A strong argument written in German against the privatization of social media as a problem inflicted on us by unaccountable profit seeking corporations.
Tooze makes a coherent argument in this episode of Surplus why expropriation of the large landlords in Berlin makes economic sense. Morally it’s of course a no-brainer.
Why would anybody pay attention to what a German court says about something digital? The country has no idea and is behind by decades. Was the ruling delivered by fax machine?
Here’s an idea: I think video documentation of extremely risky behaviour (parkour, rooftopping etc.) and self-harm (mutilation, mukbang, ana) should be banned on all the major video platforms.
If LLMs are trained on GPL licensed code (and as it seems now they are trained on that and on pretty much everything else the companies can get their hands on), why doesn’t that make the LLMs and all the works they produce GPL licensed?
It should surprise nobody that ed tech is mostly an excuse to shovel money to whoever has an open line to the politicians making decisions at the moment.
Sovereign Tech Fund investing in KDE points towards some concerted effort into weaning Europe off big tech. KDE has come a long way and with a bunch more more pushes like this, it could become a more than worthy alternative to Windows.
I read some stuff by Zitron a while back and even back then it seemed untenable and divorced from reality aiming mostly to score points with an audience that’s more than eager to believe him.
Het is lastig te beschrijven hoe belangrijk en consequent Karin Spaink en haar schrijven waren voor Nederland en voor de digitale wereld waarin ook ik opgegroeid ben.
One person helping another because they have a relationship and the work needs doing. Sean frames these as workarounds. Necessary but awkward and illegible. But what if they’re not workarounds? What if they’re the actual thing?
After hearing so many good things anout it, we normal people finally get to use a SAP solution as well. I wonder how quickly they’ll get out a first version for us to test and how wonderfully usable it’s going to be.
One of my favorite episodes of Past Present Future with Mary Beard where she compares the unaccountable power of emperors of the past with today’s tech oligarchs.
Reducing kids’ exposure to the internet and social media is something that’s very tempting for governments who want to control and surveil everything that happens online.
Through a recommendation on Bluesky I came across the Ronzheimer podcast hosted by Paul Ronzheimer, the main journalist out of the Axel-Springer media house. Listening to him talk to German notables, it becomes clear that he’s not the sharpest knife in the block. There is no spark or wit in either of the two episodes I listened to. His questions are superficial and unoriginal. I don’t understand why anybody would listen to this.
Here’s a case for the people in Germany claiming that Datenschutz is never used to limit societal progress and that it doesn’t have a vast and debilitating chilling effect.
France leads the way enforcing the real laws that we have against abuse against the American platforms. Let’s push for many more governments to follow suit.
Europe has lots of significant industries and capabilities. There is nothing stopping us from having a competitive local cloud offering (except of course the lack of political will).
Germany desperately needs to be investing in its future, it needs equipment of all kinds. It needs infrastructure and it also needs to invest in human capital.
Like the NYT has walked back its reporting and continuously grovels for its regime, you can see the exact same behavior of uncritical non-journalism in mainstream outlets over here.
The CDU wants to abolish the right to work part-time in Germany. Most people don’t know that anybody here can ask to work part-time and if the company does not have a good reason to refuse it, they can’t.
Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.
Instead of being able to carry my digital ID in my phone wallet as is long overdue, here in Europe we just get lots of people going on and on about these or those privacy minutiae.
Ai Weiwei is right to be angry and lashes out in this barrage of scathing statements. That Zeit would not publish this is curious given the garbage that they’ve been wont to put out over the past year. However undirected, criticism of Germany is not appreciated by the Germans.
It’s not just Mamdani, it’s also Jewish leaders like Rabbi Moishe Indig who make me ashamed to live in Berlin. In comparison, our local political and religious leaders are so very bad.
His father is a university professor. His mother is a physician. Farritor seems to have been a child prodigy whose talents were recognized, encouraged, and incubated almost from the moment he hit puberty. He was supported by both his well-to-do family, his community, and a number of institutions that exist to identify and elevate gifted children.
The number of sources of authoritative information is indeed limited enough that the proposal of cryptographically tagging verified output is not that outlandish.
I read this paper right after I read the book by Piketty thinking that there would be some interesting economic debate. Unfortunately I was proved wrong and this seems to be exemplary of the stagnation of the economic field.
Musk’s attacks on British politics have been bizarre to witness. Imagine the richest man in the world waging an influence operation trying to put the far right in power in your country.