In 2025, Big Tech—just ten major companies—spent €49 million lobbying Brussels. That’s more than pharma, finance, and automotive combined.

Google funds all sixteen major European think tanks shaping EU policy. Not *some* of them. All of them. Amazon and Meta fund most of the rest.

This is no longer “poor old me, I need a bit of help,” this is full regulatory capture. With a view to becoming even more embedded into businesses and governments, and getting whatever favorable legislation passed or diluted to suit them.

https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/10/big-tech-lobby-budgets-hit-record-levels

To help us Europeans in 1945, thousands of Americans had to fight their way from the bloody beaches of Normandy all the way to Berlin, under fire, in ice cold trenches, watching their friends die left and right.

But to help the Americans in 2026, we Europeans need to sit in our heated livingrooms and hit "end subscription" on streaming services that finance the American oligarchy — and of course no one wants to live through the horror, so fascism it is.

#UnsubscribeNow

Big new update to #LibreOffice, the free and private office suite. Version 26.2 is here, with:

📝 Markdown support
📊 Connectors in Calc
🚀 Spreadsheet speedups

...plus many other new features, improvements and fixes. Learn more and download it: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/02/04/libreoffice-26-2-is-here/ #foss #opensource #freesoftware

How good is Ecosia on environmentalism? Well, they use that notoriously low footprint system ChatGPT https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1qv6yyk/ecosia_uses_gpt41_revealed_gpt41_mini_nano/

Es hat Gründe, dass in den Epstein Files ein großer Teil der damals führenden KI Forscher auftaucht. Nicht nur weil sie Creeps sind (das auch!) sondern weil es dort und zu Leuten wie Peter Thiel massive ideologische Überschneidungen gibt.

"KI" ist ein Narrativ, dass auf gewaltvoller Aneignung, auf dem Übertreten der kommunizierten Grenzen anderer, auf "Might makes Right" aufsetzt.

Deshalb unterstützen die Leute, die das überall pushen, das ja auch.

Kurz gesagt:
Es gibt für die Arten "KI", die wir heute sehen, keine "linke" oder "menschliche" Perspektive. Sie sind ein Tool der Ausbeutung und Unterdrückung. Strukturell und aufgrund der Ideologie der Leute, die sie betreiben und finanzieren.

@libreoffice markdown support sounds like a feature that would help a lot of people to bridge info between development environments and office environments. Great, I will definitely try this out 👍🏻

Digital Euro

Gives all Europeans access to a digital form of public money — alongside cash — with a generous holding limit, so it can become a credible alternative to private money issued by commercial banks.

Acts as a foundation of a sovereign and resilient European payment infrastructure, following the highest privacy standards.

Do not lower the ambitions of the Digital Euro project under pressure from banks and Big Tech. Ensure it serves people above profits.

Save the digital euro. Europe depends on US companies to handle digital payments, putting our money at risk. A strong Digital Euro would give everyone safe, independent access to money. But banks and Big Tech want to kill the proposal. Save the digital euro. Sign the petition now: https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2026-02-digital-euro-petition-EN/?utm_source=akmail-19163&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20260104_EN&t=14&akid=19163%2E1917914%2EODbmvj

It has been ZERO DAYS since some GPL'd software made me "agree" to the GPL while installing it.

The GPL is not that kind of license: You don't need to agree to it. Agreeing to it changes nothing.

This just happens because installers have a premade "license" page and the GPL license seems like a natural fit.

But there's no point: You need to notify the user the software is GPL, but that's all.

When I see discussion about "AI for the people" or "community-led AI" or "public benefit AI," the focus is almost always on tooling and infrastructure.

But I don't think you can have any of those things without seriously rethinking the purposes and design of AI.

It's quite possible that LLMs and image generators — which were designed to serve profit-led industries — are simply at odds with community and public benefit. So anyone looking to build ethical and communal AI needs to start not with questions like "How do we democratize existing services?" but rather "What sort of AI would serve the needs of actual communities and societies?"

Libreoffice Writer > Tools > Customize

A better world is possible

With the currently released things about Bill Gates in the Epstein files (he had sex with the women and girls Epstein provided and asked Epstein for antibiotics to secretly give to his then-wife to treat the STI he gave her) how are we feeling about the Gates Foundation funding ... anything? Why should that creep (through his foundation) get to use that kind of power to shape what scientists and NGOs can do?

(Nobody should have that power, most foundations are politically a net negative on the world but I am talking about a specific case here.)

I want to address something that happened here recently. I wasn't involved, though I did know the people who were. The bristly situation was not an isolated occurrence on this platform.

My main takeaway from that kerfuffle is that no one here owes anyone else a conversation. "But why can't we have a discussion; isn't that the point of this place?" has real "Debate me, Bro" vibes. It's not a discussion without mutual agreement.

This has nothing to do with the point(s) being made. If, at any time, you have been asked to leave by the person who started the thread, you have to leave the thread. You don't have the right to keep engaging after someone tells you to stop. Full stop. If you feel like you were possibly misunderstood, and want to clarify, you'll have to do that in a separate post of your own: "I was part of a discussion today, and here's the point I was trying to make . . ." That's fine, because it's your space, not someone else's. It's a bit like being in your own home instead of at someone else's front door.

The rules of discourse apply in this online space just like they do in any physical space. If someone doesn't want to argue with you, they don't have to, most especially in their own home.

I may regret this at some point, but I felt the need to put down in writing how I feel about this moment in the tech industry.

It is not kind. You may well be insulted by it. If you are... then you really should question yourself.

https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/selfish-ai

#AI #LLM #Programming

"The Zersetzung is working. He is taking himself apart, piece by piece, and replacing the parts with synthetic fillers because the world has told him his own parts are defective."

"The Colonization of Confidence" by Robert Kingett (@WeirdWriter) is one of the best pieces of writing about "AI" I have ever seen. Read it over lunch and it literally made me cry in the restaurant.

https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence/

The term "AI" is worse than useless because it hides more than it explains. Mozilla Firefox's "AI killswitch" shows how

(Original title: Hiding behind translations)

https://tante.cc/2026/02/03/hiding-behind-translations/

@tommorris I think they also fudge the numbers by how the define "AI" https://tante.cc/2026/02/03/hiding-behind-translations/

I have finally worked out why the “AI-vegan” narrative is a logical fallacy.

https://writing.jan.io/2026/02/02/ai-veganism.html

I've said it before, but Mozilla isn't an ordinary developer doing shit out of the goodness of their hearts, they're a confusing corporate morass of for-profit, non-profit, and VC institutions that bears at least some nominal responsibility to their users.

The least betrayal would be not including AI encumbrances. Next least would be including AI encumbrances only as an opt-in. You need to go through so many distinct forms of betraying your users to land at whatever the fuckshit this is.