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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 2d

The EU has a secret weapon to counter Trump’s economic bullying. It’s time to use it ▶ The anti-coercion instrument, or ‘trade bazooka’, is designed to shield against foreign pressure | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

What is to be done? Europe’s anti-coercion instrument works by calculating the degree of the coercion and imposing counter-actions. Provided most European governments agree, the European Commission could kick US goods and services out of Europe’s market, or apply tariffs to them. It can strip their intellectual property rights, block their investments and require reparations as a condition of readmittance to Europe’s market.

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 3d

Els veïns dels eixos verds de l’Eixample es planten i critiquen la gestió de la càrrega i descàrrega ▶ A més, reivindiquen que es mantingui tota la vegetació que es va plantejar des d'un inici en aquests carrers pacificats | Betevé beteve.cat/societat/que...

Els veïns dels eixos verds de l'Eixample es planten i critiquen la gestió de la càrrega i descàrrega

El nou horari de càrrega i descàrrega als eixos verds de l'Eixample torna a incomplir-se un mes després d'haver entrat en funcionament.

beteve.cat

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 4d

Global renewable energy generation surpasses coal for first time ▶ Record solar expansion and steady wind growth driving world’s shift away from fossil fuels in 2025, report finds | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Global renewable energy generation surpasses coal for first time

Record solar expansion and steady wind growth driving world’s shift away from fossil fuels in 2025, report finds

www.theguardian.com

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 5d

Europa premia los ejes verdes de Barcelona y el ayuntamiento guarda silencio | El Periódico #superilla @ajuntamentbcn.bsky.social www.elperiodico.com/es/barcelona... prizes.new-european-bauhaus.europa.eu/winners-prizes

Europa premia los ejes verdes de Barcelona y el ayuntamiento guarda silencio

<a href='https://www.elperiodico.com/es/barcelona/eixample/20251002/vecinos-esquerra-eixample-retan-ayuntamiento-122126175' target='_blank'>Los vecinos de la Esquerra del Eixample retan al ayuntamient...

www.elperiodico.com

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 5d

El Ayuntamiento de Barcelona respetará los parterres plantados por los vecinos de la Esquerra de l'Eixample | El Periódico www.elperiodico.com/es/barcelona... #superilla

El Ayuntamiento de Barcelona respetará los parterres plantados por los vecinos de la Esquerra de l'Eixample

<a href='https://www.elperiodico.com/es/barcelona/eixample/20251003/europa-premia-ejes-verdes-barcelona-122232332' target='_blank'>Europa premia los ejes verdes de Barcelona y el ayuntamiento guarda s...

www.elperiodico.com

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 9d

OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus ▶ The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters + the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped | 404 Media www.404media.co/openais-sora...

The main immediate use of Sora so far appears to be to allow people to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, blogs, books, images, videos, photos, and pieces of art that OpenAI has scraped from people far less powerful than, say, Nintendo. As a reward for this wide scale theft, OpenAI gets a $500 billion valuation. And we get a tool that makes it even easier to flood the internet with slightly better looking bullshit at the low, low cost of nearly all of the intellectual property ever created by our species, the general concept of the nature of truth, the devaluation of art through an endless flooding of the zone, and the knock-on environmental, energy, and negative labor costs of this entire endeavor.

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 10d

Revealed: Europe losing 600 football pitches of nature and crop land a day ▶ Investigation shows extent of green land lost across UK and mainland Europe to development from 2018 to 2023 | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Nature accounts for the majority of the losses, at about 900 sq km a year, but the research shows we are also building on agricultural land at a rate of about 600 sq km a year, with grave consequences for the continent’s food security and health.

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 10d

Scientists make embryos from human skin DNA for first time ▶ The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life | BBC News www.bbc.com/news/article...

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 15d

AI ‘Workslop’ Is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable ▶ AI slop is taking over workplaces | 404 Media www.404media.co/ai-workslop-...

A joint study by Stanford University researchers and a workplace performance consulting firm published in the Harvard Business Review details the plight of workers who have to fix their colleagues’ AI-generated “workslop,” which they describe as work content that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” The research, based on a survey of 1,150 workers, is the latest analysis to suggest that the injection of AI tools into the workplace has not resulted in some magic productivity boom and instead has just increased the amount of time that workers say they spend fixing low-quality AI-generated “work.”

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 18d

Trump is waging culture war on Europe by promoting rightwing allies, report finds ▶ Study says US president seeks to interfere in elections and ‘move the ideological centre of gravity’ in European politics | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

The study suggests conditions are “ripe” for European leaders to walk off Trump’s “film set”. Polling shows European sentiment – the sense of belonging to a common space, sharing a common future and subscribing to common values – is strong, it says.

Eurobarometer data shows citizen trust in the EU is at its highest since 2007 and has risen in 12 countries – most sharply in Sweden, France, Denmark and Portugal – since Trump returned to the White House. Majorities in almost all feel attached to the EU.

Hardly any party now wants to leave the EU, and majorities in all but three countries (Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic) say the role of the EU in protecting Europe’s citizens against global crises and security risks must become more important.

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 22d

'Enough is enough' by Chumbawamba & Credit To The Nation, from the 1994 album 'Anarchy' www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD0R...

Chumbawamba & Credit To The Nation - Enough Is Enough

YouTube video by RileyELFuk

www.youtube.com

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 29d

The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes ▶ LinkedIn has been joking about “vibe coding cleanup specialists,” but it’s actually a growing profession | 404 Media www.404media.co/the-software...

The alleged benefit of vibe coding, which refers to the practice of building software with AI-coding tools without much attention to the underlying code, is that it allows anyone to build a piece of software very quickly and easily. As we’ve previously reported, in reality, vibe coded projects could result in security issues or a recipe app that generates recipes for “Cyanide Ice Cream.” If the resulting software is so poor you need to hire a human specialist software engineer to come in and rewrite the vibe coded software, it defeats the entire purpose.

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Sep 10

That's a bummer 😞 Been waiting for that Internet Today t-shirt Ricky wears to drop for ages now. Some day, some day..

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Sep 10

When surgical tools don’t fit: how gender bias in design puts female surgeons at risk ▶ Built for men, used by everyone | The Conversation theconversation.com/when-surgica...

In vascular and cardiac surgery, precision and power go hand in hand. These procedures require surgeons to maintain awkward positions for extended periods, often in high-pressure situations. Even without design flaws, the risk of muscle and joint strain is significant. But when a handle is too big to grip securely, or a control requires more force than a surgeon can comfortably exert, that risk increases sharply and disproportionately for women.

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Sep 9

Massive Leak Shows How a Chinese Company Is Exporting the Great Firewall to the World ▶ Geedge Networks, a company w ties 2 the founder of China’s mass censorship infra, is selling its censorship & surveillance systems to ≥ 4 other countries in Asia and Africa | Wired www.wired.com/story/geedge...

Researchers who reviewed the leaked material found that the company is able to package advanced surveillance capabilities into what amounts to a commercialized version of the Great Firewall—a wholesale solution with both hardware that can be installed in any telecom data center and software operated by local government officers. The documents also discuss desired functions that the company is working on, such as cyberattack-for-hire and geofencing certain users.

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Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

RickyFTW @rickyftw.bsky.social · Sep 9

this should work now... Merch for the first time in half a decade, and more designs coming
internettoday.myshopify.com

Internet Today Merch

Merch for the YouTube Channel Internet Today

internettoday.myshopify.com

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Sep 8

Former WhatsApp security boss in lawsuit likens Meta’s culture to a “cult” | ▶ Meta allegedly prioritized user growth over security, lawsuit said | Ars Technica arstechnica.com/security/202...

Shortly after assuming that role, the lawsuit said, Baig “discovered systemic cybersecurity failures that posed serious risks to user data.” During a red-team exercise designed to find and exploit security vulnerabilities so they can be fixed, Baig said he found that roughly 1,500 engineers inside the messenger division had “unrestricted access to user data, including personal information covered by the FTC Privacy Order, and could move or steal such data without detection or audit trail.”

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Sep 4

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History | ▶ "These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past." | 404 Media www.404media.co/ai-generated...

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History

"These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past."

www.404media.co

Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

ESA Operations @operations.esa.int · Aug 28

Seeing double! ESA's Izaña-2 laser ranging station has begun to track space debris from the Spanish island of Tenerife. In the future, engineers hope to use such lasers to nudge small debris off of a collision course with a satellite. Full documentary at: www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Aug 3

Five children see HIV viral loads vanish after taking antiretroviral drugs | ▶ The first widespread success in curing HIV may come from children, not adults | Ars Technica via Wired arstechnica.com/health/2025/...

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Jul 29

Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain | ▶ Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources | 404 Media www.404media.co/googles-ai-i...

Essentially, the data shows that Google’s AI Overview feature introduced in 2023 replacing the “10 blue links” format that turned Google into the internet’s de facto traffic controller will end the flow of all that traffic almost completely and destroy the business of countless blogs and news sites in the process. Instead, Google will feed people into a faulty AI-powered alternative that is prone to errors it presents with so much confidence, we won’t even be able to tell that they are errors.

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Jul 16

The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work | ▶ AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model | FULL ARTICLE www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

So AI is destroying traffic, ripping off our work, creating slop that destroys discoverability and further undermines trust, and allows random people to create news-shaped objects that social media and search algorithms either can’t or don’t care to distinguish from real news. And yet media executives have decided that the only way to compete with this is to make their workers use AI to make content in a slightly more efficient way than they were already doing journalism.

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Jul 14

ChatGPT made up a product feature out of thin air, so this company created it | ▶ Soundslice caught OpenAI's bot telling users about a fake music notation feature - then built it | Ars Technica arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/c...

On Monday, sheet music platform Soundslice says it developed a new feature after discovering that ChatGPT was incorrectly telling users the service could import ASCII tablature—a text-based guitar notation format the company had never supported. The incident reportedly marks what might be the first case of a business building functionality in direct response to an AI model's confabulation.

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Jul 13

‘I’ve £90k in student debt – for what?’ Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout | ▶ AI isn’t just taking away entry-levels jobs, it’s helping thousands apply for the same job with almost the same CV | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/money/2025/j...

Martyna, a 23-year-old who will receive a master’s degree in English literature from the University of York this autumn, was among other graduate jobseekers who got in touch with the Guardian via a callout and has been searching for her first full-time job since the beginning of May.
“I’ve applied to about 150 entry-level jobs – in marketing, publishing, the civil service, charities, but also for retail and hospitality positions,” she said. “So far I’ve had five interviews, many almost instant rejections, plus ghosting. It makes me want to scream.
“Platforms use AI to search for key words. I have friends who have copied entire job descriptions, pasted them into the Word document, reduced the font, and turned the colour to white so AIs find the words they’re looking for. It feels dystopian.”

Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · Jul 11

The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers | ▶ Anubis, which block AI scrapers from scraping websites to death, has been downloaded almost 200,000 times | 404 Media www.404media.co/the-open-sou...

Essentially, Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot. One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do. This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test. In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the additional computational cost of doing so on the scale of scraping the entire internet would be huge. This way, Anubis creates a computational cost that is prohibitively expensive for AI scrapers that are hitting millions and millions of sites, but marginal for an individual user who is just using the internet like a human.

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