Field notes on local-first agents, legible runs and the tooling that keeps an operator in the loop.https://sondalab.eu/https://sondalab.eu/blog/owning-the-machine/https://sondalab.eu/blog/owning-the-machine/Every agent you run on someone else's hardware is a decision you have delegated. Here is what changes when the machine is yours.Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-clock-ran-out-in-brussels/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-clock-ran-out-in-brussels/On 2 August the Commission stopped asking and started enforcing. The interesting part is not the fines — it is that a regulator can now demand access to a model.Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-machines-took-the-majority/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-machines-took-the-majority/Cloudflare's June figures put bots at 57.5% of HTML traffic. For the first time the web is majority machine, and most of those machines are reading, not indexing.Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/legibility-is-a-feature/https://sondalab.eu/blog/legibility-is-a-feature/An agent that cannot show its work is not autonomous, it is unaccountable. The difference is entirely in the tooling around it.Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-loophole-has-an-address/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-loophole-has-an-address/You cannot ship the chip to Beijing. Nothing stops Beijing from renting time on the chip in Singapore. Washington has noticed, and the fix is harder than the ban.Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/nobody-wants-it-next-door/https://sondalab.eu/blog/nobody-wants-it-next-door/Seven in ten Americans oppose a data centre near them. The AI buildout has hit the one constraint capital cannot route around — the people who live where the land is cheap.Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-context-you-did-not-choose/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-context-you-did-not-choose/Most bad agent output is not a model failure. It is a context failure, and context is the one part of the stack you fully control.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-exploit-wrote-itself/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-exploit-wrote-itself/Google's threat intel group published the first credible account of an AI-developed zero-day used in a real attack. The capability was never the question — the cost was.Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/everyone-finances-everyone-elses-compute/https://sondalab.eu/blog/everyone-finances-everyone-elses-compute/Hyperscaler capex is heading for three quarters of a trillion this year. The argument that settles whether it is sane is a dispute about how fast a GPU stops being worth running.Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-test-stopped-measuring/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-test-stopped-measuring/Nearly half of the benchmarks in a 60-benchmark study are saturated, and the rate rises with age. That is not a capability result — it is a broken instrument.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-pilot-that-never-landed/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-pilot-that-never-landed/MIT found 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots delivered no measurable P&L impact. The report is explicit that the models were not the problem.Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/a-hundred-and-thirty-two-gigawatts/https://sondalab.eu/blog/a-hundred-and-thirty-two-gigawatts/Global data centre power demand is set to rise 27% this year. The rack density number is the one that should worry you, not the total.Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/there-is-no-fix-for-prompt-injection/https://sondalab.eu/blog/there-is-no-fix-for-prompt-injection/Adaptive attacks bypass essentially every published defence. Five Eyes issued joint guidance in May. The honest architecture assumes the injection lands.Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/nine-problems-a-few-hundred-dollars-each/https://sondalab.eu/blog/nine-problems-a-few-hundred-dollars-each/DeepMind's prover closed nine open Erdős problems and 44 OEIS conjectures. The success rate was 2.5%, and both numbers matter.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-weights-came-from-hangzhou/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-weights-came-from-hangzhou/Four of the five leading open-weight models come from Chinese labs. "Open source means second best" stopped being true, and the licences deserve a closer look than the benchmarks.Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-ladder-lost-its-bottom-rung/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-ladder-lost-its-bottom-rung/No mass unemployment, no collapse — but hiring for 22-to-25-year-olds in exposed fields has slowed, and entry-level roles now ask for senior judgement.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/nobody-signed-the-picture/https://sondalab.eu/blog/nobody-signed-the-picture/Content Credentials became the obvious way to satisfy the EU's labelling rules. It still cannot tell you anything about an unsigned file — and a signed one is not proof either.Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-reactor-is-a-purchase-order/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-reactor-is-a-purchase-order/Hyperscalers have committed 10 to 13 GW of nuclear capacity across more than a dozen deals. Most of it restarts old plants; the new reactors arrive after 2030.Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/one-and-a-half-billion-for-the-library/https://sondalab.eu/blog/one-and-a-half-billion-for-the-library/A court called AI training fair use and Anthropic still paid a record settlement. The distinction it turned on is the one every lab should have been watching.Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/a-thousand-robots-mostly-watching/https://sondalab.eu/blog/a-thousand-robots-mostly-watching/Humanoids reached real factory floors this year. No manufacturer has sustained a deployment above the low hundreds of units, and most robots come with a supervisor.Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-microscope-turned-inward/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-microscope-turned-inward/MIT named mechanistic interpretability a breakthrough technology of 2026. We can now find the feature for an emotion and push on it. Nobody is claiming we understand the model.Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-friend-that-was-a-product/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-friend-that-was-a-product/California's companion chatbot law took effect in January. Minnesota is weighing an outright ban for under-18s. The lawsuits that forced this are the reason to read the details.Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/six-cents-a-million-tokens/https://sondalab.eu/blog/six-cents-a-million-tokens/Inference costs have fallen faster than almost any computing commodity in history. The interesting consequence is not cheapness — it is that the frontier stopped being the default.Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://sondalab.eu/blog/the-states-versus-the-order/https://sondalab.eu/blog/the-states-versus-the-order/A December executive order set out to preempt state AI law using a litigation task force and $42 billion in broadband funding. The states enacted 109 AI laws anyway.Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT