[drop_cap]E[/drop_cap]veryone wants a pocket oracle. They type their question into Claude or ChatGPT and wait for the One Correct Answer™ to descend from the cloud. When it’s wrong—which it eventually is, because prompting is like rolling dice in a wind tunnel—they announce that the entire field is a scam. “Stochastic parrot!” they crow, as if […]
[drop_cap]N[/drop_cap]ot so long ago, when you hit a weird bug, the ritual was always the same: Google the error message → pray to the old gods → land on a 2012 StackOverflow thread answered by someone named DenverCoder9. If the stars aligned, there was a code snippet that almost fit. You copied it, pasted it, […]
Social media is so insanely fragmented right now it’s honestly comical. Remember 2009? (15 years ago … how?) I joined Twitter and it felt like the future. Even Facebook—yes, Facebook—was kinda usable back then. Real humans having real conversations instead of performing for the algorithm. Now? It’s just oceans of AI slop, engagement-farming rage bait, […]
The better AI models become at certain things the more fun it is to find things they horribly fail at. My new favorite low brow “benchmark”: draw the Hebrew letter Aleph in SVG format. It should be pretty simple in practice. Three lines: one long diagonal, one shorter curved line at the bottom (with optional […]
2025 UPDATE: I changed my mind about a lot of this. I am no longer using Spotify. Here’s why. [drop_cap]N[/drop_cap]ot too long ago, before image macros and reaction videos roamed the planet, human beings created mix-tapes to express complicated feelings or share their favorite songs with family and friends. These custom compilations of songs were recorded […]
Weißt du noch, wie es damals war? Als die meisten Webseiten noch öden Orten glichen, auf die man oft nur durch Zufall stieß — arglos zusammengezimmerte Codegeflechte, die irgendwo in der digitalen Wildnis darauf warteten, sich ruckartig auf flimmernden Bildschirmen zusammenzusetzen, Pixel für Pixel für Pixel. Weit vor der atemlosen Hast des Ständig Neuen, dem […]
These days my weeks are filled with manuscript writing, proof reading, editing, formatting and everything else that follows. While it’s very satisfying to immerse myself in longer projects that take many months to complete, I’ve also rediscovered the fun in blogging, the refreshment of forming an idea within one or three days and publishing it […]
Als ich das erste Mal mit jungen Jahren Bilder von Jerusalem im Fernsehen sah, war ich überrascht. Da waren Straßen zu sehen, asphaltiert wie in Deutschland, und die Menschen trugen Jeans und Tshirts. Ich hörte Sirenen, sah brennende Autos und Frauen mit schmerzverzerrten Gesichtern. Jerusalem, das war für mich ein Wort, das ich nur aus […]
Yesterday, I stumbled over an interesting recording from the re:publica Berlin 2012 about the changing face of publishing titled: “What happens when authors circumvent publishing houses“. Especially noteworthy I found Leander Wattig‘s introductory talk whose salient points I’d like to summarize here for non-German speaking readers: The Default Setting authors need money to “buy time” […]