bckt v0.7.5 is out, with lots of performance improvements that make a huge difference for blogs with a large number of posts. Get it here or upgrade with brew upgrade bckt.

Bloatware is not a recent invention but recently, I see so many products "just like X, but with 100 more features". Now that AI agents make it cheap to add features, removing them is the real value.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in Washington, Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma said the U.S. and the Netherlands share common goals over preventing sensitive technology from ending up in dangerous hands.

However, "elements in that Act seem to suggest that the United States might take control over some of these decisions that affect our national security and the way our companies operate," he said. If the excellent cooperative working relationship with Washington "becomes cooperation by force... that is undesirable from our point of view," he added.

—Reuters

This is the context imho:

You are the Netherlands. Your neighbor and EU partner, Denmark, was just threatened with war over Greenland. You too have a couple of islands, like Curacao, that belong to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and happen to be in Trump's back yard. The US administration has made clear that no treaties, no international law has value, only power. Why would you give up control over ASML, your most powerful leverage point?

It’s time for "the opposite of doomscrolling” — a new Linkfest, in which I sort through the planet-wide digital rummage-sale of the Internet to locate the finest items of culture, science and technology, just for you.

I really enjoy The Linkfest. I suggest you subscribe too.

Open Tab: Kevin Kelly The radical optimist on starting Wired, stories from the early internet, originating 1,000 True Fans, and why the only way to steer technology is to use it https://on.substack.com/p/open-tab-kevin-kelly

Some people are worth listening to. I'm tired of overnight influencers, and people who somehow are considered deep thinkers because they made a lot of money.

I updated my homepage: People evolve and change, the homepage should stay in sync with the owner. In the process I digged into some of the older posts and pages (I've been maintaining this domain for decades) and took the opportunity to fix some broken links, and resurface some long lost pages :-)

bubbles.town is a beautiful way to dicover blogs and posts. It's social, but there's some friction here and there, the community is large enough, but not massive, and the blogs are hand-selected (as far as I can tell). The result is something close to a cozy corner, which I enjoy a lot.

We are in the mainframe era of AI: A few centralized compute providers and millions of "dumb" clients connected to them.

Football may be the last mass spectacle that still resists instant gratification.