Microsoft cannot guarantee that European citizens’ data will not be transmitted, if requested, to US authorities. Neither can Google, Meta, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Oracle, Adobe, Dropbox, Zoom, Atlassian, Twilio, Salesforce, Cisco, Box, Slack, Anthropic, or any of the dozens of others I can’t think of right now.
One of the guys I met at my new job, when I pointed out that the software he’d developed lacked a shred of documentation and was impossible for new developers to manage, complained that requests always came to him as urgent, and so he quickly produced code—patching things up, not documenting or commenting, and neglecting privacy and security aspects—for the good of the company. Damn, for the good of the company!
Last August we visited the Netherlands. We based ourselves in Amsterdam and visited a few places and cities around there. I won’t write a review; it would be impossible to convey its beauty, its costs, its uniqueness, and its immersiveness. It was intense. That’s enough.
I was reading, somewhere online, but unfortunately I’ve lost track of it, a suggestion to me as a reader: “record your thoughts”.
If you apply a certain force to someone, expect a force of at least equal magnitude to be exerted on you. To paraphrase Newton’s third law, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Bringing the whole thing back to a less philosophical and low-level level, I could say that it’s absolutely foolish not to imagine that an action will always have consequences of equal or greater intensity.
I’m about to leave for the Netherlands. I’ll spend a few days there with my family. It was a coincidence: Amsterdam wasn’t on my bucket list, but I’m very happy to be going.