The discourse on “AI” systems, chat bots, “assistants” and “research helpers” is defined by a lot of future promises. Those systems are disfunctional or at least not working great right now but there’s the promise of things getting better in the future. Which is how we often perc … | Continue reading
I got one talk proposal accepted at this year’s re:publica but two submissions didn’t go through review. I’ll archive them here (if someone has an idea where to submit them I’d of course be happy to try): The Nowhere Generation – Are we lost? Short description: The Declaration of … | Continue reading
For a while I have been arguing that maybe there are some issues with the whole “Open*” movements, their founding myths and ideologies (see for example my talk at Fluconf). This criticism comes from a place of love. All the writing on this blog is licensed CC-BY-SA to allow other … | Continue reading
I am not an active user of so-called “AI-Assistants”, neither for coding nor writing nor research. I constantly test and evaluate those systems (for my private analyses as well as for my day job) but they don’t really integrate well with my workflow and thinking. There are many r … | Continue reading
When saying something, anything the context of what you say is at least as important as the literal group of words you are saying or writing. Context is a big word. In spans the history of the person speaking as well as the time and place or publication that that person choses to … | Continue reading
One of the most popular memes when it comes to talking about the tech sector is Alex Blechman’s tweet about the Torment Nexus: One can interpret the tweet in a bunch of ways. As a comment on the level of reading comprehension that billionaire tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg or … | Continue reading
On February 1st I had the privilege of getting to speak at the first Fluconf about Open Source and why that whole movement might not do as much good for as as we might want it to. It’s not that Open Source is “bad” but that it is sometimes presented as a solution to sociopolitica … | Continue reading
The headline is of course a bit of a provocation. Not all Innovation is a distraction, there are many areas in which meaningful work happens any day to generate some form of relevant new product or process or technology. But there are also so many areas in our lives, so many prob … | Continue reading
I am quoted at length in a new article on Ars Technica (a website I have been reading for years and years) on an in-depth article on tarpits for AI crawlers. But people who know my MO will already guess that even being quoted at length is only the tip of the iceberg and Ashley [… … | Continue reading
Some of you might have heard the phrase “corporations don’t want to make money, they want to make all the money” (I think I heard it first from James Stephanie Sterling talking about video game publishers). This thinking is a bit of a companion thought to the delusion that within … | Continue reading
The “Free Our Feeds” campaign was launched today and something about it is off. It’s trying to raise money (at least 4 Mio and up to 30 Mio USD) for ATProto (the protocol at the core of Bluesky) so “the community” can standardize the thing and “build stuff”. Plus the project want … | Continue reading
(This s a bit navel-gazing and not a relevant essay about anything. Just a bit of thinking about myself on a weird day. So you probably just wanna skip this one.) People have very different ways of feeling themselves being in the world. I think it’s mostly something one develops … | Continue reading
Today (November 8th, 2024) Refused released a new version of their groundbreaking “The Shape of Punk to Come” Album based on cover versions of the original tracks. I really enjoy cover versions of tracks I already love because they show a different perspective on a piece of art, … | Continue reading
Paris Marx invited me to his influential Tech Won’t Save Us podcast to connect two seemingly distinct stories: The WordPress collapse (that I also talked with Hagen about on his podcast) and the new OSI “Open Source AI Definition” (that is not Open Source at all). I think we have … | Continue reading
So Hagen Terschüren, a German journalist who does a lot of work on tech- and internet related topics has his own new podcast that he invited me to. The episode is titled “Digital Infrastructure and Why Open Source Is Not Enough Anymore” an can be downloaded or listened to on Hage … | Continue reading
In a recent earnings call Sundar Pichai claimed that at Google now 25% of Code is AI generated (“and then reviewed and accepted by engineers”). In the AI boosterism parts of the web (so basically X and LinkedIn) this number was celebrated: Even Google does AI code generation. So … | Continue reading
The OSI has presented their definition of Open Source AI and a closer reading only shows that "Open Source AI" probably just isn't a thing that can exist. | Continue reading
Meta recently had their big “this is what we are doing” conference and in all the noise was one very interesting fact. As the Verge writes: If you think avoiding AI-generated images is difficult as it is, Facebook and Instagram are now going to put them directly into your feeds. … | Continue reading
When I was young, Germany still had conscription meaning that every (able bodied, there were many reasons the military wouldn’t accept you) boy/young man would be forced to spend a few months doing military service after school (or in some cases after job training). The amount of … | Continue reading
If you’ve read me for a while you know that – when it comes to tech reporting/talking about tech – I have been around the block a few times. Talked about some hypes, cut some supposedly magic technologies down to size. Sometimes even defending or advocating for certain tech. Afte … | Continue reading
Meta's Open Letter titled "Europe needs regulatory certainty on AI" is bullshit. | Continue reading
Is "AI" art impossible? Or is that just a way to exclude people from making art? I think both perspectives are wrong: It's about materials. | Continue reading
“By some estimates, more than 80 percent of AI projects fail—twice the rate of failure for information technology projects that do not involve AI.” – The Root Causes of Failure for Artificial Intelligence Projects and How They Can Succeed A study by the RAND Corporation (found vi … | Continue reading
Especially in IT and software development numbers keep popping up about “savings” through AI. Amazon for example claims to have “saved” 4500 person years of work. These numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt and shouldn’t be interpreted as “oh, we will save massive amounts … | Continue reading
Mozilla.ai did a study on generative AI trends and their methodology shows that they should never be allowed near anything AI. Ever. | Continue reading
Tech Won’t Save Us is probably one of the most influential podcasts in the space of critical, deep analysis of technologies and their social and political effects. That’s why it has been such an honour and pleasure to be a guest on it. In this week’s episode we talk about Europe … | Continue reading
Under the motto “Who Cares” Re:Publica gathered a few thousand people in Berlin and I got to give a talk continuing the path I started out on with my last two talks in 2022 and 2023. Titled “Empty Innovation” I tried outlining my understanding of the patterns of the weird technol … | Continue reading
One of the more reasonable use cases for modern “AI” (statistical pattern matching and generating machines) is to support doctors in diagnostics, especially in the evaluation of complex data sets / documents in order to determine potentially dangerous abnormalities. It’s a proble … | Continue reading
I just got an email from a store I bought something at about 4 months ago. It happens, they have my mail, somewhere in their fine print they said that they were gonna send me product recommendations or I clicked a thing because it looked like the box you have to click to get the … | Continue reading
While the crowd at sxsw2024 booing a sizzle reel of people either promising the beauty of the future "AI" will bring or claiming it to be "without alternative" is funny and went viral for all the right reasons, this event speaks to a deeper shift in perception. #ai #genAI #luddis … | Continue reading
In tech-related discourse “decentralization”, “Open Source”, “democratization”, “federation” have become weird terms. Not because of the specific architectural or technological concept they are describing but as a way to hide the fact that the speaker thinks that “markets” are th … | Continue reading
So when I moved to Berlin a few years ago I probably “used” the city more than living in it. Like I enjoyed (and still enjoy) all the cultural, social, etc. offerings but I didn’t care too much about where I lived – as long as the connection to public transportation were good. If … | Continue reading
I wrote an essay about the tensions of "AI" and democracy because I don't believe their respective values and goals fully match. | Continue reading
Automattic is secretly selling the stuff their users wrote and drew and created to "AI" companies to fuck up the web a bit more for a few bucks. But the problem goes deeper. | Continue reading
Currently when talking about very big large language models even people who want to be taken seriously talk a lot about bio or chemical weapons: Will "AI" systems make creating bio weapons too easy? But is that a real danger? Will ChatGPT give terrorists new weapons to attack us … | Continue reading
Even before “lean” became the battlecry of everyone making work a bit more annoying companies were focused on being efficient. Optimizing processes, reducing waste to squeeze more profit from the materials and labor put into their respective processes. And in that context this fo … | Continue reading
The political Europe is very busy currently: Having passed the GDPR a few and the DMA even fewer years ago its currently in the process of debating the so-called “AI Act”, a piece of legislation aimed at the developers of so-called “AI” systems trying to enforce “European Values” … | Continue reading
I understand that OpenAI/Microsoft can’t build ChatGPT within our legal framework. Well they could but it would be prohibitively expensive (it already is now without paying the people who did the work). But I missed the part where that is our problem as a society. This! I am t … | Continue reading
The reaction to OpenAI's admission to be unable to train their systems without breaking copyright sometimes misses the point a bit: OpenAI is not a normal organization. | Continue reading
If you go to secondary school in Germany for the last 2 years you have to pick a bunch of specializations, subjects you want to focus on to a degree. You spend more time on these subjects and your final grade is strongly influenced by your results in those courses. When I picked … | Continue reading
When I was a kid / teenager I wanted to play the guitar. Like many people that age. Got myself a guitar and everything but never really practiced at all in any meaningful way. I didn’t so much want to play the guitar but I wanted the reward I associated with the output, the cultu … | Continue reading
I think there are a lot of good points in Mozilla’s “Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness“. Yes, relying on proprietary vendors to provide security is not the right path and we should know this because we’ve had that debate decades ago about IT security and open source: Open … | Continue reading
For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings fo … | Continue reading
I was on a panel yesterday and the narrative of “exponential growth in LLMs” came up. The story goes like this: LLMs have in recent years doubled in size every few months, so they’ll get better/smarter etc. and we’ll have to base our model of thinking about them, their regulation … | Continue reading
Recently 25 experts and me released an open letter to the US Senate and House of Representatives asking for better regulation of the crypto market. Being what it is this letter had to argue on the basic fundamentals of the underlying tech without going into a lot of technical det … | Continue reading
(This text is very long. Maybe too long. You can find a PDF and an EPUB of it below.The current version of this text will always live at https://web3.tante.cc) By tante Version 1.0Date: Dec 17th 2021License: CC-BY-SA 4.0 Introduction I had hoped that I wouldn’t have to write this … | Continue reading
“Robots will replace us!” is a very popular meme for those who don’t want robots or “AI” to replace human… | Continue reading
Automated statistics systems are all the rage today. But not under that heading and name. They are called “artificial intelligence”.… | Continue reading