Recommend read: "Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment."

one of Vienna's most prestigious cultural events has allegedly invited Peter Thiel. I guess the reason would be a mixture of a childish urge to "provoke the left", desperate attention seeking, a lack of creativity and a weird obsession with techno fascism. He is not interesting but simply weird 👇

I was also there, learning about neural nets, in the 90s, at the institution where the term "artificial intelligence" was coined. The field is 70+ years old. The math is interesting and in some cases useful. The grift, the new spin on the same old capitalist extraction, is what we hate.

one interesting thing so far about loudly hating AI is the way AI lovers are like "wow so you're just totally closed off to hearing another perspective??" as if their perspective hasn't been relentlessly pushed down our throats with no space to push back (particularly in professional settings)

Simple shaders in p5.js with p5.strands. Nice! 👍 youtu.be/TIbHjtfuMoI?...

Great little thread. Also applicable, by now, to other processes being taken over by LLM-based “AI”, like medical device development, where “Human in the loop” is touted as good enough for automated generation of aspects like risk analysis/management or system of systems architectures.

MIDDLEMARCH HIVE, RISE UP!

Long, informative thread. TL;DR: SpaceX is fucked up. Will likely be the biggest IPO in history anyway, and if need be, then get bailed out by the government. Because this is America we’re talking about. 🫡 🇺🇸

Oh this is delightful. Let's start with SpaceX's violation of 17 CFR § 229.504 (Item 504). Their "use of proceeds" neglects to mention they are contractually obligated to use the first $20 billion from it to pay off a bridge loan. This is also while their quarterly cash burn exceeds $8 billion. /1

Today's Daily Cartoon for @newyorker.com by Kevin Maher and me.

Very valid points on #accessibility empathy labs: “Without direction and the lived experience of actual disabled people, empathy labs can turn accessibility into a game. You need the story behind the impairment. How disabled people can't turn it off and on.” via @cjforms.bsky.social

The post says Google's new flagship AI model, Gemini Omni, allows multiple refinements of a video without "losing the thread" so where is the violin, google? Where did the violin go? HOW DID YOU LOSE THE WHOLE DAMN VIOLIN IN THE FIRST STEP

Our public-sector innovation meetup is returning soon. Our next topic is ‘Money and taxes’. We are going to piggyback on @tsbberlin.bsky.social’s CityLAB Berlin Summer Conference and even hear from some of their invited international speakers. The meetup will take place on 2 June.

To be clear, this is not NATO's going-out-of-business sale; but it IS your chance to snap up everything you always wanted to know about NATO and what it might have to do next, at 25% off.

People who do not make art themselves and who do not study tend to view realism as the ultimate goal of an artist, the peak of their craft. So, it makes total sense that they would think they had cracked what van Gogh just didn't have the skill to achieve. Art education matters.

Interesting discussion overall (hat tip to @jmkorhonen.fi). The discussion about "new" or, alternatively, "original" output, with regards to LLMs, is particularly difficult in industries and work that are perceived as "creative". In my field, product/ux/ui design, the discussions can get heated.

From the archives: Temporal is the Date system we always wanted in JavaScript. It's extremely close to being available so Mat Marquis thought it would be a good idea to explain exactly what is better about this new JavaScript date system. piccalil.li/blog/date-is...

David Roguer, the “Founder and CEO of MasterClass” posting: “They booed Eric Schmidt. The former CEO of Google. The man who gave us Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Android.” on LinkedIn in a pro AI rant and people are still wondering whether we will see the signs of AI brainrot coming. Jesus.

Ich selbst hatte 2019-2022 die Leitung eines Forschungsprojekts zu dem Thema, an dem mehr als 20 Experten aus mehr als 10 Ländern mitgearbeitet haben. Das Ergebnis ist open access verfügbar, falls es sie interessiert. Darin wird die Frage auch behandelt. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Sad fucking lonely unlovable men. No warmth. No joy. No friend they can call when they need the assurance of a human voice. www.theverge.com/tech/934260/...

Der Spitzenmathematiker warnt vor einer Flut KI-generierter Beweise, die kein Mensch gut genug versteht, um darüber zu berichten und Fragen entgegenzunehmen.

If anyone tells you the SpaceX IPO is a good investment for a normal person with normal goals like home ownership or a secure retirement, write their name down and never listen to another thing they ever say. This is cashing out rich people who already bought the bridge www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...

And it is really important to understand it in this context. Once you perceive ai as a political project, it makes arguments about whether new models can produce usable code or mediocre emails seem (correctly) irrelevant

It’s bad we have a personal service for sending armored up guys with assault rifles towards the homes of people who catch our attention.

space fleet done #pixelart #gamedev

They all suck. Every single one of these motherfuckers will fire you, poison the well, and set fire to your crops if it means clearing an extra dollar for themselves. A dollar they don’t need and won’t even notice. Mock them relentlessly.

Any startups looking to hire morally flexible employees who are fine working for technofascists can head to LinkedIn for good deals on ex-Meta employees. Grab them while supplies last!

A step in the right direction! For most folks: just publish locally (with 2FA) — CI publish is the attack vector typically exploited!

Wondering how to make music in the terminal? 🎶 We interviewed Christian Grothe, creator of "Grainiac" — a granular sampler built with @ratatui.rs 🐁 💯 Live audio synthesis & sampling with SuperCollider ▶️ Watch the full episode here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWVU... #rustlang #ratatui #tui #music

The original cars with their much larger restyling versions issued years later [📹 roma_urraco] Original post

oh wow I wish I'd read this a few years ago this is perfect

Exactly this. It’s about Europe taking the initiative. Good Europe Express by @henryjfoy.ft.com “Diplomats say that … the fact the debate is happening at all reflects a growing recognition that Europe needs to either speak up or be talked over.”

Alte Journalistenregel: 1 Gramm Ahnung ist wertvoller als 1 Kilo Meinung. Offenbar so alt, dass man sie in der PRESSE leider vergessen hat. Auf die Frage gibts eine sehr einfache Antwort: Weil es im ORF-Gesetz steht. 😵‍💫

Very normal democracy

YUPP

My kingdom for a tech ecosystem that will stop smothering me with apps and devices that constantly try to engage me in conversation against my will

Are you a privacy engineer or work with privacy engineers? Would you like to learn more about probably engineering? Boy do I have a conference for you! PEPR, the conference on privacy engineering, practice, and respect, is happening June 1-2 in Santa Clara, CA. www.usenix.org/conference/p...

Too late. This Canadian government has put the 'ai' scam around our necks like a millstone: • a Prime Minister pushing shady 'ai data centre' projects all over the country, despite the climate disaster, waste, and social destruction they embody • a 'Minister for AI' breachmedia.ca/mark-carneys...

Meanwhile in Vienna tech peeps having meetups where everyone keeps excitedly declaring “AI is here to stay, we just need to figure out how to make it work in production!” and “We successfully moved to an AI-first design system, trying to figure out how to design now!” with straight faces. 😄

Hyperscalers will, by the end of 2027, have spent over $2 trillion on AI investments that have so far created at best around $100 billion of revenue between Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft. There is no avenue for this to pay off at the scale they need. www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-too-expensive/

Some interesting choices in the replies there. I found out about Zen and some of its features am going to have to try it out. 👍

Austrian AI meetups be like "We moved past the 'convince people AI matters' phase and are now in the 'trying to make it work in production' phase." and everyone is celebrating each other on the deep (perhaps even borderline-genius!) thought (on LinkedIn, obvs). The Vienna IT "scene" in a nutshell.

2026: This gets cut, but endless data centers are no biggie. Even if Dr. Antaki would have never released a product, but simply generated a ton of examples and evidence of what doesn’t work, it would be infinitely more valuable than however many servers would equate the cost of that work.

I think this, along with every other piece of art advice online, heavily depends on the industry you're working in and what your goals are. Full-time employed artists, freelancers and small business owners can't realistically expect the same advice to work equally well for all of them, all the time.

If anyone sees our research showing up in AI outputs please let me know. I’m proud that we made so much training data to make AI as great as it can be!

New development in the AI slop email scams: They now have a fake certificate saying that the AI slop is “manually written” 🫠

LinkedIn morning comedy strikes again, with a parting Head of Design’s "It’s been a great journey!"-post about what an amazing 12+ months the last job has been, where they built a great design team and moved the design system to be AI-first. (No significant feature shipped in one and a half years.)

Meanwhile my last employer’s marketing people are posting how amazing it is that doctors can vibe-code an app for their patients and deploy under 7 days, and how that’s proof of AI’s impact in the medical device/software industries. And it’s all people who damn well know these things are happening.

If you want to learn all about web components from a human then check this out: Web Components Demystified online course is $10 this week (it'll go back to the usual $25 deal after that). It's 8 hours of video lessons, or 4 if you listen at 2x, which wouldn't offend me at all. Use the code Just10.