Ximo F. Verde
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ximofverde.bsky.social
Ximo F. Verde
@ximofverde.bsky.social
24 followers 36 following 150 posts
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ximofverde.bsky.social
What AI “remembers” about you is privacy’s next frontier ▶ Agents’ technical underpinnings create the potential for breaches that expose the entire mosaic of your life | MIT Technology Review www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/28/1...
Personalized, interactive AI systems are built to act on our behalf, maintain context across conversations, and improve our ability to carry out all sorts of tasks, from booking travel to filing taxes. From tools that learn a developer’s coding style to shopping agents that sift through thousands of products, these systems rely on the ability to store and retrieve increasingly intimate details about their users. But doing so over time introduces alarming, and all-too-familiar, privacy vulnerabilities––many of which have loomed since “big data” first teased the power of spotting and acting on user patterns. Worse, AI agents now appear poised to plow through whatever safeguards had been adopted to avoid those vulnerabilities.
January 28, 2026 at 9:12 PM
ximofverde.bsky.social
Wind and solar overtook fossil fuels for EU power generation in 2025, report finds ▶ Researchers say event described as ‘major tipping point’ for clean energy in era of destabilised politics | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/environment/...
January 22, 2026 at 6:10 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards ▶ X’s deepfake porn feature clearly violates app store guidelines. Why won’t Apple and Google pull it? | The Verge www.theverge.com/policy/85990...
You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs, and of children with so-called “donut glaze” on their faces — which, by the way, were being generated at a rate of one per minute. I’d also call that “offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste” and especially “just plain creepy”! Do you need a back brace to stand up straight, buddy? Because at this point, I am certain you haven’t got a single vertebra.
January 10, 2026 at 7:58 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
‘We have a new role’: mayors across the world increasingly taking on society’s biggest challenges ▶ From Budapest to BCN, NY to Paris, mayors are increasingly being thrust on to the political frontlines as they face down the rise of the far right | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
“Basically we’re saying that if there’s any place in Europe where European values and democracies are being defended, it is in our cities,” he said. “For the most part, cities, whether in the United States or Europe, continue to be bastions of open, inclusive societies, where progressives are the majority.” He contrasted the practical solutions being offered by the mayors’ alliance – from pushing for EU funding for affordable housing to crackdowns on tourist lets – with the far right’s scapegoating. “We all know that where the far right is already governing, things haven’t changed at all,” he said. “The difference is that hate speech has made inroads, along with division and confrontation, while the rights we all fought for have been eroded.”
January 6, 2026 at 8:38 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
Chipwrecked ▶ Nvidia has built an empire on circular deals for chips. Can anything knock it down? | The Verge www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
Chipwrecked: Can Nvidia avoid the crash?
What happens if the GPU-backed loans go south?
www.theverge.com
December 23, 2025 at 12:14 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
Billionaires want data centers everywhere, including space ▶ Astronomers and environmental scientists are skeptical | The Verge www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
Some experts say it would not be smooth sailing, however. The group of satellites would need to travel through millions of pieces of space debris, or “a minefield of random objects, each moving at 17,000 miles an hour,” Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, associate research scientist of space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan, explained to The Verge. This space debris is especially concentrated in popular orbits like the Sun-synchronous orbit. This is why Google’s plan is looking, well, “a little iffy,” he said. Dodging each object requires a tiny propulsion to move out of the way. For context, Akhavan-Tafti wrote in a recent Fortune article that the approximately 8,300 Starlink satellites made over 140,000 such maneuvers in just the first half of 2025. Given the close proximity of each satellite in Google’s plan, Akhavan-Tafti thinks that the entire constellation, rather than each individual satellite, would need to move out of the way of any incoming debris. “That’s really the big challenge,” he said.
December 22, 2025 at 11:45 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
Demand-driven inflation vs tariffs-fueled inflation, by Justin Wolfers, Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Michigan | The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway youtu.be/xA9nRaI71dw?...
The Biggest Disruption Is Yet to Come — ft. Justin Wolfers
YouTube video by The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway
youtu.be
December 19, 2025 at 4:00 PM
ximofverde.bsky.social
How one controversial startup hopes to cool the planet ▶ And why many scientists are freaked out about the first serious for-profit company moving into the solar geoengineering field | MIT Technology Review www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/10/1...
But numerous researchers focused on solar geoengineering are deeply skeptical that Stardust will line up the government customers it would need to carry out a global deployment as early as 2035, the plan described in its earlier investor materials—and aghast at the suggestion that it ever expected to move that fast. They’re also highly critical of the idea that a company would take on the high-stakes task of setting the global temperature, rather than leaving it to publicly funded research programs.
December 11, 2025 at 9:27 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
The war on disinformation is a losing battle ▶ How the systems that fight misinformation and disinformation became misconstrued and dismantled | The Verge www.theverge.com/features/839...
The disinformation wars are here
How Joe Biden’s administration caved to the right in the battle for truth.
www.theverge.com
December 10, 2025 at 7:51 AM
Reposted by Ximo F. Verde
mikestabile.bsky.social
"Elon’s entire incoherent free speech framework collapses into a single coherent principle: speech I like is protected, speech I don’t like should be punished.

This is what happens when someone who never understood the actual principles of free speech tries to cosplay as a free speech absolutist."
Three Tweets That Capture The Entire Elon Musk Free Speech Con
We’ve spent years calling out what a hypocrite Elon Musk is on free speech. But sometimes the universe Elon hands you a gift: three tweets in the span of a little over a week that demonstrate…
www.techdirt.com
December 9, 2025 at 9:41 PM
Reposted by Ximo F. Verde
ec.europa.eu
Today, we fined X for non-compliance with transparency obligations under the DSA.

We're holding X accountable for:
🔹Deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark’
🔹Lack of transparency of its advertising repository
🔹Failure to provide access to public data for researchers

link.europa.eu/bcmC87
December 5, 2025 at 3:41 PM
ximofverde.bsky.social
‘Cultivate resistance’: policy paper lays bare Trump support for Europe’s far right ▶ Text signed by president seems to echo ‘great replacement’ theory, saying Europe faces ‘civilisational erasure’ | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
‘Cultivate resistance’: policy paper lays bare Trump support for Europe’s far right
Text signed by president seems to echo ‘great replacement’ theory, saying Europe faces ‘civilisational erasure’
www.theguardian.com
December 5, 2025 at 6:03 PM
ximofverde.bsky.social
Buy the sky
and sell the sky
and lift your arms up to the sky
and ask the sky
and ask the sky

Don't fall on me
December 1, 2025 at 12:13 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make the change
You gotta get it right while you got the time
'Cause when you close your heart
Then you close your mind
November 30, 2025 at 11:11 PM
ximofverde.bsky.social
Large language mistake ▶ Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it | The Verge www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
The AI hype machine relentlessly promotes the idea that we’re on the verge of creating something as intelligent as humans, or even “superintelligence” that will dwarf our own cognitive capacities. If we gather tons of data about the world, and combine this with ever more powerful computing power (read: Nvidia chips) to improve our statistical correlations, then presto, we’ll have AGI. Scaling is all we need. But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.
November 26, 2025 at 8:37 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
Microsoft tries to head off the “novel security risks” of Windows 11 AI agents ▶ Agents with read/write access to your files create big security, privacy issues | Ars Technica arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...
But these safeguards and monitoring capabilities don’t change the fact that you’re exposing yourself to privacy and security risks by using AI agents. They’ll be able to request read and write access to most of the files in your user account—by default, anything in the Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders. They’ll have access to any apps that have been installed for all users on the PC (apps that have only been installed in your user account won’t be accessible to the agent, and it will also be possible for users to install apps that only their agents can access.) And agents can potentially be vulnerable to hijacking that exposes your data to attackers—Microsoft specifically mentions “cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content embedded in UI elements or documents can override agent instructions, leading to unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation.”
November 18, 2025 at 8:44 PM
ximofverde.bsky.social
LLMs show a “highly unreliable” capacity to describe their own internal processes ▶ Anthropic finds some LLM “self-awareness,” but “failures of introspection remain the norm.” | Ars Technica arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/l...
The full paper on “Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models” uses some interesting methods to separate out the metaphorical “thought process” represented by an LLM’s artificial neurons from simple text output that purports to represent that process. In the end, though, the research finds that current AI models are “highly unreliable” at describing their own inner workings and that “failures of introspection remain the norm.”
November 4, 2025 at 8:31 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
I tried OpenAI’s new Atlas browser but I still don’t know what it’s for ▶ My impression is that it is little more than cynicism masquerading as software | MIT Technology Review www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/27/1...
It’s been hard for me to understand why Atlas exists. Who is this browser for, exactly? Who is its customer? And the answer I have come to there is that Atlas is for OpenAI. The real customer, the true end user of Atlas, is not the person browsing websites, it is the company collecting data about what and how that person is browsing.
October 28, 2025 at 8:07 AM
Reposted by Ximo F. Verde
404media.co
NEW: an a16z-backed startup called Doublespeed promises clients can “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.”

Essentially an AI-powered bot service in violation of all major social media platforms

www.404media.co/a16z-backed-...
a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service
Andreessen Horowitz is funding a company that clearly violates the inauthentic behavior policies of every major social media platform.
www.404media.co
October 24, 2025 at 6:14 PM
ximofverde.bsky.social
Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data ▶ With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data sent by satellites unencrypted | Wired www.wired.com/story/satell...
For three years, the UCSD and UMD researchers developed and used an off-the-shelf, $800 satellite receiver system on the roof of a university building in the La Jolla seaside neighborhood of San Diego to pick up the communications of geosynchronous satellites in the small band of space visible from their Southern California vantage point. By simply pointing their dish at different satellites and spending months interpreting the obscure—but unprotected—signals they received from them, the researchers assembled an alarming collection of private data: They obtained samples of the contents of Americans’ calls and text messages on T-Mobile’s cellular network, data from airline passengers’ in-flight Wi-Fi browsing, communications to and from critical infrastructure such as electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and even US and Mexican military and law enforcement communications that revealed the locations of personnel, equipment, and facilities.
October 14, 2025 at 11:51 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement ▶ New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness | Ars Technica arstechnica.com/security/202...
Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement
New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness.
arstechnica.com
October 14, 2025 at 7:04 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
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.
October 9, 2025 at 7:13 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
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
October 8, 2025 at 8:43 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
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
October 7, 2025 at 10:55 AM
ximofverde.bsky.social
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
October 6, 2025 at 11:59 AM