Pluralistic: Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (11 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe "urgently" needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard

Vibe coding Nothing’s apps is fun, until you try to make them useful by Robert Hart

The second issue is a potentially fatal hurdle for a project like this: me. I’ve been reporting on AI tools for years, and one pattern keeps repeating—no matter how capable a system is, the hardest part is knowing how to use it to its potential. I immediately ran into that using Nothing’s Essential App Builder. It seems very capable and has great potential, but I didn’t always know what I wanted, and when I did, I didn’t always know how to ask for it. An ecosystem built on vibes is a great idea, but sometimes vibes aren’t enough.

Good to know that there may yet be a future for us techies.

LinkedIn is too damn much.

If you found something funny, just say this was funny. Not this was funny, let me tell you why. I don’t want a caption for an image.

LinkedIn is full of lessons. I don’t want lessons. Let me think of the lessons, just tell the damn story.

How iPhones Made a Surprising Comeback in China by Zeyi Yang

But Apple’s product strategy wasn’t the only important factor here. The iPhone 17 was priced low enough to qualify for a massive electronics subsidy program launched by the Chinese government last year. To help stimulate the economy, Beijing spent some $43 billion subsidizing domestic purchases of electronics, appliances, and cars in 2025. Smartphones sold for less than 6,000 RMB (about $860) were eligible for up to a 15 percent discount. Apple listed the iPhone 17 in China for 5,999 RMB, ensuring price-sensitive buyers would be able to benefit from the government policy.

A combination of good product, subsidies by the government and people being in the upgrade cycle since their last phones were the iPhone 13 series.

Stop generating, start thinking - localghost

In the wake of the Horizon scandal, where innocent Post Office staff went to prison because of bugs in Post Office software that led management to think they’d been stealing money, we need to be thinking about our software more than ever: we need accountability in our software.

Nice write up. I see the same points that I’ve seen elsewhere. I don’t think it’s the engineers driving this revolution though. It’s the business leaders doing that. There is a fomo in the industry - people are committed to AI without having any use case for it.

Regarding accountability it will fall on the reverse-centaurs, the people left to deal with the large amounts of AI generated work. Nobody will say Claude made a mistake, it’s the employees who made mistakes by not verifying what was generated. It will not be a great place, but we are barreling toward it.