The Blark black and white camera app is a rather new addition to my most used camera apps on my iPhone these days. I want to mention it here quickly because even though it's not perfect, it's doing a lot of things right. The Blark app is a pretty new app, it was first released in 2025, so at the pint of this writing it's just a couple of months old. And therefore the app makes good use of many advantages of the modern OSs. read more…
Berlin. 2025. History wherever you go. Like in many other major European cities you can't move a single cobblestone without revealing endless stories of the past. The future in such areas is always relative, it never exists without the things and stories that have existed before. Every decision comes with numerous consequences, consequences for the present, for the future, but also for the past. Change becomes difficult, if it happens at all. And yet change happens, but often not in the way it is or was intended. read more…
The summer of 2025 is almost over already but I still have some pictures to show you that hopefully bring back that summer vibe. Back in June I've been visiting the small Italian island of Elba for the very first time. Elba is best reached by car via a ferry boat from the mainland. The obvious route starts in the city of Piombino and ends in Ponteferraio, the biggest city of the island. The boat trip takes about 1 hour. Piombino can be reached by train as well but navigating to all the tiny locations and little towns of Elba is really difficult or just impossible without a car. There are busses from Ponteferraio to certain beaches and a selection of little towns across the island but of course not to all of them. read more…
Big, huge, vast, impressive, intimidating, monumental, majestic, colossal. It's these terms that start spinning through my head when looking at the unfinished tons of brick and granite of the Congress Hall (German Kongresshalle) in Nuremberg. The often so called Coliseum has been designed by Franz and Ludwig Ruff in 1935 as part of Hitler's fantasy of a thousand year Reich. It's part of the Nazi Party Rally Ground (German Reichparteitagsgelände), a huge, only partly finished area at the outskirts of the city and was meant to house 50000 members of the Nazi Party during their annual Congresses. The advent of Word War II brought the construction to a halt in 1939. read more…
Consciousness is one of these terms that comes up again and again when talking about the newest iterations of current AI systems. But what is consciousness? Honestly, the term was already hard to define even before the advent of AI. I guess the most common explanation these days is still that consciousness starts building up the more a system, a biological system, becomes more complex. Most people would argue that under these circumstances, only we as humans are able to be aware of who we are and reflect on what we are doing. So humans are to be considered conscious. But what about animals? Or plants? Or any living cell? And finally, what about AI? read more…