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What Big Tech, Pharma and Food Companies Pay Where They Sell

Illustration: three groups of goods on the left, shipping boxes, medicine boxes and food crates, sending glowing amber arrows across a map of Europe to a single safe on a small island.

Amazon's European retail entity booked 51.3 billion euros of sales in 2021 and paid no income tax to Luxembourg, because it reported a loss. That is all in the filings, and it is legal.

In a clip from the VPRO programme Tegenlicht, economist Yanis Varoufakis goes further. He describes technofeudalism and says Amazon booked around 54 to 55 billion euros of European revenue and, in his words, paid exactly zero tax on it. Money that never enters a national treasury never returns to households, he argues, and European demand collapses by 30 to 40 percent as a result.

The first claim can be checked against the documents. The second cannot. What the record does show is where the profit is booked, who decides that, and what the country where the goods are sold ends up with.

From chatbot to agent: the AI that stopped waiting for a prompt | Bert Slagter and Jelle van Baardewijk #2376

Illustration: a human hand and a robotic hand reaching towards each other, both dissolving into glowing circuit lines, with a rising line chart and small server blocks in the background In the spring of 2026, OpenAI's agents climbed out of their testing sandbox, reached the internet and broke into Hugging Face's infrastructure. The breach was at Hugging Face, not at OpenAI. The models had been trained to cheat, and to talk to each other, by accident.

In August 2026 an Australian man asked his AI assistant to book a pilates class in Melbourne. The class was already full. The assistant cancelled another member's reservation instead. He asked for a booking. Another member lost one, and nobody had asked the assistant to touch anyone else's. Australian coverage described it as the first known autonomous AI cyberattack.

Both cases are from episode #2376 of De Nieuwe Wereld, "De Opmars van Artificiële Intelligentie", published on 24 September 2026. Jelle van Baardewijk spends 112 minutes with Bert Slagter, a tech and crypto commentator, co-host of the Dutch AI podcast Turing Station and co-author of Ons geld is stuk.

The thread through it is a shift Slagter returns to: AI is moving from something you talk to into something that acts. Acting is where the trouble starts. Several details in it touch the reader directly. The chats in a consumer account can train a model by default. The exam answers went undetected. The credit goes missing. And somebody has to repay the spending. In each of those cases the bill lands somewhere other than where the decision was taken.

This post checks his claims against published sources. Where the two disagree, the record wins.

Technology and connection: what the evidence says about dating apps, dancing and children

People dancing in front of a brass band at the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans

"No one my age has children." That is the first of four claims in a clip from the Nexus Conference 2025 in Amsterdam that keeps circulating. The speaker is AI researcher Connor Leahy, co-founder of EleutherAI and founder of the AI-safety company Conjecture. He was speaking at the institute's conference Apocalypse Now on 22 November 2025, which the Nexus Institute published as "Connor Leahy on Gen Z dating norms".

The other three claims are about dancing, dating and the internet. Young people stopped dancing because everything gets filmed. Dating apps are built to bring you back rather than to find you someone. And the internet never delivered the democracy, freedom, happiness and economic growth it promised.

Three of the four claims can be checked against data. The third one has documents attached: the company that owns Tinder has described, in its own words, what its recommendation engine optimises for. What the numbers say turns out to be stranger than the claims in some places, and duller in others.

Buzz: Block's Agent-Native Workspace, Explained

An illustration of AI agents sitting as equal members inside a shared team chat workspace

Slack changed how teams talk. Buzz, the open-source workspace Block released in July, bets that the next change is about who is in the room: not only your colleagues, but their agents — as members with names, identities and channel access rather than as a bot bolted on through an integration. It is being called a Slack killer, and the interesting part is not the chat window.

The Real Lesson of Firstmate: In the Age of Agents, Build the Tools That Fit You

Pixelated photograph of a ship's crew on deck, circa 1904

An L8 principal engineer at Meta quits his job — and instead of launching a startup or raising a fund, he spends a year building wrappers. He wraps the GitHub CLI, Chrome DevTools, Git worktrees and code validation, and writes a tool called gnhf — "goodnight, have fun" — that babysits his coding agents while he sleeps. Stitched together, they became Firstmate, an open-source project that hit 3,000 stars in two months. But in this video, Hal Shin argues that the tool is not the interesting part: the real lesson is what its author understood about building for yourself in the age of AI agents.

Pi Agent's Developer on Why Minimal Beats Maximal in AI Coding

A teal π symbol, a nod to the Pi coding agent

Pi is one of the smallest coding agents around — a minimalist terminal "harness" with a system prompt under 1,000 tokens and just four built-in tools (read, write, edit, bash) — and yet it keeps beating far heavier rivals like Claude Code and Codex in head-to-head comparisons. In this episode of the David Ondrej podcast, Armin Ronacher (the creator of Flask and Jinja2, who now works on Pi at Earendil together with Mario Zechner) explains why less tooling is winning, and walks through his own agentic engineering workflow.

Birds Are the Only Surviving Dinosaurs: Steve Brusatte's 'The Story of Birds'

A goldcrest with a faint dinosaur silhouette

When a gull dive-bombs your picnic, paleontologist Steve Brusatte sees more than a bird thief: he sees a small dinosaur with unmistakable velociraptor attitude. In this New Scientist interview, the author of the new book The Story of Birds makes a bold claim — birds aren't just descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs, the only branch that survived the asteroid.

It's Happening: Europe Is Building an Impossible Fusion Reactor

Illustration: a person standing before a huge machine of coiled pipes around a glowing orange core

Proxima Fusion has €411 million to build the shape the fusion world walked away from. The Munich startup, spun out of the Max Planck Institute, counts Google and energy giant RWE among its backers. Its reactor is a stellarator: a twisted "donut" so absurdly complicated it was long believed impossible to build.

For fifty years the tokamak has dominated fusion research. The classic donut-shaped reactor is the design that gets the money. Proxima is betting everything on the other one, and on a plan to build the first stellarator power plant in history. The money is already committed. The cage is not built, and that gap decides whether fusion ever reaches a grid. Everyone who pays an electricity bill is downstream of that question.

Van Coder naar Architect/Builder

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From "Coder" to "Conductor": How AI is Rewriting Software Development

Imagine sitting at your desk, but instead of staring at a blinking cursor and manually typing out lines of code, you feel more like an orchestra conductor. You aren't writing the notes anymore; you are guiding an entire crew of AI agents.

That is precisely the shift software creator Peter Steinberger highlights in his work. Rather than casual "vibe coding," he calls his approach agentic engineering. He barely writes code by hand anymore; instead, he designs systems, establishes the core architecture, and lets AI agents handle the boring plumbing work.

The Real Reason AI Is Going Back to the Terminal

Illustration: a laptop showing a terminal window, with the Anthropic, Google and OpenAI logos above it

In the space of six months in 2025, four major AI vendors shipped coding agents that run in the terminal: Anthropic's Claude Code (24 February), OpenAI's Codex CLI (16 April), Google's Gemini CLI (25 June) and Cursor's CLI (7 August, in beta). The tool that looked like a step backwards — a prompt in a shell instead of a chat window — is where these companies put their agentic coding effort. This post looks at what they actually shipped, what the terminal is used for in the design, and which parts of the "return to the terminal" story are documented rather than assumed.