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This is the second TechFreedom newsletter. Today we’ll be sharing posts from both Doug and Tom on our tech and a bunch of interesting links we’ve found over the last few weeks.
We’re now two thirds of the way through our first pilot cohort and are learning so much for future cohorts. We’re also pleased to be running a very short ’taster’ session as part of TechNext in June, so if you are in the North East of England do come along - https://www.technext.co.uk/programme/events/tech-for-good-hub-kow5t
One of the reasons we started TechFreedom as a programme is because gaining tech freedom, i.e. reducing your risks and moving away from the default of big tech is because, well it’s not easy. If it was, people would have already done it. It takes more than just a list of alternatives, and we are very clear that this isn’t about purism, there is no judgement from us or anyone else on the cohort. And how could we judge? We are not perfect either. Although everything TechFreedom is ran on EU alternatives both Doug and Tom have other work, and use other things to do that. We think it is important to always be transparent about this, so we write about the tech we use, sort of as a ’tech disclaimer’ and also as a way for us to learn also. You can read about the tech we use below
A really good piece by James Martin on quitting big AI. We are in an interesting moment with AI currently, with constant changes to both models, their capabilities, their pricing and the motives of the larger players in this space. In this piece James writes about both the why you might want to quit, and also that maybe you don’t actually need the frontier models. There is also a nice shout out for Bearing (but we would have included the post anyway!)
Ok the headline might be hyperbole…or is it? Anthropic, in a desperate need for more compute has signed a deal with SpaceX owned by a certain Musk. Not only that, but SpaceX runs much of it’s data centres on gas powered turbines. Environmental concerns are not one of the ‘scored’ TechFreedom lenses, but it is one we talk about in the cohort. This is big and troubling news
Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal
If you’ve ever been to Lidl you’ll know that the middle isle can turn up all manner of random things. Gardening equipment, power tools, furniture, sports equipment…you name it, it may be there, you just never know. But one thing I wasn’t expecting was to find Lidl hosting tech infrastructure for a major bank. Yes, Lidl is now in the tech sector Dutch central bank chooses Lidl for European Cloud
An interesting data viz project making visible the cloud infrastructure much of the world relies on.
As mentioned the first TechFreedom cohort is two thirds of the way through. If you are interested in hearing about the next cohort, you can look out for updates in this newsletter or you can drop your email here and we will let you know when the next one is launching.
That is all for now. Thanks for reading. Tom.
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