It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the world. I mean, look at … everything. Massive ongoing wars everywhere, Fascism on the rise, exploding inequality. Shit is fucked up and more fucked up on a global scale than it ever was in my life time (I was born in 1979). And with the media lan … | Continue reading
After a lot of turmoil and their most vocal user base protesting about how Mozilla keeps pushing “AI” into the browser in many weird ways they now released the “AI Killswitch” they have been talking about for a while. Which is good. Those features should have been “opt-in” from t … | Continue reading
With studies upon studies showing that actual measurable productivity gains through “AI” (which these days basically means chatbots) are really hard to come by and that “workslop” (meaning the extra work created for the rest of the organization by one person using “AI” lowering t … | Continue reading
I send in two talk proposals to this year’s re:publica and since one never know what might get accepted and what not, I thought I’d archive both here. If one or both gets rejected, maybe I can find another home for them. The Future is Decomputing: An Approach For More Humane Tech … | Continue reading
Clothes have never been cheaper. These days a t-shirt is often cheaper that a decent cup of tea in a cafe. The wonders of capitalism. At least that is how it is often described. And when you point at the underpaid, gruesome labor that people in poorer regions of the planet have t … | Continue reading
When computers entered the homes it was often as toys or toy-like artifacts: These machines, usually called “home computers“, were often used like gaming consoles with magazines giving you code to type in to have simple games on them. Their use was limited to people who wanted to … | Continue reading
In 2025 I have spend some time to untangle my digital life from billionaire/fascist (that Venn diagram is becoming more of a circle each and every day) run platforms. So at the beginning of 2026 maybe it makes sense to talk a bit about what I did, why I went certain ways and what … | Continue reading
I am not a talented person, I’ve never been called “gifted” or anything like that. Anything I can do, anything I achieved took a lot of work and stubbornness to achieve. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that I’m “selfmade” and that my position in society, my access to resource … | Continue reading
Abstractions are powerful tools. Given enough abstraction everything gets somewhat simple. Somewhat clear. Also somewhat wrong. Abstraction turns everything real, material, consequential into mostly nothing. The abstraction of “a relationship” hides all the love and care and desi … | Continue reading
I’m in the process of rewriting a talk I gave a few weeks ago in order to record it and publish it online. When I mentioned that to a friend who’s a filmmaker and knows how lighting and all that works he offered to help me doing it “right” so it doesn’t look like shit. […] | Continue reading
“The first model fakes the data, then the second model trains on the fake data. Any problems in the synthetic data set are amplified further. Then the second model — based on fake data — is used to treat real patients. This is, of course, all fine.” Today I want to take David Ger … | Continue reading
The journalist Karen Hao – who published an absolutely fantastic book about OpenAI called “Empire of AI” recently – coined (as far as I know) one of the best terms for describing modern “AI” systems: Everything Machines. “AI” systems are not framed as specific tools that solve sp … | Continue reading
Armin Ronacher, who is quite a well-known open source developer (especially in the Python community) and who would probably consider himself a very rational, pragmatic person when it comes to “AI” usage posted an interesting post on Mastodon today: Post by @mitsuhiko View on Mast … | Continue reading
If you are very rich – think multi-millionaire or billionaire – there is a thing you no longer experience really: Hearing no. Sure there will always be people on social media yelling at you and what you did and what you stand for but in your daily life, your actual environment th … | Continue reading
I had a conversation with a friend who described sitting in a workshop where clients and the people they hired were working on problems. As you do. Happens in every consultingy kind of job. But what has totally become normalized is for the people hired, the “experts” to use ChatG … | Continue reading
As anyone who has ever seen anything I have created knows: I am not a designer. So take my reasoning and thinking here with a grain of salt. I do have many designers amongst my friends and I do think that a lot of software engineering falls within the domain of design to a certai … | Continue reading
The hype about the potentials (it’s always future potential, never real current use) of AI has discarded its last cycle (“reasoning models”/”deep research”, both terms being factually untrue and deeply deceiving at best) and moved to a new double whammy of “agentic AI” and “Vibe … | Continue reading
There’s this weird phrase “agentic AI” which looks weid. But it’s a sign for how bad the state of the bubble is: Software agents are a very old concept, they are simple systems provided with a target function to optimize that operate somewhat autonomously. This fits in well with … | Continue reading
I was on a panel on “AI” yesterday (was in German so I don’t link it i this post, specifics don’t matter too much) and a phrase came up that stuck with me on my way home (riding a bike is just the best thing for thinking). That phrase was AI systems are just tools […] | Continue reading
When people talk about “AI” these days – which depending on how healthy and well-adjusted your social environment is can be very little or if you are on LinkedIn all the fucking time – the main focus is on what is called “generative AI”, sometimes shortened to “genAI”. Generative … | Continue reading
After sharing Ed Zitron’s latest piece called “OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry” I got a few responses arguing in a similar way: People agree that “AI” and especially “generative AI” is a massive bubble that does not really make much sense – if you imply rational de … | Continue reading
For a research project I am currently evaluating all kinds of generative AI models (mostly for visual artifacts but some text based ones as well). There also is somewhat of a push at my employer to use those systems more because of “efficiency”. So we all know that LLMs fabricate … | Continue reading
The Open Source Initiative is doing … something again, now it’s working against regulation protecting people from certain uses of AI systems: In particular, previous drafts of the Code of Practice mandated acceptable use policies, and a prohibition of certain uses of the AI syste … | Continue reading
Hayao Miyasaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio known worldwide for their stunning, emotional, beautiful stories and movies. At the core of Studio Ghibli’s work is a deep engagement with questions of humanity. About what it means to be a human, abou … | Continue reading
So whenever you use some AI chatbot (regardless of the maker), it’s there. That motherfucking asterisk. Like look: Quote: “Gemini can make mistakes […] so double-check it.” I have a question (well multiple ones but let’s start with my biggest one): Why do we accept that? Say I or … | Continue reading
There is a popular meme in digital rights spaces when governments want to look into encrypted systems/communication. And because that’s basically impossible with perfectly implemented encryption schemes governments tend to ask for so-called “backdoors” or “key escrow” systems tha … | Continue reading
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