Week 09/2026

E qualcosa sarà. O magari anche niente.

Nikolaus Forgó

20 Feb 2026 — 4 min read

You don't see Großglockner here.

NSFW

This week's song is a beautiful poem and love song, from Gianmaria Testa, reminding me that I always wanted to learn Italian better.

The singer/composer died in March 2016, 10 years ago, at the age of 57, from Cancer. Fuck Cancer. Here, here and here is a little more about him.

Retrospect

We had a consortium meeting o nTuesday in PräNudge. It was the first time I visited the Future Health Lab in Vienna - that has, among other things, a very nice coworking space close to Hauptbahnhof that can be rented.

Internal Project Meeting

We had a two days internal project meeting with the whole team to work on internal communication, group dynamics etc. The venue was UNIVIE's digital ilab in Apostelgasse 23.

As I was kindly invited by the internal masters of ceremony Saskia and Theresa (who - again - did a terrific job in this) to contribute with a (kind of) keynote, I used this opportunity to do a Mentimeter survey (great tool, btw) on several questions, including the group's most important strengths and weaknesses.

I am very much in line with the answers on our key strengths given by the group:

I was - again - blown away by the dedication, group spirit, friendliness and creativity in this group. The poster session alone was better than most things ever seen at (legal) conferences.

Media

The interviews announced las week were published in profil, Kurier and ORF.

I gave an interview for UNIVIE's Rudolphina on social media age limits that is still in the pipeline.

Prospect

#arsboni

I will host a session with Prof. Dr. Amrei Bahr about AI in research assessment, motivated by recent DFG-policies in the domain on Tuesday at 9.00 am.

I also did the announced interviews in the laundry, but am a little late with the editing. You may, however, expect them to be published in the next week.

Wiener Zeitung

The Wiener Zeitung is legally obliged to have an advisory board (§ 1 section 5 WZEVI-Gesetz). I am one of its members. We have a meeting next week and it will be very interesting to see how the current shitstorm against the reform of media funding will be reflected there.

Women in Law - Male Allies

The women in law conference initiative will host a conference on Male Allies in Juridicum on Tuesday evening,

Free entry, registration required, no stream.

Look and Feel

I am quite intrigued by Openclaw and Peter Steinberger (see also Weekly 07/2026), for technical, social and legal reasons.

Der Standard has a nice text explaining in plain language what this all is about giving credits to Mario Zechner (who was in #arsboni with another project some time ago).

Steinberger was interviewed on Openclaw by Armin Wolf in Zib II.

The interview (that I personally found OK) received remarkably bad feedback in social media (e. g. Florian Gschwandtner on LinkedIn, Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, brutkasten or "Frau Elch")

some people defending it (Zechner, again :-) )

and also some interest in traditional media (Der Standard, Die Presse [Paywall], NewsFlix, Heute, etc.).

It triggered many general complaints about the (lack of) digital culture in Austria.

This debate is why I also listened to a more than 3 hours interview, hosted by Lex Fridman (who is, in my view, very good here).

I would very much recommend to listen to this. It's a very good introduction into agentic AI and AI agents, but, perhaps more importantly, a very interesting example of a brilliant, yet very peculiar, creative mind and the motives leading to such a project (idea).

One of the funny ways to lose time in this game is to get stuck reading on Moltbot - a kind of Reddit-like bulletin board - where AI-agents (presumably) started to communicate with each other. Humans are allowed to watch.