We have a saying in Montana: “You don’t have to be faster than the Grizzly bear. You just have to be faster than the guy running next to you.”

— Walter Kirn

Over on Substack, I’ve just published my analysis of last night’s explosive local election results here in Germany:

→ Eye on The Press: Our Shit’s All Fucked Up

So, machine learning is really getting creepy. I came across this post chain on Bluesky – or “Bisky”, as I like to call it, because its domain is bsky.social – where people were posting AI-generated images with the challenge “post your bluesky name and bio in ai and see what makes of it.” So I fired up Midjourney and prompted it with:

A portrait of fabsh, journalist & writer, freelance — "Understanding is a three-edged sword"

Here is what it came up with. It’s eerily accurate, I feel…

The EU wants to pass a horrible law and anybody who actually understands the technology involved thinks it’s a bad idea. And now it’s become obvious that this is because the lawmakers didn’t listen to experts on technology, but to experts on cashing out. My latest podcast episode:

→ The Private Citizen 160: The Lobbyists behind Chat Control

It turns out, that the EU’s push to completely abolish digital privacy might not actually be an altruistic move to save children from abuse. Several tech companies, including one headed by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, stand to profit substantially from the decision. Which is why they massively influenced it.

“Bumblebees”

Nikon D7100, AF-D Nikkor 35 mm ƒ/2 (ISO 320 • 1/4000 s • ƒ/2.0)

I’ve just updated my exercise log here on the site with current data and a corresponding visualisation. April data is only partial, because that was when I switched from Strava to tracking my own data.

Summer Lightning in the Rhineland

While I’m sitting here, working on my preparation of episode 160 of The Private Citizen, it occurs to me that I haven’t posted the previous episode from last week yet. So here goes:

→ The Private Citizen 159: Society Is Going to Hell in a Handbasket

How following the exodus of Germany’s worst YouTuber to TikTok opened a private hell of lolcows for me. To a point where I don’t think I understand society as a whole anymore. What is this shit? And where is it all going to end?

Getting cancelled on social media, as examined through the lens of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung:

All over America, there are people who wake up, every day, to find themselves transformed into giant bugs – in the view of others, if not themselves. The psychological journey here is a lot like that of someone who has been cancelled innocently. Who, suddenly, is being treated as a monstrous vermin by everybody else in society, and is just trying to go about their lives on the inside.

— Walter Kirn, on America This Week, episode 47

This is a very interesting observation from Walter Kirn on America This Week, episode 45:

You know the one thing [Robert F.] Kennedy [Jr.] and Trump do have in common, genuinely? They’re both peace candidates, to some extend. And, frankly, that seems to be the thing you’re not allowed to be.

Tom Lawson prided himself, rightly, as a practical experimenter; this was something unusual in an age when most so-called astronomers were really mathematicians who never went near an observatory.

— Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust (1961)

The creator of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-inspired indie shooter Road to Vostok talks about the whole Unity game engine situation and why he decided to port his in-development game to Godot.

“Daily Starfield Screenshot”

“Daily Starfield Screenshot”

“Daily Starfield Screenshot”

This week’s episode of The Private Citizen is out. Get it while it’s hot!

→ The Private Citizen 158: The EU Wants to Abolish Digital Privacy

The EU wants to establish universal client-side scanning for text messages and photos on citizen’s phones. With other words: All cryptography would be useless and hence, nobody would have any privacy in the digital realm anymore.