Several colleagues have written about the problem of #memorization in #LLMs. If you're interested, I wrote about my own experiences and experiments in German in "Was liest #ChatGPT?", published last year in Digitales Lesen, ed. by Susanne Düwell and Nicolas Pethes. tl/dr: I am not surprised.

#GuineaPig Minerva ("Mimi") 🖤 2020–2026. May her meadows be ever green and no shadow cross her sky.

This is Minerva ("Mimi"), one week ago, out on the lawn in our backyard. She will probably not make it through the night. Her health has deteriorated lately. But she is comfortable now and surrounded by the little herd of #GuineaPigs she has led for the last five years. Godspeed, Mimi.

#Juno, the Roman #goddess of fertility and community (among other things), chose to manifest in our backyard as this pretty #GuineaPig girl of said name. Here she is enjoying a sacrifice of freshly cut grass.

Lunch for the #GuineaPigs.

That’s her.

#GuineaPig girl Cassiopeia (“Kessi”) in her cozy new cardboard cave, munching on freshly cut grass. Life is good.

It could be fun while it lasted. #Internet #WWW

Das Comeback, auf das wir alle gewartet haben: Die Arbeiten am Schriftzug an den Kunstsammlungen sind abgeschlossen. Jetzt strahlt das Werk von Licht- und Konzeptkünstler Mischa Kuball wieder über unseren Campus.

New appreciation unlocked (very late to the game, I admit): Patsy Cline. ❤️ #Country #Music

And that’s not even the best line.

"I have got to get to a library... fast!" Hahaha! Great nonsense fun film!

… helps reframe our …

… speaks directly to …

Geduld nur, Geduld! / Der Frühling ist nah.

Die Meerschweinchen sehnen den Frühling herbei.

I normally don't share my little UI experiments, but everyone's trapped in a blizzard, so here's the Internet Archive's magazine rack inside an experimental alternative interface. Enjoy reading and discovering titles and issues. mirrorball.textfiles.com/MAGAZINERACK

Just bought a second-hand copy of an old Terminator 2 release on Blu-ray, i.e. pre James Cameron's AI upscaled and DNR'd disaster versions, and what can I say? It actually looks like it's a movie shot on film, not a puppetered video game.

Does anyone have or know of a recording of the broadcast "Medien und Krieg" [Media and War] from Radio Bremen on 17 February 1991, feat. Friedrich Kittler, Wolfgang Coy, and Wolfgang Hagen? This is the broadcast mentioned at the beginning of Kittler's "There Is No Software".

Just published: "A few notes on the scalar foundations of foundation models," a position paper in which I discuss the need for rejecting large-scale vague AI, and talk about fascination as a technological operation. Available open-access at doi.org/10.1017/cfc.... .

This is not funny. And yet …

Surprise, surprise. I cannot open said *.PIC files in an emulated version of PC Paint 3 on DOSBOX. Hmm, what format could these files be?

##FFmpeg is an absolutely amazing piece of software, nonetheless.

I could, of course, try to write my own decoder. 😉

How do I display an old PICtor #image #file (PC Paint file #format) on a current #macos machine? Any ideas? No luck so far with #ImageMagick, #ffmpeg, and #GIMP.

Ten or so years from now, we will ask "Where were you when Musicology Duck woke up and figured out the bus was not going to the right place?" #ThreadsForEternity

Lone Star > One Battle After Another

+++ NEU erschienen: Oliver Ruf: Medienwissenschaft. In: Handbuch Designwissenschaft. Theorie – Praxis – Geschichte. Hg. v. Oliver Ruf, Thomas Hensel u. Lars C. Grabbe. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2026, S. 339-346.

Senior #GuineaPig lady Mimi enjoying some freshly cut grass. (To the left: Snofru)

Currently the featured article on the IEEE Annals website www.computer.org/csdl/magazin... . Available open access at doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2025.3559418 .

My day is made: a new 1e initiative thread on DF.

Ach was

Ich bin ja nicht so für Behörden-Bashing, aber hier in Bochum fühlt es sich gerade ein wenig seltsam an. (Klar, die Kinder freut‘s, wenn sie nicht zur Schule müssen.)

Ich sag mal so: In den vergangenen Tagen war es hier in Bochum stellenweise tatsächlich ein bisschen glatt. Und es hat auch heftig geschneit. Da gab es nie keine UNWETTERWARNUNG nirgends, und auch die Schulen wurden nicht geschlossen.

Bochum. Auch Bochum.

Ist es denn jetzt in irgendeiner größeren Stadt in #NRW tatsächlich so spiegelglatt, dass man die Kinder nicht guten Gewissens zur #Schule schicken könnte? Hier in Bochum ist es nass, sonst nix.

"The question is not whether #renewables can work. The question is whether governments have the courage to change the rules. If they do, the rest is straightforward.”

Nach einer Durststrecke von über dreißig (!) Letztplatzierungen in Folge habe ich tatsächlich eine Partie Seven Wonders gegen meine Familie gewonnen! Ein beinahe biblisches Wunder.

Leisure-time goal for 2026: start to DM the first #AD&D 1e campaign since I was sixteen.

As I and many others have shown, #LLM like #ChatGPT “memorize” what they “read” in “training” and can often reproduce #text verbatim. For an easy-to-read German companion piece to the Atlantic’s story and the research cited there, see my “Was liest ChatGPT?” from last year (link below).

My #HomeGym is a small basement compartment, low ceiling and dim lighting. It barely fits a half squat rack, a bench, a barbell (two, actually), and some plates – okay, some dumbbells too. I lift only tiny, tiny (!) weights. Still, it feels great.

I've just released fully documented source code for The Sentinel as an easy-to-browse website. It's a lot more fun to explore than the GitHub repository, with cross-references, popups, indexes, statistics and more. Enjoy! thesentinel.bbcelite.com #retrocomputing #retrogaming #bbcmicro #c64 #8bit

Reading through magazines from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and one of my biggest takeaways is this: Back then, "regular" folks seemed to have a lot more money and time to spend and spare. It's probably all ideology, but still ...

Frisch erschienen: Handbuch Designwissenschaft. Theorie – Praxis – Geschichte. Hg, v. Oliver Ruf, Thomas Hensel u. Lars C. Grabbe. Stuttgart: Metzler 2025; 437 S. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

My electronic #mailbox is now at ~20 #gigabytes. It goes back to the year 2000 (complete since 2004) and currently holds 130,766 messages. Should I start deleting old messages?

Die Menge an Wäsche, die zwei Teenager produzieren, wird in meinem Haushalt in der Einheit "Nervenzusammenbruch" gemessen.

Back at the desk.

Following the equally fantastic years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025, 2026 does not disappoint.

2026: off to a very good start indeed. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Erste Fahrt mit der @deutschebahn.com im neuen Jahr – und natürlich alle Verbindungen verspätet.