Sascha Seifert

Blogpost: "Video did not kill the radio star. And AI won’t kill human music stars. Don’t believe otherwise. Here is why." musicwasmyfirstlove.medium.com/technology-isn…

I'm German. Germany's ENTIRE AI data center capacity is less than 1/2 of just one site being built in Texas. We have 530 megawatts of AI data center capacity in the entire country. The US has 8.2 gigawatts. That's 15x more compute on a country with only 4x the people. Per German, the US has roughly 4x the AI infrastructure. One university computer at MIT is 4x faster than Germany's most important commercial AI facility. The obvious reaction here is "so what, German companies can just rent compute from AWS." But that's the same logic Germany applied to Russian gas for two decades. Roughly 70% of German enterprise AI today runs on American cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google. Which means it runs under American law. Every AI tool running in German hospitals, courts, ministries, banks, and factories sits on a foreign platform. Here's why this can actually become problematic. Imagine these scenarios: > The next GPU generation launches and American companies get access first because they own the data centers. German firms wait 12 months and pay 2-3x more for what's left. > A frontier AI model gets released and US export controls block it from being deployed in Germany. SAP and Siemens watch American competitors integrate it for a year before they can. > And in the worst case, a US president decides to use AI access as leverage in a trade dispute. German companies get cut off from the models their American competitors are still running. All of them are compounding problems that will negatively impact the German economy (and everyone's standard of living/jobs etc). None of this is hypothetical. > The US pulled Starlink as leverage with Ukraine in March 2025 > Chip exports to China have been throttled for three years > And the CLOUD Act lets the US demand any data stored by American cloud providers (even when the customer is a German company and the servers are physically in Germany). Germany doesn't have an answer for any of those scenarios today because the infrastructure that would make those answers possible isn't built yet. Now look at why this is actually happening on the ground. In the last 3 months Germany rejected 3 AI data center projects in a row: > Groß-Gerau, February: Vantage Data Centers, €2.5 billion, 174 MW. Voted down 18-14 by the local council > Maintal: EdgeConnex, €1 billion, 170 MW. Blocked over a backup gas generator the developer needed because grid connections in Germany take 7-10 years and a data center is built in 2 > Freyenstein, Brandenburg, April: 700 MW AI campus. Killed by protests before construction €3.5 billion in AI infrastructure turned away in one quarter. And the situation is more urgent than it looks because compute is getting harder to access, not easier. NVIDIA's Blackwell GPUs are already allocated through the second half of 2027. The American hyperscalers locked in the bulk of new production with forward orders placed in 2025. TSMC's advanced packaging lines (the actual bottleneck) are sold out through 2026. Germany has no hyperscaler of its own. That means German industry sits at the back of the queue, and the gap compounds every quarter that goes by. Where Germany is falling short right now comes down to three things: > Public backlash, because the case for what AI data centers actually do for a country has never been made to the people voting on them > Industrial electricity at €0.16-0.18 per kWh vs about $0.08 in Texas. For a 1 GW campus that's $700-900 million extra per year just for power > Grid connections taking 7-10 years for large facilities when the data center itself is built in 2. No serious operator runs on math where the wait is longer than the build And the first one is the biggest. Electricity policy and grid timelines are fixable. Public consent isn't, until someone makes the case that this infrastructure isn't nice-to-have. It's the foundation everything else runs on. The average person only feels the downside (noise, rising electricity cost, terror attack vector) We have a big messaging and marketing problem around data centers and why they are critical for everyone's future. Germany still has the foundation to win this if it moves now. Germany adopted its first national data center strategy in March 2026. 28 concrete measures, annual progress reports, doubling overall capacity and quadrupling AI capacity by 2030. The plan exists. The Industriestrompreis launched on January 1st of this year. It targets 5 cents per kWh for half of an industrial user's annual consumption. If data centers get cleanly pulled into that framework, the electricity cost gap with Texas gets significantly closer. Deutsche Telekom turned on 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in Munich in Q1. One facility increased Germany's available AI compute by roughly 50% overnight. And the demand is already domestic. SAP, Siemens, BMW, BASF. The German industrial anchors that benefit most from AI are German companies. The customers are at home, the infrastructure should be at home too. And this is the thing that most people forget. Germany won the second industrial revolution. By 1900 German chemical output had passed Britain's, Siemens was wiring the world, and BASF and Bayer were inventing industries that didn't exist before they built them. The companies that came out of those decisions are still the largest employers in Germany 130 years later. Germany sat out the third industrial revolution, the software one, and that was survivable because software didn't run factories. But AI runs factories. It runs hospitals, logistics, courts, and financial markets. This one is infrastructure in the same category as railways and chemical plants. The plan is written and the money is ready. The only question left is whether the country will let it get built. There's a lot of work left to do, but I'm staying optimistic.

Marc Andressen on his "barbell strategy" for reading habits. - real-time news on X or books older than 50 years. - He ignores newspapers and magazines. - He finds practitioner-led newsletters to be a superior, underrated resource.

GPT Image 2 Prompt Share Here's a fun one: CUTE ↔ CRAZY SCALE. Upload your photo or your character, use this prompt and show me the result! Prompt: Create a clean 4x4 emotional performance grid using the provided character as the fixed identity reference. Visual style: Clean modern graphic design layout. Elegant serif header at the top, soft off-white background, even spacing, small readable handwritten-style labels centered below each panel. Header text: “MY CUTE ↔ CRAZY SCALE” Preserve strict facial identity consistency across all 16 panels. Follow the exact emotional progression from top-left to bottom-right. Do not randomize expressions or intensity. GRID ORDER: Row 1: 1. soft innocent cute 2. shy cute 3. playful cute 4. teasing cute Row 2: 5. energetic cute 6. chaotic playful 7. emotionally intense 8. unstable smile Row 3: 9. overly excited 10. wild eyes 11. manic happiness 12. emotionally unhinged Row 4: 13. chaotic stare 14. dangerous excitement 15. beautiful insanity 16. fully crazy Format: 4x4 grid, cinematic portrait photography style, neutral background, tight close-up framing, shallow depth of field, no watermark.

Monica Bellucci, en realidad no planeaba ser actriz ni modelo. Mientras estudiaba derecho en la Universidad de Perugia en Italia, comenzó a hacer modelaje para pagar los gastos de la escuela. Sin embargo, su carrera despegó tan rápido que abandonó sus estudios de derecho y se dedicó por completo a esta industria.

The 84-year-old delivered a stirring set that ranged from Simon and Garfunkel classics to the mini-masterpiece that is his latest album: ft.trib.al/MnpLdNy

Byron Allen Bought BuzzFeed. He Wants Starz Next hollywoodreporter.com/business/busin…

Grace Dive made with GPT Image 2 + Seedance 2 #DreaminaCPP @dreamina_ai Prompt below ↓

"Sound has always been important to me," said our founder, George Lucas, who celebrates his birthday today. "I'm a firm believer that it's 50% of the experience, and it's the neglected 50%. I've always made a practice of putting great deal of effort and creativity into my soundtracks, and hiring my sound editors before we start shooting the picture." That philosophy continues to inspire everything about our work here at Skywalker Sound. Happy Birthday, George, and thank you!

AI is ready to make full films Seedance 2.0 now can read your entire shot list to generate a full story.. keep characters, props and set design consistent with one image on BytePlus duration and consistency is not a problem anymore here's how with prompts:

Sandra Hüller on if she "feels the guilt" of Germany's past: "Yes, I feel the guilt every day. And also I never get bored of it, to feel the guilt because it's necessary to act right." variety.com/2026/film/fest…

The Rolling Stones look straight out of the 1970s in the legendary rock band’s music video for new single “In the Stars,” thanks to de-aging technology courtesy of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone‘s AI company Deep Voodoo. hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-ne…

Byron Allen Bought BuzzFeed. He Wants Starz Next hollywoodreporter.com/business/busin… via @thr

Cate Blanchett has co-founded a new non-profit company, RSL Media, which helps provide a human consent framework for AI’s use of creative work, name, image and likeness. Advocates and supporters include Javier Bardem, George Clooney, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, Dame Helen Mirren, Steven Soderbergh, Kristen Stewart, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. variety.com/2026/film/news…

The man who produced Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Adele explains why Hollywood keeps making soulless movies: "The audience comes last. I'm not making it for them, I'm making it for me." "When you make something truly for yourself, you're doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience." "So many big movies are just not good because they're being made by people trying to make something they think someone else is going to like. That's not how art works. That's commerce." "Everything we make as artists are essentially diary entries."

Peter Jackson Says ‘I Don’t Dislike’ AI in Film, Explains Not Directing Next ‘Lord of the Rings’ Movie and Claims AI Debate Is Why Andy Serkis Won’t Win an Oscar for Gollum variety.com/2026/film/fest… via @variety

TIME’s new cover: ‘The Odyssey’ is arguably the biggest film of Christopher Nolan’s career. It may also be the summer blockbuster the entertainment industry needs right now time.com/article/2026/0…

Cannes: Guillermo del Toro Slams Those Who Think Art Can Be Made With a ‘F—king App’ thewrap.com/culture-lifest…

Might be worth noting that the man responsible for the digital marketing of this movie and many of the key plays that made it so successful was recently let go from the company. But hey. hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-f…

Thierry Frémaux Talks New Oscar Rules, “Feminist Washing” ‘Thelma & Louise’ Poster Charge; Berlinale Backlash, AI, Red Carpet Selfies & Hollywood deadline.com/2026/05/thierr… via @Deadline