Vienna

Shipping the Verifieddit browser extension taught me that the cryptography was never the hard part. The hard part was designing for the person who has never heard of a certificate chain. In 1999, Alma Whitten and J. D. Tygar sat users down with PGP 5.0, a security program with a polished interface, and gave them ninety minutes to sign and encrypt a single email. Most failed. The software worked. The users could not. The protection therefore protected nobody who could not operate it. ...

“The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.” I. J. Good, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965)1 Sixty years on, Good’s footnote has become the operating assumption of three of the world’s most capitalised research labs. What was once a thought experiment for cyberneticists in Hawaii is, by 2026, a quarterly capex disclosure. The question is no longer whether such a machine will be built. The question is whether the race to build it will run faster than the institutions meant to govern it. ...

“To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote. Today, as AI threatens to flood our information ecosystem with synthetic content, this warning resonates with new urgency. The question isn’t whether AI will replace journalism – it’s whether we’ll passively accept the degradation of our shared truth-seeking institutions. Let’s be clear: the fundamental role of journalism in democracy cannot be automated away. When Jürgen Habermas described the public sphere, he wasn’t envisioning a network of language models – he was describing the very human process of collective sense-making. This is why journalism, real journalism, will persist regardless of AI’s capabilities. ...

Nancy Pelosi addressed the American public to announce an official inquiry into the impeaching of America‘s worst president. 6 different house committees are already working to document the ever-growing list of impeachable offenses the second highest vote winner of the 2016 election. There are other sites that can list the numerous impeachable offenses of the Trump administration. There are also many sites documenting Trump’s own criminal enterprises and corrupt way of life prior to being president. ...

A bitch and 2 bagels

This is along the pathway where the graffiti is always changing.

Christmas Eve on the Danube Canal, Urania Observatory. It was maybe a degree above freezing, but AWESOME!

Oktoberfest Tent in the Prater. Dirndls dirndls everywhere. Behind me there were multiple passed out beer-lovers and it was barely four in the afternoon!

My friends Vala and Leon visited Thailand and brought back this Thai BBQ device in which a bowl of coals has a spaghetti strainer type lid placed on top of it and then the gutter is filled with pork broth, noodles and veggies. Then pork strips are grilled and mix with the soup. Nice compact way of cooking everything in a very small space right on the table!

Shopping and eating at the Middle Ages Festival in Vienna. The Bohemian Prater is like a little version of the Prater park in Vienna. Mostly it has rides for smaller kids. Which was perfect for Boris and Kim’s son Max! See the full gallery on Posterous