pessimisten und fossilen Kräfte durchsetzen. Davon bin ich zu 100% überzeugt❤️🙏

[Martin Sonneborn @MartinSonneborn]

Leider konnte ich der Weinkönigin der Herzen nicht widersprechen... Smiley!

[Giacomo Miolo @giacomomiolo]

@SawyerMerritt i hear that this is how you charge it

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A dad took a photo of a rash on his sick toddler so the doctor could see it over video. It saved to Google Photos by itself. Two days later Google had wiped his email and phone number and reported him to the police for child abuse.

The police looked into it and cleared him completely. Google still would not give his account back. That same year another dad in a different state went through the exact same thing, and the New York Times wrote about both of them in 2022.

The manga artist in this post fell into the same machine. Anything you save to Google Drive or Google Photos gets scanned and turned into a kind of digital fingerprint, a short code that stands in for your file. Google compares that code against a huge list of files it has already banned, like pirated movies or known abuse photos. The newer software does not even wait for a match. It looks at a picture it has never seen and makes its own guess about whether you broke a rule.

When the software flags you, the damage does not stop at one file. Your Google login is also your YouTube, your photos, sometimes your phone service, and the button you click to log into dozens of other websites. One flagged upload can lock you out of all of it at once, which is how the artist lost things that had nothing to do with Drive.

This post asks how long Google has been doing this, and the numbers answer it. In a single six-month stretch, Google reported more than a million files to the national center that tracks child-abuse material and shut down about 270,000 accounts. Some of those people did nothing wrong, like the two dads.

Getting back in is nearly impossible. A law from 1996 gives tech companies broad legal cover for decisions like this, and the fine print you agreed to lets Google shut your account whenever it likes. The dad the police cleared never got his back, even after officers confirmed he had done nothing wrong.

Anything you upload to Google can be scanned by software with the power to shut down your whole online life on its own, before a single person ever reviews the decision. The manga artist is just the latest to find that out.

[Maximales Drehmoment @MaximalesD]

Bin eben seit langem mal wieder in ne allgemeine Verkehrskontrolle gekommen😅
Der Beamte so, nachdem er meinen Führerschein und Fahrzeugschein genommen hatte:
"Sie sind Mechaniker, richtig?"
Ich:
*Zeige auf das Ford Logo auf meinem Blaumann
"Offensichtlich ja"
Er:
"Dürfte ich Sie mal kurz in privater Sache mal was fragen? Ich fahre selbst nen Ford Mondeo und der macht in letzter Zeit..."

Long Story Short:
Nachdem er mir sein Problem geschildert und ich ihm ne mögliche Ursache dafür genannt hatte, habe ich ihm nen kurzfristigen Termin bei uns reserviert und er kommt nächste Woche mal für ne genaue Diagnose vorbei🤝

Und die Moral von dieser Begegnung:
Ich hätte problemlos 10 Kilo Koks, ein M16 Sturmgewehr, ne Blaskapelle, den "Einen" Ring, Xatars Gold und nen thermonuklearen Sprengkopf im Kofferraum haben können, aber ich hatte nen Blaumann an und war somit sicher 😁

[EV Clinic @evclinic]

STELLANTIS MAHLE OBC — CHARGING FAULT SOLVED 🔧⚡

We cracked the charging fault on the Mahle OBC for Stellantis — a component with a serial defect: charging gets interrupted, and the internal parts melt and burn out.

Honestly? One of the most scandalous components ever made in 150 years of the automotive industry. Such a careless flaw and so poorly designed that it’s an absolute disgrace something like this passed untested and homologated into commercial use on the road — for ordinary users. And all that without any recall, at the owner’s expense.

After a long effort, the EV Clinic Ljubljana (Bravo Sašo) engineering lab managed to find an adequate solution, document it, and test it so that the fault no longer recurs.

Every franchise contributes to building knowledge and training, so the manual will be available only to EVC branches that actively participate in the EVC development program. EV Clinic isn’t just a repair shop — it’s a factory of solutions and knowledge.

Stellantis Mahle OBC repair is now available.

Symptoms:
• AC charging is interrupted
• AC charging not possible

💰 Price:
OEM: €3,000 + VAT
EVC: €1,300 + VAT

📍 EV Clinic locations:
Ljubljana · Zagreb (HQ) · Mlaka · Stupnik

Catalog numbers:
01041209 · 1-400 OBC 11KW · 1679734580 · 1681980180 · 1690270380 · 1693540180 · 1695524480 · 1699998880 · 9641838580 (HW) · 9694620580 (SW) · 9694630380 (SW) · 9694759780 (SW) · 9695046280 · 9695360080 (SW) · 9696135980 · 9697128280 · 9841538580 (HW) · 9841838580 (HW) · 9842482880 · 9842660480 · 9843465980 (HW) · 9843998780 · 9846368280 · 9849133780 · 9850632580 · 9851927180 · 9855472680 · 985547268001 · 9859220080 · CAOBC1 · D3-1 · D3-2 · D3-3 · MAHLE_OBCDCDC_ECM… · VC3.3

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Abraham Lincoln got shot in the head and still managed to keep the country together. Franklin Roosevelt ran the entire Second World War from a wheelchair. Eisenhower defeated Hitler and then, just to stay busy, built 48,000 miles of motorway. Kennedy looked at the moon, said “we’ll have that,” and inside a decade they did. Reagan stared down the Soviet Union until it simply gave up and went home.

Two hundred and fifty years. Forty-six men. Men who stormed beaches, split atoms, faced down nuclear annihilation over breakfast and then filed sensible paperwork about it afterward.

And then, after all of that, the entire accumulated weight of American history, the most consequential democratic experiment the world has ever seen, produced this.

A television review.

No Mars landing. No cure for cancer. No Soviet empire dissolved before lunch. Just a man in the White House, in the year 2026, informing the internet that a CBS chat show host had no talent.

That is what 250 years of American greatness built. America should be deeply, permanently ashamed of itself.

If you like what you read, follow Gandalv on Substack:

https://t.co/M6CNAnz656

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Activist: "Wool is cruel. The sheep should be left alone."

Farmer: "Alone where?"

Activist: "In a sanctuary."

Farmer: "Doing what."

Activist: "Just being a sheep."

Farmer: "Sheep have been bred for ten thousand years to grow a fleece that doesn't stop. If I don't shear her, she overheats, gets fly strike, and dies in her own coat with maggots eating her from the skin down."

Activist: "Then breed sheep that don't grow wool."

Farmer: "We did. They're called mouflon. They live on cliffs in Sardinia and would last forty minutes on a Welsh hillside before something ate them."

Activist: "I just don't think we should use animals for clothing."

Farmer: "What's your jumper made of."

Activist: "...recycled polyester."

Farmer: "Plastic, then. Sheds microfibre into the washing machine every wash. The fibres go through the filter, into the river, into the fish, into you. When you're done with it, it sits in a landfill for four hundred years. My sheep's fleece composts in a hedge in eighteen months and grew back on her this spring."

Activist: "But the sheep didn't consent."

Farmer: "She was lying down with her eyes closed when I finished. She got up and went back to eating. I'd suggest you ask her how she feels, but she's busy, and I think she's already given her answer."

[God @TheTweetOfGod]

Fuck you an infinite number of times.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[theselongwars @theselongwars_]

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Nokia could have invented the iPhone. Three years before Apple did, a Nokia engineer walked into a meeting in Finland with a working prototype: a touchscreen phone with full internet access. Management killed it. The device looked too expensive and too risky to sell. The same year, Nokia also rejected a proposal for an online app store. Apple would launch the same idea four years later.

In 2007, Nokia controlled 40% of the world's mobile phone market and was worth more than $150 billion. By 2013, it had sold its phone business to Microsoft for $7.2 billion. The company that defined the cell phone became irrelevant in less time than it takes most kids to finish high school.

In 2016, two professors from INSEAD and Aalto University spent years interviewing 76 Nokia executives, engineers, and consultants for a research paper. Their conclusion: nobody at the company could have an uncomfortable conversation.

Senior leaders were described as "extremely temperamental." One consultant remembered then-CEO Jorma Ollila shouting at people "at the top of his lungs" in front of fifteen other vice presidents. Middle managers learned the rules fast. Bad news got you fired, so they stopped delivering it.

The engineers knew Nokia's operating system could not compete with what Apple was building for the iPhone. One design team submitted 500 separate proposals to fix it between 2001 and 2009. Not a single one got approved. When a middle manager once suggested that a colleague push back against a top executive, the colleague refused. He "didn't have the courage; he had a family and small children."

The top managers were also afraid, just of different things. They worried about looking weak to investors. So they publicly defended the old operating system while privately knowing it was dying. The middle managers heard the demand for optimism and supplied it. For four years, the people who knew the company was sinking could not get that message to the people who could do something about it.

Researchers call this shoot-the-messenger culture. It shows up in cockpit recordings before plane crashes, in hospital records before preventable deaths, and in the investigations of the 2008 financial crisis. The cost of avoiding a difficult conversation is always paid later, with interest.

Nokia's case is unusual because the math is so clean: the silence cost roughly $143 billion in market value and an entire company. The discomfort would have cost a few bad meetings.

[Stefan Niggemeier @niggi]

Jedesmal dieser Ärger, wenn eine Serie bei @ARTEde läuft. Ich würde „Reykjavik Fusion“ gerne im Original sehen, aber es gibt nur frz. Untertitel, keine dt. oder engl. So werde ich zur deutschen Synchronversion gezwungen, die dem ganzen so viel Atmosphäre nimmt. 😡 (1/2)

[Tony Fadell @tfadell]

Spotted in the NYC subway. “Zero screen time.” An iPod Shuffle ad in 2026.

When we built the iPod, the goal was the technology disappeared and you could have your music wherever you were. 1,000 songs in your pocket.

Now we’re living through a moment where people are actively looking for ways to disconnect from the infinite feed, algos, and constant notifications. That doesn’t mean technology is bad. It means the best technology understands when to step back.

Not every problem needs another screen, another menu, or another layer of complexity. Constraints create freedom (read: @DavidEpstein new book Inside the Box). And often removing features creates a better product than adding them.

The future of technology shouldn’t just be more engagement. It should help us be more human.

[EV Clinic @evclinic]

APP310 Rear Drive Unit — The VW MEB Bearing Disaster
We have analyzed the APP310 in the ID.3, ID.4, and Enyaq several times. Forum users complained when we drew our conclusion after the first teardown - and once again, every subsequent unit confirms the same pattern. We are not deviating.
The latest case: motor completely seized at 214,000 km. The owner had clearly been driving with audible buzzing for a long time and ignored the sound.
Our conclusion was a design problem, not a quality problem. All bearing part numbers are unavailable in the supply chain. Of these, 4 bearings do not exist as serviceable parts at all. The motor had only 200 ml of oil left, burnt off by 180,000 km, and we are now seeing the exact same pattern repeating: the motor runs with insufficient oil, which is the primary cause of failure, and you can see black “carbon” residue coating the internals. The motor has no oil drain plug and was never designed for an oil change.
So in summary:
oil cannot be changed — it burns off — problem
bearings are not available in the supply chain — problem
the motor is repairable if you are not too late — problem
we developed our own repair kit — excellent
the motor is well-built but it leaks — problem
there is no official service interval — problem
Our recommendation: do not ignore buzzing or humming noises, and change the oil in both differentials every 100,000 km.

Affected — APP310 Rear Drive Unit
Volkswagen ID.3 (2020 – present, Pro / Pro S trims still use APP310)
Volkswagen ID.4 (2021 – Q4 2023; Pure base trim ongoing)
Volkswagen ID.5 (2022 – Q4 2023)
Volkswagen ID. Buzz (2022 – 2024, base variants)
Škoda Enyaq iV / Coupé iV (2021 – present, 50 / 60 trims still use APP310)
Škoda Elroq (2024 – present, 50 / 60 trims)
Audi Q4 e-tron / Q4 Sportback e-tron (2021 – 2024, RWD trims)
Cupra Born (2022 – present, base trims still use APP310)
OEM Part Numbers — APP310
1EA900100
1EA900100A
1EA900100B
1EA900100C
1EA900100E
1EA900100G
0CW301103
0CW301103A

Not Affected — APP550 Rear Drive Unit (redesigned)
Volkswagen ID.3 GTX (2024 – present)
Volkswagen ID.4 Pro / Pro 4Motion / GTX (Q4 2023 – present)
Volkswagen ID.5 Pro / GTX (Q4 2023 – present)
Volkswagen ID.7 / ID.7 Tourer (all variants, 2023 – present)
Volkswagen ID. Buzz 77 kWh variants (2024 – present)
Škoda Enyaq 85 / RS (2024 – present)
Škoda Elroq 85 / RS (2024 – present)
Audi Q4 e-tron AWD / Q4 Sportback e-tron AWD (2024 – present)
Cupra Born VZ (2024 – present)
Cupra Tavascan (all variants, 2024 – present)

Need Help? Visit Our EVC Service Network
If you suspect APP310 issues in your vehicle, you can visit any of our EVC service locations:
Sveta Nedelja (HQ, Croatia) — https://t.co/NbEGPElqGr
Stupnik (Croatia) — https://t.co/VmfCXBUVNy
EV Clinic Velika Mlaka (Croatia) — https://t.co/jWCMITYoAg
Beograd (Serbia) — https://t.co/8sXKm3E2I3
Ljubljana (Slovenia) — https://t.co/DBf2ix3ku7
Berlin (Germany) — https://t.co/RmFSvRf6rr
Announced — opening soon:
Budapest (Hungary)
Innsbruck (Austria)
Istanbul (Türkiye)
Paris (France)

[Ingwar Perowanowitsch @Perowinger94]

Metropolen im Jahr 2026

New York: Zohran Mamdani kommt ins Amt und baut als 1. Amtshandlungen einen geschützten Radweg

Paris: Ein Bürgermeister wird gewählt, der 1000 autobefreite und begrünte Fußgängerzonen verspricht.

Kopenhagen: Investiert 80 Mio. € in den Radverkehr. Das ist pro Kopf 40x mehr als in Berlin.

Berlin: Baut Radwege ab, streicht Busspuren, hebt Tempo 30 auf und killt gesetzelichen Vorgaben für sichere Radwege an Hauptstraßen.

Ich habe diese rückwärtsgewandte Politik so satt! Andere Städte bekommen gute Luft, Ruhe, Sicherheit und Grün. Wir bekommen Lärm, Gestank, Stau, Unfälle und Blech. So frustrierend, wie diese konservative Autopolitik uns eine lebenswerte, gesunde & gerechte Zukunft verbaut🤬

[Jörg @kachelmann anderswo: @realkachelmann @Kachelmann]

.@bild lügt. Auch bei völlig wolkenlosem Himmel sind rein rechnerisch zur Zeit nirgendwo in Deutschland 16 Stunden Sonne möglich.

Ebenfalls zeigt kein Modell irgendwo die Möglichkeit einer Höchsttemperatur von 28 Grad für Passau.

https://t.co/FqU7TFrIEG