Ulf Treger

🗣️📢 Call for short essays, poetry and short fiction: LOOMING ‘zine (issue 2, winter 2025).

Deadline: Dec 1

LOOMING is a technocritical zine celebrating the human and the analog in the face of Big Tech.

CC @kconrad.bsky.social

Submit to: looming.the.zine@proton.me

Ein digitales Display in Form einer Litfaßsäule, im urbanen Raum. Auf dem ca 3 Meter hohen Display ist eine Schlagzeile des NDR zu sehen: „Olympische Spiele in Hamburg: Mehrheit dagegen.“

„Olympische Spiele in Hamburg: Mehrheit dagegen.“
www.ndr.de/ndrfragt/oly...
Immerhin eine schöne Nachricht heute 😁 #nolympia #hamburg

AI and the Great Digital Labor Convergence | Antonio A. Casilli

[NEW BLOG POST] Uber letting drivers label data during downtime marks the collapse of a long fiction: gig work, content creation & data labeling were never separate. The Great Digital Labor Convergence is here—everyone now feeds the same AI machine. www.casilli.fr/2025/10/18/a...

AI companies are spending billions on deals with each other, which boost their value.

This has helped twenty billionaires tied to AI add $450B to their fortunes in 2025.

Meanwhile, an MIT study found that 95% of companies using AI haven't seen returns on investment.

Be warned.

A post from an academic on blue sky that says: "I'm learning about "prompt engineering" when asking LLMs to extract data. I now add this to all instructions: Style Be concise, analytic, and specific (cite page/figure if provided). If essential info is missing, keep going but flag Unclear and exact data needed. Never invent data. #academicsky"

Seeing people nonchalantly post stuff like makes me feel like I'm going crazy honestly.

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/22f7afc3-8ac0-4ca1-9877-fd3f8ddcc986?desktop=true&segmentId=7c8f09b9-9b61-4fbb-9430-9208a9e233c8#myft:notification:daily-email:content Meta will use conversations people have with its chatbots to personalise advertising and content across its platforms, in a sign of how tech companies plan to make money from artificial intelligence. The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on Wednesday said it would use the content of chats with its Meta AI to create advertising recommendations across its suite of apps. “People will already expect that their Meta AI interactions are being used for these personalisation purposes,” said Christy Harris, privacy and data policy manager at Meta.

What an unsurprising decision by corporations that desperately need to make money with AI. If every other company with a chatbot isn't already doing this, then expect them to be following Meta's lead soon. The chatbot is not your friend; it's a corporate listening device. www.ft.com/content/22f7...

"Chatkontrolle" - EU-Staaten erzielen keine Einigung Die EU-Staaten haben erneut keine Einigung auf eine sogenannte Chatkontrolle im Kampf gegen sexualisierte Gewalt gegen Kinder erzielt.

Viel wichtiger als die Kulturkampf Veggieschnitzel Entscheidung im EU Parlament ist das hier:

www.deutschlandfunk.de/eu-staaten-e...

Ein kleiner Etappensieg. Informiert dennoch weiter über die Pläne zur Chatkontrolle und wie man dagegen protestiert!

“AI will kill everyone” is not an argument. It’s a worldview. How rational is Eliezer Yudkowsky’s prophecy?

Da seit heute das Doom AI Buch von Yudkowsky und Soares auf meinem Tisch liegt, ist das eine gute Gelegenheit für ein passendes Gegengift
www.vox.com/future-perfe...

Comic. [Two people hiking up mountain] PERSON 1: Okay, we’re nearing the next downhill segment I’ll put in the order. ...Confirming start and end points… Submitted! [water slide being dropped from above by drones] PERSON 2 with long hair: Look, here it comes! [Waterslide positioned on downhill slope of mountain with both people riding down] BOTH: Wheeee [Waterslide carried back into the air] [Both people continuing to hike up next slope] [caption] On-demand waterslide delivery has really improved the whole hiking experience.

Hiking

xkcd.com/3147/

"Oberflächlich professionelle, aber inhaltsleere KI-Texte zwingen Mitarbeiter zu stundenlanger Nacharbeit und kosten Unternehmen Millionen Euro. Trotz Milliarden-Investitionen in KI-Technologie bleiben messbare Produktivitätssteigerungen aus. Die scheinbare Effizienz entpuppt sich als Trugschluss"

I collected some materials on critical AI from my perspective; hope it's useful: olivia.science/ai

"CAIL is as an umbrella for all the prerequisite knowledge required to have an expert-level critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims"

Waiting for Robots An essential investigation that pulls back the curtain on automation, like AI, to show human workers’ hidden labor.   Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are incline...

Oh hey.

“As the proverbial Godot, robots are the bearers of a messianic promise that is always postponed. Instead of bringing prosperity for all, they discipline the workforce, so we don’t dream of a world without drudgery and exploitation.”

Ein unfassbarer Vorgang: Die EU-Kommission suspendiert das Kartellverfahren gegen Google und beugt sich damit Trumps Wünschen.

Eigentlich wäre die EU-Kartellstrafe gegen Google für heute geplant gewesen, doch diese wurde Stunden vor der geplanten Ankündigung auf Eis gelegt.

The philosophical project of the "high/low" art hierarchy is conceptually united with the classically liberal public/private distinction. Today the latter is basically obsolete bc privatization, so that means the former is too

dilettantearmy.com/articles/lim...

The big idea The Big Idea: why we should embrace AI doctors People are understandably wary of new technology, but human error is often more lethal

You'd hardly know the Guardian had partnered with an AI company 🙄

Inklusion braucht keine großen Reden – sie braucht kleine Handlungen. Zum Beispiel: einen Alt-Text zu deinem Bild.

A raft of quantum computing news articles less than a day old, hot on the heels of a massive dip in AI stocks and a wave of news items about AI delusions.

I said a couple of weeks ago that if AI were well and truly fucked we'd see the amount of quantum computing news items spike and uh

Eine Sovereign Cloud von Google, Azure und AWS ist nicht souverän (Surprise Surprise).
www.golem.de/news/digital...

HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy. Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving. Take shorter showers. Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

In a new digital twist to environmental individualisation of responsibility, the UK government is now advising people to “[d]elete old emails and pictures” in data centres to help with the current drought. www.gov.uk/government/n...

Realtors Are Using AI Images of Homes They're Selling. Comparing Them to the Real Thing Will Make You Mad as Hell Realtors are starting to use AI-generated images of houses that don't exist to sell expensive properties, inciting anger.

The primary use case is fraud.

Kein Sonderregister für trans* Personen – Nie wieder Listen gegen Minderheiten! Hallo, ich bin Penelope Alva Frank, Transfrau, queerfeministische Aktivistin und Gründerin der queerfeministischen Bewegung Queermany. Ich weiß, wie es ist, jeden Tag Blicke, Sprüche und Angriffe ausz...

Wusstest Du, dass das Innenministerium ein Sonderregister für trans, inter und nicht-binäre Menschen plant? Wir sagen: Nie wieder! Jetzt unterzeichnen ✍️ und teilen! weact.campact.de/petitions/ke...

Mapping Lesbian History: Q&A with Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz Historians Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz use digital mapping technology to uncover a hidden geography of lesbian life in the 1970s and 1980s, tracing patterns of connection among lesbian women in...

Many of the places that loom largest in queer history—NYC’s Stonewall Inn, San Francisco’s Castro district—tend to focus on gay men & urban spaces. A fuller history is told by Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz.
@pcb-aha.bsky.social‬ www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/m...

"Mit der Bildungsexpansion der Moderne wird Wissen als politisches Selbstermächtigungsinstrument breiten Schichten zugänglich. Büchereien fußen nun auf d Prinzip der Gleichheit aller, die sie nutzen. Antidemokraten begehren dagegen auf."
Sinnvoll wäre die politische Solidarisierung der Bibliotheken.

Was für ein 🔥 Text von Alfonso Pantisano, Queerbeauftragter des Berliner Senats:

"Lasst euch nicht einreden, dass wir zu laut sind. Wir waren nie laut genug [...] Und wer uns die Sichtbarkeit nehmen will, will, dass wir verschwinden. Aber wir waren nie still. Und wir werden es nie sein"

#CSD 🌈 🏳️‍🌈

As Billionaire Funds an Opera House, Nazi-Era Questions Linger Over His Company

A new home for the Hamburg State Opera is meant to increase the city’s international standing. But some say its choice of funder is out of step with the cultural mood.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/a...

The Impact of Generative AI on Employment: Hype, Reality, and the Future of Work w/ Aaron Benanav – sperrstunde Aaron Benanav (Cornell University) provides a critical analysis of the potential impact of generative AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, on the job market.

Morgen Abend im Centro Sociale,HH
sperrstunde.org/events/2025-...

In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.

LLMs as a machine for repeating every error of history.

It has never been more important for historians to teach the histories of eugenics as often as possible, to as wide an audience as possible.

Habt ihr euch gefragt, warum so viele indische Kurierfahrer unterwegs sind? Viele werden von teuren Privatunis hergelockt, verschulden sich, landen in einem Teufelskreislauf aus miesen Jobs und überfüllten, möblierten Apartments. Meine ganze Recherche gibt's bei der @taz.de
taz.de/Das-Geschaef...