The Test

Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO and wearer of the most midlife crisis looking leather jackets in the world, was on Ezra Klein's podcast. Now I don't really want you do go through all of what was being said in that recording/writeup. It's painful. You feel your mental capabilities decaying with every minute of listening ... kinda like using a Chatbot. But worse. Huang says many outrageous things in the podcast. Like when Klein asks about how kids don't learn skills when using LLMs, Huang […]

https://tante.cc/2026/09/24/the-test/

The Next Hype

I met with a friend yesterday and the conversation got to what the next hype might be after the current bubble pops. We live at the height of the "AI"-hype and bubble, the hype that took over from the short Metaverse hype which in turn came after the crypto bubble. And the main actors are often the same. The same folks who told us crypto was the future now tell us that "AI" is. Tech these days is built less around actual products but hype, less around building actually functional solutions […]

https://tante.cc/2026/09/23/the-next-hype/

Der besorgte “KI”-Bro

Wir lesen in den letzten viel über die besorgen "KI"-Bros: Dario Amodei und Sam Altman sprechen beide davon, man müsse jetzt die Entwicklung von "Frontier KI" verlangsamen und Elon Musk stimmt ebenfalls zu. Eine unheilige Allianz, die nachdenklich machen sollte, gerade wo die drei betreffenden Herren sich alle zu tiefst verachten. Sind die "KI"-Bros jetzt wirklich besorgt um die Zukunft? Ist der aktuelle Fall um Jacob Coxon, der seinen Job bei Anthropic hingeworfen hat, weil er Sorgen hat, […]

https://tante.cc/2026/09/14/der-besorgte-ki-bro/

Power grab

Omarchy should not matter. But sadly it does. As a power grab. If you don't know what Omarchy is here's the short summary. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of RubyOnRails, owner of a software business and millionaire, decided a few months ago to go all in on Linux and - because that's just his MO - thought that turning his setup into a project made sense. Omarchy is just that: A pretty standard Arch Linux distribution with a handful of configuration files, that Heinemeier Hansson (or DHH as […]

https://tante.cc/2026/09/11/power-grab/

Rediscovering The Spark

The last few years have been hard as someone who is not only very much engaged with technologies, their applications, damages and affordances as well as their politics. We've been moving through hype cycle after hype cycle with increasing promises at increasing speeds. Which is somewhat natural of course: Being built not around something material, something real, but around a "world-changing narrative" is what defines a hype. There is the reliance on experts, the hope that they'll call out […]

https://tante.cc/2026/09/10/rediscovering-the-spark/

Making Social Media Social

As some of you might know, I am part of a team of people moderating a Mastodon server. And as so many of those servers we've been having some problems with fake signups lately. This is about how we mitigated the issue and how it was beneficial beyond that. So for those who don't know what Mastodon is: It's an open source software that you can use to connect to an open federated social network called the Fediverse. You can use many different kinds of software to be part of the Fediverse, some […]

https://tante.cc/2026/09/10/making-social-media-social/

The function of LLM-based math “proofs”

There has been quite the uptick in "AI" labs' claims of their LLMs "solving complex math problems". I wondered why that is, especially given that LLMs are not exactly built for the kind of rigor that proving mathematical theorems requires. There's a whole bunch of - really hard - math problems out there looking for solutions. For people who are not into that kind of thing: The issue is not that there is completely uncharted territory but that usually there is a hypothesis about some […]

https://tante.cc/2026/09/07/the-function-of-llm-based-math-proofs/

Doku “Crypto-Hype – Milliardenfalle Memecoins”

So ganz ist der Crypto Betrug ja nie weggegangen, er hat sich nur verschoben. Heute vor allem hin zur Bestechungsmethode für die US Regierung und illegales Glücksspiel ("Prediction Markets"). Aber vor einigen Monaten wurde ich doch nochmal zu einem Crypto Thema interviewed. Es geht dieses mal vor allem um die Memecoins. Man kann sich den ganzen Film in der ZDF Mediathek […]

https://tante.cc/2026/08/25/doku-crypto-hype-milliardenfalle-memecoins/

“Useful” is not sufficient

So Linus Torvalds, head of the Linux kernel development, put his foot down on the Linux Kernel development mailing list when someone was bringing up criticism of LLMs: "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issueswith that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's nolonger in question today. There […]

https://tante.cc/2026/07/15/useful-is-not-sufficient/

Kurze Notiz zu”politische Dimension von Daten und Infrastrukturen der Digitalität”

(Für ein Event wurde ich gefragt ein paar Worte zur politischen Dimension von Daten und Infrastrukturen der Digitalität" zu schreiben. Ich veröffentliche es auch hier kurz als kleine Notiz, weil es mein aktuelles Denken ganz gut zusammenfasst.) Die Debatte über Daten und digitale Infrastrukturen bezieht sich oft stark auf das „wer“: Wer designed solche Systeme, wer wird ihnen ausgesetzt, wer wird diskriminiert oder bevorteilt? Alle diese Fragen sind selbstverständlich relevant, […]

https://tante.cc/2026/07/08/kurze-notiz-zupolitische-dimension-von-daten-und-infrastrukturen-der-digitalitat/

On Google declaring war on the Web

In Yesterday's IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. (See longer description on their website.) TL;DR: They are pushing Search more into the "here's your processed answer" direction that "AI Overviews" have established (you know, those AI snippets in current Search that are wrong about 10% of the time). So they are mostly giving up on the paradigm of providing links to information.While they packaged it as a lot of "AI" talk and "agentic" and whatnot, what their whole […]

https://tante.cc/2026/05/20/on-google-declaring-war-on-the-web/

AI as a Fascist Artifact

(Christian Tieber hat eine deutsche Übersetzung des Textes angefertigt: "KI" als faschistisches Artefakt. Vielen Dank Christian!) (This is a bit of a merger of two talks I recently gave about fascism and AI. One was in German at the Cables Of Resistance conference, one in English at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy. I added some shots of the slides I used as a structure for the text which might make it look a bit weird. You can just ignore the images if you want to. They are […]

https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/

Dissolving the social

"AI" exists to disenfranchise labor. That's what it's for. Regardless of how good these stochastic systems are or the flaws they have just being able to point at the non-unionized robot whenever the employees ask for raises or anything really is incredibly valuable for business. The existence of "AI" and the supporting narrative mean that you defending your value and therefore price on the market will have a way harder time. But that's the impact for people on the top. That's why the C-Suite […]

https://tante.cc/2026/04/01/dissolving-the-social/

Artisanal care

When we moved into our apartment we hired a contractor to build bespoke cupboards for a few niches that we wanted to use optimally. He built perfectly fitting, nice cupboards that make those areas look nice and clean while allowing us to store all kinds of stuff. And he took great care doing it. Even after the job had started he kept explaining us why certain decisions we thought were smart might have been not so smart and offered solutions - often without charging extra. He wanted to build […]

https://tante.cc/2026/03/04/artisanal-care/

On Alliances

This morning (it is evening now in freezing Berlin) I wrote an article about a blog post Cory Doctorow had released the day before. In his post Cory made an argument about LLM usage that I criticized: I think his view on technology being neutral and it being possible to "liberate" any technology by making it "free and open" is a bit wonky. You can read his stance and my arguments in the respective articles. Cory Doctorow is not like you or me. He is famous - at least on the Internet and in […]

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/on-alliances/

Acting ethically in an imperfect world

Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are at some point in a situation where the best you can do is a vegetarian option. Sometimes it's not even our hand being forced but us not having the mental strength or priorities to do something: I […]

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/

Diffusion of Responsibility

One of the features of "AI" is the diffusion of responsibility: "AI" systems are being put in all kinds of processes and when they fuck up (and they always fuck up) it was just the "AI", or "someone should have checked things". "AI" companies want to sell machines to solve every issue but give no warranties, take no responsibilities and the same dynamic often extends to organizations using "AI": You get the support-chatbot to promise you a full refund and when you claim that you get a […]

https://tante.cc/2026/02/14/diffusion-of-responsibility/

Winning the wrong game

With studies upon studies showing that actual measurable productivity gains through "AI" (which these days basically means chatbots) are really hard to come by and that "workslop" (meaning the extra work created for the rest of the organization by one person using "AI" lowering their work quality) eats up a lot of what might have been productivity gains many critics feel somewhat relieved: When the main narrative of "AI" (massively increased productivity) fails, this surely marks the end of […]

https://tante.cc/2026/01/25/winning-the-wrong-game/

Re:Publica 2026 talk proposals

I send in two talk proposals to this year's re:publica and since one never know what might get accepted and what not, I thought I'd archive both here. If one or both gets rejected, maybe I can find another home for them. The Future is Decomputing: An Approach For More Humane Tech Summary: When talking about tech we rarely leave the established frame of reference: Software need to scale up to the whole world - but we want it open sourced for example. But That way lies only doom. Decomputing […]

https://tante.cc/2026/01/19/republica-2026-talk-proposals/

Software as Fast Fashion

Clothes have never been cheaper. These days a t-shirt is often cheaper that a decent cup of tea in a cafe. The wonders of capitalism. At least that is how it is often described. And when you point at the underpaid, gruesome labor that people in poorer regions of the planet have to do to make this possible the answer tends to be: "Well, they are having jobs and can provide for their families now, so it's reducing poverty." Now of course the situation is a bit more complex, has more angles. […]

https://tante.cc/2026/01/15/software-as-fast-fashion/