2025-12-11 Thu

News

2025-12-01 Mon

• Read Krister Wahlbäck’s magnificent overview of the “Finnish Question” in Swedish politics since 1809
• U.S. Secretary of War Crimes Pete Kegseth tried to meme on Twitter

2025-11-26 Wed

• LLM image recognition is already cracking one of the hardest problems in digital humanities - handwriting recognition
• Research: A European way of war: Towards doctrine to defend against Russia, without the US
• Luxury surveillance: People pay a premium for tracking technologies that get imposed unwillingly on others
• Bluesky thread: Learning how to live with already weak-God-like and increasingly powerful technologies
• “Enough!”: Great 1947 Social Democratic posters from Finland
• “Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.”

2025-11-20 Thu

• Finnish report greatly exaggerated how much Sanna Marin’s social democratic government (2019-2023) increased government expenses
• Techno-optimism hinders climate action: research
• China’s battery exports charge to new highs (Reuters)
• Research estimates that 25 % of public social science funding in Austria flows directly to a few academic publishers
• Researchers measured greenwashing in 1 million Facebook ads by LLM-enabled system, found vast networks sharing pro-fossil fuel messages and targeted ads
• A much-talked-about London AI artwork is being torn down, because people believe it depicts migrants
• There are good reasons why nuclear power is regulated
• A fishing attack: Black neon tetra committed a credit card fraud

2025-11-14 Fri

• Trump’s national security strategy “reads like openly fascist rantings”
• ICC to ditch MS Office for European open source alternative
• “The large-scale conversion of Norse societies between the tenth and twelfth centuries is best understood not as a sudden attraction to Christian doctrine, but as part of a long transformation tied to state formation, economic integration, and sustained contact with Christian Europe. “
• “Man with a machine can be a slave or a free man.” (Henry Ford)
• “Technology affects society by affordances, constraints, preconditions, and unintended consequences.” (Baym, N. K, 2010).
• “In the late 1800s alien ‘engineers’ altered our world forever.”

2025-11-09 Sun

• Read The Husbands by Holly Gramazio. Very good!
• “Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists.”

2024-11-25 Mon

• Europe is under attack from Russia. Why isn’t it fighting back? – POLITICO
• Tulsi Gabbard’s Ties to Russia Are Far More Dangerous Than You Realize, Experts Say
• Europe Needs More Conventional Forces, Not Its Own Nukes
• Evolving Norway’s Role in the NATO Alliance - Luftled
• Stafford Beer once said he had stopped doing simulation games with management consulting clients because they were too powerful; he didn’t like the thought of factories being built and closed based on what worked in a rule set he’d come up with over a coffee break.

  News

2022-05-19 On Bitcoin, Tether, and Beanstalk

Jessica McKenzie wrote in Twitter about the less known trend in Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin miners and fossil fuel firms, which increasingly tend to be the one and the same thing, are buying gas-fired generators and use them right next to gas wellheads. End result: to solve the crypto sudokus, fossil gas that would otherwise not be extracted and burned, is extracted and burned. Read more