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Arsalan Zaidi

@arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
15 followers 1 following 123 posts

Musings on people, processes, technology and the overlaps between them. Passionate about #FOSS and #OpenData. 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mastodon.social/@arsalan_zaidi, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/10/2026
Turns out that the greatest factor affecting engineering output is not the model, tooling or even token usage, but (surprise!) the human factor. Around 70% of of output can be attributed to that and top performers before AI largely remain the top performers after the introduction of AI. The […]
mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026
TLDR; First use your brains to understand the problem. Only then should you use an AI to help solve the issue. Once you have the AI output, use your brains once more to verify. A brain sandwich if you will. You cannot surrender cognition to the token generation machine 😇 […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026
A new category of System One model from Cloudflare designed to extract, calculate, estimate, and forecast structured values from messy data. It's different from categorization System One models like Jev which classify inputs or choose among predefined options and return probabilities […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026
aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/explor… AWS adds new functionality to AWS Lambdas allowing you to run long lived node.js servers. Potentially useful. #AWS #Lambda
aws.amazon.com
Exploring AWS Lambda Web Functions for building web applications | Amazon Web Services
Run a standard Node.js web server on AWS Lambda with Lambda Web Functions, a new type of Lambda function. Deploy it with one command or AWS CloudFormation and get a public HTTPS endpoint with no adapter layer and no servers to manage. See how one execution environment handles many concurrent requests and how active-CPU billing keeps the cost of waiting low.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026
kael.tech.blog/2026/10/17/my-experi… Lots of nitty gritty details on tuning local LLMs in this article. TLDR; inference software configuration can matter almost as much as hardware. A poorly chosen backend can make a capable local system appear unusable. #AI #LLM […]
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Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026
TLDR: Use AI to become smarter instead of just more productive #AI #career www.bitfish.in/dont-use-ai-to-avoid…
bitfish.in
Don't use AI to avoid thinking. Use it to think better.
TLDR: Use AI to become smarter instead of just more productive Using LLMs for Agentic workflows and work delegation in general seems to be dominating online mind-share currently. However, I find that the most useful feature of using AI professionally and personally is not as a tool I outsource work or research to, but as a teacher in the Socratic mode. Don’t use AI to remove the need for you to think; use it instead as a partner to sharpen your ability to think. The better use for AI is to use it to learn and improve yourself rather than to diminish your mental capacity through over-delegation.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026
Code throughput is up, but quality is down. #AI #programming #coding #softwaredevelopment www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-w…
faros.ai
The AI Engineering Report 2026: The AI Acceleration Whiplash - Ten Takeaways
What two years of telemetry data from 22,000 developers reveals about AI's real impact on developer productivity, code quality, and business risk in 2026.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026
"Their interpretation is that AI shifts effort rather than removing it: less typing code, more writing prompts, reading generated output, checking it for correctness, and fitting it into an existing codebase." Basically, if AI is taking over the easy work, then all that remains are the hard […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026
Platform engineers need to look for signals on what to build next from four different sources: * Deficiencies in the system * User requirements * Organizational OKRs * Industry developments The trick is to filter out these signals and focus on the ones offering the most user/business value […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026
Docker's proposal for an open specification for sandboxing AI agents and distributing them as OCI compliant images. #AI #LLM #Docker www.docker.com/blog/docker-sandbox-…
docker.com
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026
A relatively small 4B LLM can be trained to become a specialized query optimizer by measuring the performance of the queries it generates against an actual database. This demonstrates: 1. The utlity of open-weight models which you give you a head-start in training more specialized models for […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026
Purely technical skills have become commoditized, so soft skills now become much more important. Now more that ever, 'Ownership' and 'Judgement' matter. A business still needs people who can be relied upon to successfully execute a task without supervision and without follow-up. We need to focus […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026
We still don't understand model generalization in training. Training a model to do 'bad' things (like writing insecure code) can cause it to start behaving badly in other ways (like expressing admiration for Hitler). However, RLVR against a graded task where a model learned to cheat to beat the […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026
System One models like Jev (docs.typesafe.ai/introduction) are taking off. These models (named after Daniel Kahneman's “System 1 / System 2” model of thinking where system 1 is quick and intuitive) are optimized to generate fast responses for classifications, scores, or yes/no judgments […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026
Further signs that the state of the art is moving towards a Mixture of Models architecture. These guys have some small models which can run directly on an edge device (laptop, phone, etc.). Freemium licensing. #AI #LLM #LocalLLM #SLM desertant.com/blog/introducing-dese…
desertant.com
Desert Ant Labs: local, fast models that run on device
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026
The author exhaustively analyzes the Qwen 3.8:27B model at different levels of quantization to see at what point accuracy drops below a minimal threshold. #AI #LLM #Qwen #localai #localllm kaitchup.substack.com/p/qwen38-27b-…
kaitchup.substack.com
Qwen3.8 27B GGUF Benchmark: Q4 to Q1 Accuracy and Token Efficiency
15 GGUFs, 150M+ tokens
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026
A rumour of a bug seems to be all that agents need to exploit a security issue in a code base. The author found his server under attack within minutes of posting a PR with a fix, which shows that public repos are being monitored for just such disclosures. The fix for this is unclear, but we're […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026
#AI #AISlop #LLM www.anildash.com/2026/08/21/ai-slop…
anildash.com
Why shaming people about AI slop isn’t enough to stop Big AI - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2026
Tried the same as above with muse-glimmer:30b. The output is **much** better. Only 67 lines of python, no errors, a proper board and straight-forwards input. I'm guessing Qwen 3.8 is benchmark optimized. #AI #LLM #Qwen #Muse #LocalLLM
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026
OK, I ran my usual quick coding test of having #qwen 3.8 whip up a console tic-tac-toe game in python. I have to say, that I am *not* impressed. The file is around 178 lines long, but the first pass had a syntax error, which I had the #LLM fix. When the game did run, it did not display the board […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026
Qwen 3.827b is a significant improvement according to the benchmarks (artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-…). You can Simon Willison's analysis of the model here as well: simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/qwen-…
simonwillison.net
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
Friday’s big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba’s Qwen research lab. I’ve been looking forward to this one: 27B is an …
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026
I ran my usual quick speed check on muse-glimmer:30b and qwen3.8:27b in Ollama with a quick “what are your capabilities?” Output speed: * muse-glimmer:30b * eval rate: 1.85 tokens/s * qwen3.8:27b * eval rate: 1.42 tokens/s Two observations: 1. Muse-Glimmer doesn't say anything about its […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026
A really fast, really smol hardware-isolated Linux VM. This is one level of isolation above using a containerization environment like Docker or Podman. Good for running AI Agents in a safe sandbox. #AI #LLM #LocalLLM #VM #Agents #Coding #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #Docker #Podman […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026
BetterWright is a Playwright-based browser layer optimized for AI agents with persistent sessions, compressed/diffable snapshots, policy-guarded networking, credential vaults, CAPTCHA/human handoff, and proof screenshots. Compared to Playwright, it's more focused towards being run by autonomous […]
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Niki @nikitonsky.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026
“The thing that made open source maintenance joyful was that someone cared enough about your work to try to improve it. You mentored them. They learned. The code got better. The community grew. That's the social contract. AI slop doesn't add work. It replaces human connection with mechanized […]
mastodon.online
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026
I find these kind of comparisons both fascinating and frustrating. There's so much variability in the output of these AI slot (slop?) machines that even small differences in setup and prompts can have drastic differences in output; with even more differences between runs! Just keep pulling the […]
mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026
The linked post is specific to context compaction in Pi, but the process and impacts will be similar in other agents. Of special note is that you lose any cost savings from context caching at the model end if you compact the context, since the context history has changed. However, the overall […]
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Original post on mastodon.social
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Simon Willison @simon.fedi.simonwillison.net.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026
The new Qwen 3.7 27B, running as a 17GB GGUF in LM Studio on my M5 Max MacBook Pro, just drew me the best pelican riding a bicycle I've seen from any model that runs on my laptop It did take nearly 21 minutes to generate, and used 22,276 reasoning […] [Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net]
The pelican has the right shaped beak. The red bicycle has the correct shape of frame. The pelican's wing reaches the handlebars. It has legs on both side of the bicycle. There is a pleasing set of clouds, birds, sun, grass and shadow on the image, plus motion lines behind but not in front of the bird.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026
DSPy describes itself as a Python framework for building AI systems as structured signatures rather than raw prompts. I'm not convinced that this extra layer of abstraction adds more than you lose in transparency about what's actually being sent to the model. I'm curious if anyone here has […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026
Microsoft eXecution Containers (MXC) are an opensource, cross platform execution sandbox for running untrusted code (esp. AI agents). Still under development, but worth keeping an eye on. #AI #LLM #LocalLLM #vibecoding #coding #softwaredevelopment github.com/microsoft/mxc
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026
A quick and dirty comparison of llama.cpp with ollama. The model used is `gemma4:e2b` and the prompt is a simple 'hi'. Thinking mode is on. Running the direct CLI mode for both. * llama.cpp: `Generation: 12.5 t/s` * ollama: `eval rate: 10.17 tokens/s` This matches the expect 20%-25% speed up […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026
This is a bit of a specious argument. No one is arguing that Local models can compete with frontier ones head-to-head. There's no way a 12B or even 30B parameter model is going to outperform the multi-trillion parameter monsters running on top tier hardware. The question is, is a local model […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026
Using Harmony OS as a political statement #android #harmonyos #infosec #us #uspol #China #hwawei indi.ca/how-i-ditched-apple-and-goo…
indi.ca
How I Ditched Apple and Google For Harmony (OS)
Journey from the West
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026
Just something to keep in mind when you're tuning your local LLM setup. The size of your context can really eat up your RAM! Small Models (~8B Parameters) Context size KV Ram used 4K (Default) ~0.5 GB 8K ~1.0 GB 32K ~4.0 GB 64K ~8.0 GB 128K ~16.0 GB Medium Models (~14B to 32B Parameters) […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026
Agent Plugins from Vercel are a new vendor-neutral standard for packaging Agent Skills and MCP servers into a single portable plugin. #AI #LLM #skills #MCP vercel.com/blog/introducing-agent-p…
vercel.com
Introducing Agent Plugins
Agent Plugins 1.0.0 is an open, vendor-neutral specification for packaging Agent Skills and MCP servers into distributable plugins that compatible AI agent clients can discover and load.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026
A deep dive into what is sent across when you use Codex. No spectacular revelations here but it's still interesting. #AI #LLM #Codex www.0xkato.xyz/what-codex-actually-…
0xkato.xyz
What Codex Actually Sends to the Model
I recorded the requests Codex generated for a 16-character prompt and measured what changed as it loaded instructions, exposed tools, read files, ran commands, received images, and compacted its history
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2026
A short primer on Postgresql index types. #coding #softwaredevelopment #database #postgresql levelup.gitconnected.com/postgres-i…
levelup.gitconnected.com
Postgres Index Types Explained: B-tree, GIN, BRIN, and Operators
In my post about JSON and JSONB I told you to create a GIN index with jsonb_path_ops and moved on, because that post was about a column…
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026
I don't work with chatbots, but this is a good article about how Airbnb used Eval Driven Development (EDD - kind of like Test Driven Development (TDD)) to get a handle on testing non-deterministic AI solutions. #AI #LLM #Evals #EDD #Coding #SoftwareDevelopment […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026
OpenCLI lets you interact with your browser (using your logged in sessions) via the command line. This means you can automate your web usecases or hook up an AI model to carry out tasks against websites. It's kind of like Playwrite MCP, but targeted more towards scripting than maybe QA or full […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026
I like the core idea here, which is basically, "Don't have the AI run your software. Use software to run the AI." The point is to treat the LLM as a smart, isolated function inside regular, predictable code. You make calls to the LLM only when a choice is needed and then drop back into regular […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026
TLDR; Quantization is no longer a dirty trick but a standard way to reduce size. It may not make things faster, but it very likely reduces size with little to no reduction in quality. 2-bit models are slightly worse. 3-bit depends a lot on details - but for 4-bit ones and above, the quality is […]
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026
'Nono', a zero-latency sandbox in seconds, with minimal setup. Seems like a quicker and cleaner solution than using Docker, Podman or a full VM. The only issue is that there is no native support for Windows. You will need to use WSL. #AI #LLM #Agents #security nono.sh
nono.sh
Secure, capability-based runtime for AI agents | nono
Capability-based agent runtime with fine-grained policies . Brokering access directly within the agent's operating context.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026
Updates to context engineering for Claude 5.x generation models. While probably not 1-1 applicable across all frontier models, I'm sure these learnings will be similar for others as well. #AI #LLM #Claude claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-co…
claude.com
The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026
This would seem like good news for individual workers, but it's also another pin in the AI valuations bubble where trillions of dollars are riding on the dream of replacing all white collar workers. Not that I'm shedding any tears for Clammy Sammy or Wario Dario. #AI #OpenAI #Anthropic […]
mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026
One of the sectors which is going to explode (even more) in importance in the AI era is Cyber Security. In a world where we're still dealing with ancient attack vectors like XSS and SQL injection, we now have a whole pandora's box full of security vulnerabilities opening up. For example, 'Slop […]
mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026
#openweb #smallWeb #selfhosting bellkiosk.website/blog/reasons-to-w…
bellkiosk.website
95 reasons for having your own website
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026
Very clever and elegant. #canbus #electronics #networking #ethernet youtube.com/watch?v=QTTCqGtT6I4
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026
I for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords... #AI #LLM #US #FOSS #China #opensource thenextweb.com/news/z-ai-data-centr… werd.io/american-ai-is-locked-down-…
thenextweb.com
Z.AI built a giant AI data centre on Chinese-made chips
Chinese lab Z.AI has completed a 1GW data centre running only Chinese-made chips to train its GLM models, with no Nvidia inside. What it signals for AI.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026
Two things stood out for me: 1. This research is further validation of the approach of using a frontier model (or a human being!) to do the planning while a less capable (read, cheaper) model does the implementation. Costs went from $9,373 to $411 in one run. 2. They seem to have broken across […]
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Dan Gillmor @dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026
The New York Times has (somewhat belatedly) discovered that Google is an enemy of the open Internet. This is an important piece, because the Times still is an agenda-setter in journalism. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/technolo… (Google spokes-parrot denies it all […]
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