Marcus Bitzl

My oil painting of Wine and Dino Nuggs

Maybe a wax Lincoln sculpture wasn’t the best idea during DC’s first week of summer heat

Russia forgot to pay its chatgpt bill so a bunch of angry Twitter accounts suddenly went haywire

#Archivtrouvaillen: Freiheit! Natürlichkeit! Bohnenkaffee! 1931 machte ein «Aktionskomitee für den Schutz des natürlichen Bohnenkaffees» in Bern an der Schweizerischen Ausstellung für Gesundheitspflege und Sport (HYSPA) Stimmung gegen koffeinfreien «chemisch ausgelaugten» Kaffee

„Wenn der Staat verbietet, Menschen sprachlich einzuschließen, dann drängt man sie weiter an den Rand. Und dabei ist es völlig egal, ob jemand der Meinung ist, Sprache habe nichts mit Inklusion zu tun.“ Meine Kolumne zum #Genderverbot in Bayern t-online.de/leben/kolumne-…

Learn the facts

Full Excerpt: "Stanley Kubrick‘s version of The Shining is a lot tougher for me to evaluate, because I’m still profoundly ambivalent about the whole thing. I’d admired Kubrick for a long time and had great expectations for the project, but I was deeply disappointed in the end result. Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. I think there are two basic problems with the movie. First, Kubrick is a very cold man—pragmatic and rational—and he had great difficulty conceiving, even academically, of a supernatural world. He used to make transatlantic calls to me from England at odd hours of the day and night, and I remember once he rang up at seven in the morning and asked, “Do you believe in God?” I wiped the shaving cream away from my mouth, thought a minute and said, “Yeah, I think so.” Kubrick replied, “No, I don’t think there is a God,” and hung up. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: Because he couldn’t believe, he couldn’t make the film believable to others. The second problem was in characterization and casting. Jack Nicholson, though a fine actor, was all wrong for the part. His last big role had been in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and between that and his manic grin, the audience automatically identified him as a loony from the first scene. But the book is about Jack Torrance’s gradual descent into madness through the malign influence of the Overlook, which is like a huge storage battery charged with an evil powerful enough o corrupt all those who come into contact with it. If the guy is nuts to begin with, then the entire tragedy of his downfall is wasted. For that reason, the film has no center and no heart, despite its brilliantly unnerving camera angles and dazzling use of the Steadicam. What’s basically wrong with Kubrick’s version of The Shining is that it’s a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little; and that’s why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should. I’d like to remake The Shining someday, maybe even direct it myself if anybody will give me enough rope to hang myself with." (From Stephen King's interview with Playboy, 1983)

Someone has put crocheted Christmas puddings on all 75 railing posts along St Helen’s Wharf… 2/2

I asked the National Gallery how much money they make from image fees (the licensing cost if you want to publish works in their collection). After initially refusing to answer, they confirmed that actually they lose money. 1/3

In Bayern geht es jungen queeren Menschen laut einer neuen Studie schlecht - die Landesregierung von Markus Söder schert sich aber nicht darum. queer.de/detail.php?art…

A Democrat was in the White House when my family was sent to the internment camps in 1941. It was an egregious violation of our human and civil rights. It would have been understandable if people like me said they’d never vote for a Democrat again, given what had been done to us. But being a liberal, being a progressive, means being able to look past my own grievances and concerns and think of the greater good. It means working from within the Democratic party to make it better, even when it has betrayed its values. I went on to campaign for Adlai Stevenson when I became an adult. I marched for civil rights and had the honor of meeting Dr. Martin Luther King. I fought for redress for my community and have spent my life ensuring that America understood that we could not betray our Constitution in such a way ever again. Bill Clinton broke my heart when he signed DOMA into law. It was a slap in the face to the LGBTQ community. And I knew that we still had much work to do. But I voted for him again in 1996 despite my misgivings, because the alternative was far worse. And my obligation as a citizen was to help choose the best leader for it, not to check out by not voting out of anger or protest. There is no leader who will make the decision you want her or him to make 100 percent of the time. Your vote is a tool of hope for a better world. Use it wisely, for it is precious. Use it for others, for they are in need of your support, too.

#job Wir suchen einen Admin/DevOps Menschen mit Führungserfahrung. Viel Ansible, Nginx, ELK, Prometheus, Debian Umgebung. E14, Vollzeit, unbefristet, bis zu 80% mobiles Arbeiten. Bei Fragen gerne bei mir melden! bsb-muenchen.de/fileadmin/pdf/…

c't 10/1988: »Weniger pessimistisch denkende Zeitgenossen sehen endlich den richtigen Weg beschritten, einen wirklich intelligenten Rechner zu schaffen, mit dem man sich zum Beispiel in Umgangssprache unterhalten kann, der Simultanübersetzungen beherrscht, der kreativ handelt, kurz: der all die Versprechungen erfüllt, nach denen die symbolisch arbeitenden Methoden der Künstlichen Intelligenz (KI) schon seit Jahrzehnten weitgehend vergeblich streben.« —Oktober 1988 im @ctmagazin Was ausgegraben: 1988 war das Heftthema »Neuronale Computer« KI und maschinelles Lernen: ein ziemlich alter Hut | heise online heise.de/hintergrund/KI…

Die Supraleiter-Sache wird immer verrückter. Hier ein neues Video aus China: Das neuentdeckte Material scheint nicht nur zu schweben, das sieht verdammt nach Flux-Pinning aus. Das wäre ein gutes Argument dafür, dass die Behauptungen wirklich wahr sind. Was ist hier los? (Thread)

Does anybody know of an in-memory #search library that can run in the browser and has support for tokenization, some light token analysis, field-searches, phrase searches and highlighting? 🙃

Nein. Was hindert die CDU daran, selbst die Sanierung der Kita zu beantragen und dazu noch ein paar Ideen für den Kita-Spielplatz beizusteuern. Dann stimmt man für den eigenen Antrag, der als weitergehend zuerst abgestimmt wird. Der Antrag des AfD-Landrats hat sich damit erledigt

Heat waves are becoming more frequent, more intense and longer – all due to the impacts of the climate crisis. #ClimateAction can’t wait.

Ali Riley zeigt der FIFA symbolisch den (bunten) Mittelfinger. queer.de/detail.php?art…

This is another one of those ill-thought, fear-mongering scientific disinformation about LLMs, and I will explain why in this long thread. 🧶