Last week, I wrote the following about the EU’s new regulation on “artificial intelligence”:

→ Eye on The Press: How Not to Pass a Law: The EU’s AI Act

Oh no, the Nazis are coming! I guess the way to stop them is to act very clueless, very quickly!

I wrote another piece on Eye on The Press about something that has been on my mind lately. Linux Outlaws listeners from way back will remember my stance on Musk back then, when everyone was hyping him…

→ Eye on The Press: On Elon Musk

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…

This is an extremely smart blog post. You should read it.

→ Евгений Кузнецов: The Right to Be Forgiven

The whole situation reminds me of a rural village I once visited. It didn’t have more than a dozen houses, and those families lived there basically forever. Everybody knew everyone, everyone’s parents and grandparents, everyone’s lies and cheats, everyone’s mistakes and betrayals. They had to forgive each other eventually, or their life as a community would become impossible, so they did, and went on living with each other, despite still knowing all those things about each other.

The world resembles that village now. Everybody knows and remembers everything about everyone, or at least can get that knowledge from Uncle Internet the next minute, sometimes even without asking. So we can turn to those villagers for a good way to cope.

What we actually need is a right to be forgiven.

It took a while for the idiocy of Musk to resurface after he, for once, did something good in the world. But now, he‘s gone and killed the Twitter Files project because of a competing social network feature that will never take off… Or, as Taibbi puts it in his inimitable way:

„I’ve done a lot of drugs and can’t remember ever reaching that level of paranoia.“

I also think Taibbi is right in stopping to use Twitter. They censored visibility filtered me too, so I should really try to do the same thing.

It’s not personal. I just can’t drive traffic for any site that’s censored me. These companies depend on our content to make money, and for years we’ve been rewarding all their dicking around with engagement and reality by handing them more eyeballs to sell. Frankly if all accounts walked away in these situations, the platforms would have to cut this nonsense out pretty quickly.

→ Meet the Censored: Me?, Racket News

In today’s edition of my weekly column for the German daily newspaper Ostfriesen-Zeitung, I coined what I’d like to call “Adama’s Law”:

Most problems arising from the digitalisation of society only occur due to the networking of the systems involved.

This post by Terence Eden seems to me to be a very good prediction of where the Fediverse is headed, should it actually take off:

→ How much decentralisation is too much?

There might be a dozen different phone networks in your country. Yes, they Federate with each other, but they all happen to be running close-to-identical networking gear made by Nokia or Huawei. Yes, you can put your SIM in any device, but chances are it is either Android or iOS.

We’ll be stuck with the illusion of Federation.

Thanks to Евгений Кузнецов for the link!

What the fuck is wrong with Microsoft? They push this shit on my taskbar with a minor update? Not even with one of those twice-a-year feature updates?

Look at that shit! Pixelated weather icon looks like it was copied off 1998-era ICQ assets. The fucking font isn’t the same as anything else on the taskbar (or the Start menu for that matter). It’s blurry as fuck as well. And the whole thing doesn’t even adhere to the operating system’s language settings? What the hell, Redmond?

I legit thought someone had installed malware on my computer. This whole thing looks like baitware for a trojan straight from a Russian hacker forum that you get served as a “Free Weather App for Windows” via some scammy banner ad. Only remembering that I shut down my PC for a Windows update before booting into Linux last night saved me from total panic here. And a search on the web.

Apparently, Microsoft has tested this absolute shitshow since January. How the fuck did nobody notice that this piece of shit looks like Russian malware and not like a part of the operating system made by the fucking maker of the operating system? Jesus Christ. People are really going soft in the brain working from home.

So here it is… The latest narrative from the obedient and the scared: If you’re actually even thinking about exercising your freedoms, you’re an anti-vaxxer. You’re anti-science. You’re killing us all!

Well, I have news for you: While vaccines work, contact tracing apps don’t. They don’t work. Oh, and don’t take my word for it.

Bruce Schneier on contact tracing apps:

The idea that contact tracing can be done with an app, and not human health professionals, is just plain dumb.