Newsletter

Week 29/2025

Schon 120 Clicks

Nikolaus Forgó

10 Jul 2025 — 4 min read

NSFW

This week’s song is (for the third time, see Weekly 12/2025 and Weekly 25/2025) from Anna Mabo - and it’s 2 songs: Ottakring and Jealousy.

Mabo is, with Alfred Dorfer, in the State Opera on Friday, July 11, tickets are still available. The song is a nice first warning that summer will not last forever.

Retrospect

Klagenfurt

I spent Tuesday at AIROV in Klagenfurt. The organisers were very fast in producing a nice video on this very enjoyable event.

My gig there made me search for some more biases in and issues with LLMs. I learned, in particular: ChatGPT fails 5 times in a row to draw a left handed student and starts producing random images of Golden Retrievers instead:

An interesting study suggests that at least 13.5 % of all PubMed abstracts - which is several hundred thousands - were written with LLM support in 2024.

The US-embassy in Bern asks study-visa applicants “kindly” to set all their social media privacy settings on public “to help with the identity and admissibility checks”.

Before leaving, I made it briefly into the Literature-Museum Klagenfurt and learned that Ingeborg Bachmann was not only an excellent student but also received her primary school transcript of records written on paper showing the Habsburg-monarchy-seal with a double-headed eagle - in 1936 (!).

Private Radio in Austria

Carinthia was also the topic of a a very interesting #arsboni #laundry conversation I had with Prof. Dr. Brigitta Buck and Mag. Helmut Peissl on Thursday. We spoke about the beginnings of private/free radio in Austria that were deeply rooted in Carinthia as an activity of and for Carinthian Slovenes, connected with similar initiatives in whole Europe. Haider, FPÖ, ORF, VÖZ - they all had roles in this debate that help to understand today’s debates much better.

The video is edited and rendered and is scgheduled to be published within the next hours or days. I deeply appreciated the conversation and I believe that this is an important piece of oral history to beeter understand how media was not free in Austria back then and which role the European Court of Human Rights with its decision 17207/90 of 1993 had.

Helmut Peissl was also so generous to provide me with additional reading material on the matter.

Prospect

#arsboni

I am currently producing more laundry episodes which leads to a decreasing number of streamed sessions. But there’s at least one next week, on Wednesday July 16th at 19.00 CET:

IT security and digital sovereignty at Austrian universities

is the topic of a roundtable organised by the Federal Ministry Women, Science and Research on Monday. Prof. Dr. Iris Eisenberger and me are invited to present our joint project SERA there. This is, as far as I can tell, a by invitation only event, but some media coverage is planned. Our slot will deal with the impact of the AI Act, the Digital Services Act, The Cyber Resilience Act and the NIS2-Directive on Austrian Universities and I am very much looging forward to meeting Federal Minister Eva-Maria Holzleitner, BSc in person.

Vacancy

We have an exciting job offer open at the moment.

The position is part of the Vienna Doctoral College on Digital Humanism that is funded by WWTF. This is an ideal opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary environment, not only at the department, but with colleagues with diverse backgrounds and different universities such as professors Lecheler, Lindorfer and Prainsack who will collaborate with the successful candidate as well.

Look and Feel

Eurotrash and Faserland

I finally figured out that Spotify provides interesting audiobooks as well. I don’t remember any more how, why and where, by some miraculous decision the algorithm brought me to Eurotrash from Christian Kracht that then led me back to Faserland that I had read 30 years ago. I have forgotten everything about Faserland but not that I had read it with breathless fascination then - quite the same feeling I go through again now when listening to Eurotrash.

Big, big recommendation, in particular for the audiobook that is read - surprise - by Christian Kracht: Christian Kracht reads a book from Christian Kracht on a character called Christian Kracht - and it’s a perfect story about him and us in our time.

Spotify has a playlist with all songs mentioned in Faserland as well who want to dig deeper into the 90-ies soundtrack -