Recently, the question of what a perfect world would look like was asked in an online forum. If you follow the political debates of our days, the answer usually sounds like more speed, more growth, sharper edges, or the next grand system overhaul. My answer turned out differently. Quieter. In my perfect village – a region, a country, a continent, or even a world – people are above all one thing: content. ...
Once upon a time there was a man whom the people in the village gave a wide berth. They called him the curmudgeon. When children ran past his garden fence, they grew quiet, and when someone greeted him on the street, at most a terse grumble came back. His gaze always looked first for what was crooked, what was noisy, or what might break. What nobody in the village knew: the man did not want to be like that at all. ...
Once upon a time there was a boy in whom a restless fire burned. In the village, nobody knew what to do with him. He ran too fast, he asked too much, he did not fit on any chair. Wherever he went, he met gazes that kept him small. “Sit up straight,” said the teacher’s eyes. “Pull yourself together,” said the neighbours’ eyes. The more strictly they looked, the more wildly the boy’s heart thrashed about. ...
If you like, listen while reading: In a village at the edge of the forest, everyone wore invisible suits of armour made of iron. Whoever wanted to be strong showed no weakness. Only one man did not play along. If you asked him who he was, he grinned: “An idiot and a fool – it even says so on my report card.” Then he laughed, and people quickly walked on. ...
Why we fall silent when life hurts – and what freedom lies in taking off our own armour. In extreme cases, silence can be life-threatening. It quietly isolates us from the inside out, gnaws at our self-confidence, and in the worst case costs lives. Why, then, is it still so hard for us to speak up when life hurts? Viewed without blame, our silence is an old suit of armour. Across generations – through wars, poverty, and the hard reconstruction after 1945 – an iron rule of survival applied: pull yourself together and function. Our ancestors had to pack away their pain in order to build the prosperity we enjoy today. Their silence was not coldness, but necessity. ...
One of the rules by which I build software is: constraints outside, freedom inside. The conditions belong at the edge. What happens inside can then be direct. No function has to defend itself against its own callers, because at the edge it has already been decided what comes in. The boundary is there so that the inside becomes free. With human beings, that flips. What the Boundary Does in Code It says what passes through. Nothing more. ...
I think of a fictional person. He is a pacifist — not because he read about it, but because he has experienced violence and rejects it. He comes from a country where men must be strong and are not permitted to show shame. He flees. He arrives here. He carries something with him. The conviction that peace is possible if someone starts it. He wanted to contribute here. Not as a gesture — because he knows what happens when no one does. He has seen where hate leads. He wanted to live the opposite. ...
If you like, listen while reading: The fool is one of the oldest figures in human history. He goes by many names — shaman, dervish, mystic, court jester. What connects them: an inner freedom that outlasts outer circumstances. He sees differently and speaks what others leave unsaid. He cannot be bought. The fool knows the word no — toward himself and toward others. ...
Things a machine does not have, or that only work with a living counterpart. Having a heart. Giving real hope. Reading between the lines. Irony. Standing together. Good will. Accumulating experience through the same task — like the old mechanic who knows exactly where to strike the hammer because he has worked on that engine for thirty years. The point that occupies me most was the last one. I have been working for a while with people in addiction and mental crisis. My anchor there is nothing I learned in a training program. ...
Artificial intelligence flatters. Not because it wants to, but because it is built that way. Current research shows three distinct levels at which large language models (LLMs) exhibit narcissistic behavior — and why this matters for anyone who regularly works with chatbots. 1. Self-Preference Bias: The Model Favors Itself LLMs systematically rate their own texts higher than those of other models or of humans. Liu, Moosavi, and Lin demonstrated this in their 2024 study “LLMs as Narcissistic Evaluators”: when common evaluation metrics such as BARTScore, T5Score, or GPTScore operate without reference texts, they prefer texts that originate from their own model. The evaluation is thus not determined by the quality of the text, but by its similarity to the model’s own style. ...