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According to Financial Times, Amazon Web Services experienced at least two minor outages in the final few months of last year, all caused by their internal “AI” tooling malfunctions. The article quoted one senior AWS employee describing them as “entirely foreseeable”.

Amazon is going hard on slop generators. LLMs…

Twenty five years ago today, the EU's IST advisory group published a paper about the future of "Ambient Intelligence". Way before the world got distracted with cryptoscams and AI slop, we genuinely thought that computers would be so pervasive and well-integrated that the dream of "Ubiquitous Computing" would…

I’ve been cleaning up my bedroom again—and this post is definitely not a way to procrastinate doing that

Earlier this week I started to feel something I haven’t felt in a while: I felt lost. I started to look ahead and feel disoriented. Where do I want to be in a few years? What do I want to work on? What is my dream? I have never looked…

Back in December I wrote about whether Firefox is firefucked, and I ended that post by saying the following:

Firefox won't be changing to a modern AI browser any time soon, so there's no rush for me to jump right now. So I'm planning to continue testing alternatives and…

At the recent FOSDEM, I did a very quick lightning talk about our OpenBenches project.

Sadly, despite the best efforts of the AV team, the video had a missing section. I took my own audio recording and zipkid took some photos, so I was able to recreate it using…

Before launching their Comet browser, Perplexity hired us to test the security of their AI-powered browsing features. Using adversarial testing guided by our TRAIL threat model, we demonstrated how four prompt injection techniques could extract users’ private information from Gmail by exploiting the browser’s AI assistant. The vulnerabilities we found…

This is a curious and mostly charming book about therapy. It is presented as a (somewhat contrived) Socratic dialogue between Skynner the teacher and Cleese the pupil. Skynner lectures on while Cleese interjects with "that's too clever to be convincing" and other witty remarks. It is fun to have a…

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

This week: the trouble with innovation and revenue in news, and some of the societal forces (political manipulation, exploitation) that mean figuring those things out are vital.

Did I miss…