Open-Source

Buying GitHub stars sounds pathetic enough to be a joke. The joke misses the interesting part. Stars are a public trust signal on a code-hosting platform, and there is an ordinary, low-friction market for faking them. The important question is not whether inflated stars reliably produce downloads. It is why counterfeit popularity is so cheap to buy, and why that becomes a security problem once fake credibility attaches to malicious repositories.

I love concerts. I love setlists. I hate building the playlist manually afterward. But do I really? A small automation project, a Deftones show in Dortmund, and the question of whether you should automate something you kind of enjoy.

Microsoft confirmed this week that it produced BitLocker recovery keys to the FBI after a valid legal order. On eligible devices, Windows can back a recovery key up to a Microsoft account during setup. For European universities that handle research data, student records, and HR information under GDPR, this is not an abstract concern. It is a structural problem. The answer is not a technical workaround. It is sovereign, publicly funded, openly licensed software — and a principle that the EU has articulated but not consistently practised: public money, public code.

I am on the spectrum. This post asks what “making mental illness visible” can realistically mean and describes inner-echo, an unvalidated audiovisual metaphor project—not a simulation, diagnostic instrument, or therapy.

In June 2022 I presented on educast.nrw at the Tag der Lehre at HfMT Köln. This is the longer argument behind that talk: why universities should not outsource their video infrastructure to commercial platforms, and what a better alternative looks like in practice.