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#3
Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...
Last post by Tamas - Today at 07:41:45 AMQuote from: Sheilbh on Today at 04:56:21 AMMakes a lot of sense and I think getting the banks to pay for and build it is also probably the right approach. It should be something some European countries (UK, Netherlands and Estonia spring to mind) should be able to do pretty well given that there are really developed fintech sectors that have built payment tools.
(Fintech, with some AI tools too, plus some of the chip stuff and cutting edge industrial companies is why I think the most braindead right-wing American attack on Europe is that it's not innovative.)
Edit: Incidentally it's also where I'm really not so sure the American tech supremacy is quite as strong as people (particularly in Silicon Valley) seem to think. US companies have a huge advantage in the infrastructure (data centres) of our age with AWS, Google, Microsoft etc - and there are some specific areas where there's no Western equivalent outside the US (Palantir). But an awful lot of the big American tech companies are in social media and messaging and make their money from advertising (I still find it insane that the world's biggest companies basically make all their money from selling advertising) - and for all of those there are equivalents in other internets like Russia, Iran, China etc. They're not easy to replace when they already have monopoly power, but it's not like the actual underlying business is inimitable (in fact its imitability is precisely why they need the monopoly power). There's no doubt in my mind that they'd be replaced very quickly on a European internet - even if it might take a while for the monopolies to emerge.
I am Twitter's sceptical look.
#5
Off the Record / Re: TV/Movies Megathread
Last post by garbon - Today at 06:53:57 AMI think what helps is that it is more light-hearted. Not taking itself too seriously which makes it easier to enjoy.
#6
Off the Record / Re: Dead Pool 2026
Last post by garbon - Today at 05:11:45 AMAnd now Jesse Jackson
#7
Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...
Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 04:56:21 AMMakes a lot of sense and I think getting the banks to pay for and build it is also probably the right approach. It should be something some European countries (UK, Netherlands and Estonia spring to mind) should be able to do pretty well given that there are really developed fintech sectors that have built payment tools.
(Fintech, with some AI tools too, plus some of the chip stuff and cutting edge industrial companies is why I think the most braindead right-wing American attack on Europe is that it's not innovative.)
Edit: Incidentally it's also where I'm really not so sure the American tech supremacy is quite as strong as people (particularly in Silicon Valley) seem to think. US companies have a huge advantage in the infrastructure (data centres) of our age with AWS, Google, Microsoft etc - and there are some specific areas where there's no Western equivalent outside the US (Palantir). But an awful lot of the big American tech companies are in social media and messaging and make their money from advertising (I still find it insane that the world's biggest companies basically make all their money from selling advertising) - and for all of those there are equivalents in other internets like Russia, Iran, China etc. They're not easy to replace when they already have monopoly power, but it's not like the actual underlying business is inimitable (in fact its imitability is precisely why they need the monopoly power). There's no doubt in my mind that they'd be replaced very quickly on a European internet - even if it might take a while for the monopolies to emerge.
(Fintech, with some AI tools too, plus some of the chip stuff and cutting edge industrial companies is why I think the most braindead right-wing American attack on Europe is that it's not innovative.)
Edit: Incidentally it's also where I'm really not so sure the American tech supremacy is quite as strong as people (particularly in Silicon Valley) seem to think. US companies have a huge advantage in the infrastructure (data centres) of our age with AWS, Google, Microsoft etc - and there are some specific areas where there's no Western equivalent outside the US (Palantir). But an awful lot of the big American tech companies are in social media and messaging and make their money from advertising (I still find it insane that the world's biggest companies basically make all their money from selling advertising) - and for all of those there are equivalents in other internets like Russia, Iran, China etc. They're not easy to replace when they already have monopoly power, but it's not like the actual underlying business is inimitable (in fact its imitability is precisely why they need the monopoly power). There's no doubt in my mind that they'd be replaced very quickly on a European internet - even if it might take a while for the monopolies to emerge.
#8
Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...
Last post by Richard Hakluyt - Today at 04:27:09 AMIn more positive news UK bankers are planning to set up an alternative to the effective Visa/mastercard duopoly :
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/16/uk-bank-bosses-plan-visa-mastercard-alternative#:~:text=City%20funders%20will%20be%20in,to%20the%20group%20next%20year.
It is being portrayed as a common sense increase in resilience rather than a consequence of doubts about American reliability. Which is fair enough, both are good reasons to develop this alternative imo.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/16/uk-bank-bosses-plan-visa-mastercard-alternative#:~:text=City%20funders%20will%20be%20in,to%20the%20group%20next%20year.
It is being portrayed as a common sense increase in resilience rather than a consequence of doubts about American reliability. Which is fair enough, both are good reasons to develop this alternative imo.
#9
Off the Record / Re: Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-2...
Last post by Zoupa - Today at 04:12:38 AMSeems there are localized counter offensives happening all over the Zaporizhzhya front. The sudden loss of Starlink seems to have taken the russians completely off guard.
They even managed several crossings of the Hachur river, which is seriously remarkable in 2026.
They even managed several crossings of the Hachur river, which is seriously remarkable in 2026.
#10
Off the Record / Re: The AI dooooooom thread
Last post by Syt - Today at 02:01:26 AMNot entirely AI but also.
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-age-verification-rollout-has-ties-to-palantir-co-founder-and-panopticon-architect-peter-thiel/
Also from Rockpapershutgun:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/good-news-uk-discord-users-were-part-of-a-peter-thiel-linked-data-collection-experiment
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-age-verification-rollout-has-ties-to-palantir-co-founder-and-panopticon-architect-peter-thiel/
QuoteOh, good: Discord's age verification rollout has ties to Palantir co-founder and panopticon architect Peter Thiel
Discord is "experimenting" with an age authentication vendor whose major investors include Thiel's Founders Fund.
Last week, Discord invited the contempt of its users by announcing it will be rolling out global age verification restrictions in March, which will restrict viewable content and communities for users who don't scan either their faces or government IDs and haven't already been determined to be an adult by unspecified prediction algorithms. Approximately nobody thought this was cool.
Impossibly, despite its attempts to pacify the ensuing outcry by issuing a clarification that merely some users will be required to submit to its child detection matrix, Discord has managed to make the rollout of its global age assurance policy seem even grimier. The company has informed some users in the UK they may be part of "an experiment" with Persona, an age verification vendor whose investors include Peter Thiel, co-founder of ICE's premier surveillance provider, Palantir.
In the days since Discord's age assurance policy announcement, reports began bubbling up on social media from users in the UK—where Discord already requires age verification as a result of its 2025 Online Safety Act—who were presented with prompts to consent to age verification processed by the company Persona.
Sure enough, Discord's support article describing its age verification process now features a disclaimer informing UK users that they "may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona." And while Discord had previously insisted that facial age verification recordings would only be stored and processed locally, the notice about Persona says that "the information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted."
While some users have speculated that Discord is testing alternate age verification providers because k-ID—its primary age authentication partner—has proven susceptible to creative workarounds, Discord doesn't specify why some users will be processed by Persona instead.
Regardless of the reasoning, the partnership with Persona has compounded concerns about privacy due to the company's investors. In its two most recent rounds of venture capital funding, its lead investor has been Founders Fund—the venture fund co-founded and directed by Peter Thiel.
A co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, Thiel is nowadays more often discussed—or reviled—for his work in co-founding Palantir, the data harvesting and surveillance technology firm that furnishes ICE's deportation efforts with a digital panopticon and compiles databases from the private information of American citizens.
And listen, I know people harp on this a lot, but it's a company literally named after an orb that lets the most evil force in the world spy on your thoughts.
If that's not enough for you to be unsettled by Thiel's money being involved in Discord's age verification rollout, the billionaire—who infamously wrote "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" in 2009—appeared more than 2,200 times in the latest release of the Epstein files, where he coordinated years of meetings with the convicted child predator and sex trafficker.
Discord has downplayed the significance of its age verification rules in response to public fears, while critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rindala Alajaji, argue that the outcry is warranted for myriad reasons. A figure like Thiel appearing on the scene within days sure as hell doesn't dispel those fears. IRC's looking more attractive every day.
Also from Rockpapershutgun:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/good-news-uk-discord-users-were-part-of-a-peter-thiel-linked-data-collection-experiment
Quote[...]
I know children aren't responsible for the sins of their parents, but it doesn't seem wholly irrelevant here that Palantir's UK division is headed by Oswald Mosley's grandson.
All told, I would prefer not to participate in any identity verification "experiment" bearing Thiel's fingerprints, particularly not one that uses machine learning to check your identity in the background. And this is before we get into Discord's recent history of privacy breaches involving third parties.