Daisy

It is with great sadness that I must announce that Daisy passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on Friday, 23/01/2026 in the evening, due to a heart failure. She was a wonderful companion, loved by everybody and friendly and gentle to everybody. She was an anchor in my personal life.

We miss her a lot.

She has appeared in this weekly every week since Week 49/2023. I had 2 images of her then,

and

and since then every week at least one - this was her last one, last week, in edition 05/2026

I know that for many she was the main reason to receive this newsletter and that this gap will stay unfilled.

A good friend made me aware of a very touching poem ("Als Bobby starb"), written by Karl Kraus, about a dog's death (and life).

It's probably difficult to understand how difficult it is to need a dog let go go if one never had one.

NSFW

Bare with me.

Retrospect

#arsboni

I did two laundry sessions, as planned, both of them really noteworthy.

Michaela Krömer spoke about climate litigation and interestingly drew a rather positive picture of the judiciary.

Thomas Höhne reflected on the FPÖ-run radio station "Austria first" - that actually is a webradio but no radio station.

I learned - due to a misunderstanding unfortunately only after the conversation - that there's a rather similar and very well done interview with Thomas on the same topic in another podcast: Bühneneingang - Kultur von Innen, hosted by Fabian Burstein.

It's quite funny and interesting how different (and also similar) this other interview is going - another lesson for me how to find (and how I frequently fail to find) a proper mixture of comprehensibility and relevance, expert communication and third mission, education and research.

Media

Whether or not the young should be banned from social media use is - again - discussed in Austria (ORF, Heise). I joined the party - again, first with an interview for Der Standard,

then with an interview in Salzburger Nachrichten (Paywall, which is absurdly the reason why I can't read my own interview, no liability taken here 😄 ) and in ZIB 2

that was cited by Heute, Kurier, OE24, Der Standard, Die Presse (Paywall, which is again the reason why I can't read the text on me, no liability taken here either 😄 ) and others.

The funniest comments came, as always, from the "Standard-Forum".

The recent potential changes on AI regulation ("Digital Omnibus") are less in public focus but not less important. I wrote an editorial for the German journal "AI and Law" (KIR) on this.

The title is a variation/quote of "De minimis non curat praetor" that I found funny.

Last not least I was interviewed by Max Nicholls (ORF) on a very, very interesting new phenomenon: Moltbot - an open source AI agent written by an Austrian that is as popular as it is fascinating and dangerous:

Don't try this at home!

My interview will - most likely - be aired on Saturday in "Mittagsjournal". More on Moltbot via Golem, FAZ (Paywall), Der Standard, Ars Technica, Cisco Blogs and many, many others.

LLP

I did the technical hosting for the 22nd episode of "Recht neugierig".

This was technically and organisationally rather challenging, as I needed to do the episode from Graz and had to learn that there is a 4star hotel in Graz in which internet access via phone is efficiently blocked by the concrete used, free WiFi is throttled at 8 MBit/second and paid internet (for 9.90 € per day, like in 2005) doesn't work (probably because nobody but me asks for this).

After 45 minutes failure to fix he issue, I finally ran tu KFU-Graz, entered the first auditorium that I found - fortunately unlocked and unused - five minutes before the stream should start - and launched the episode from there - somehow like a radio pirate.

This was my "studio":

Bandwith was above 80 MBit/s - Eduroam is one of the best academic inventions ever. And nobody entered.

Prospect

#arsboni

LLMs have been constantly seen in University practice for more than three years. However, it's still rather unclear whether and how they may - and should - be used in legal education. I will discuss this matter with Dr. Julia Möller-Klapperich from FU Berlin who published a proposal for a regulation.

Look and Feel

Dunkelkammer

Die Dunkelkammer features an ongoing criminal procedure against seven people accused of having robben the cap ("Couleurkapppe") of a man for political reasons. In particular the discussion with one of their lawyers is very interesting.

Der Standard, Kronen Zeitung, Exxpress (and others) report (very differently) about the matter.

Paper and Model

I attended three interesting exhibitions in Albertina.

The first is on the fascination of paper where I was in particular intrigued by Rembrandt's series of very tiny self portraits.

One of the things that stroke me a lot was that - although the exhibition clearly wants to show all facets of what has been and can be done with paper - there's nothing (at least nothing I saw) on the disappearance and the missing of this carrier in today's digital times in it. There's nothing on the absence of paper in it.

The second exibition is on Leiko Ikemura whose paintings and sculptures bring some melancholy - just as her drawing of a dog that almost made me cry.

The third was on Lisette Model, a Vienna born photographer who needed to emigrate to the USA, being chased there in the McCarthy era as well. She was, among other achievements in educating the next generation of photographers, a teacher of Diane Arbus whom I have been admiring a lot since when I was (much) younger. I also learned (from Wikipedia) that a square in 1080 Vienna is named after Model. Here are some of the photos shown in the exhibition.

Daisy, again

Let me end this one last time with two new Daisy pictures, below. No longer writing about her will leave a big, big whole.

I am not sure yet whether (and when) I will change my Ghost-profile picture that you might not have perceived consciously yet:

I know that a dog is not a human and all the blabla coming with this, but as all of us happen to be confronted with death somehow and as this is not the first such incident in my life either (obviously), let me share a link to the probably most comforting and most accurate text I know about grief, written by a random stranger on Reddit.

Have a wonderful week and take care of yourself!

Kind regards

Nikolaus (Forgó)