Christian HeilmannModify

2026-08-12 07:52:58

Translating documents isn’t hard these days, but when it comes to long documents, it still gets tricky as most translation services are limited to a few paragraphs and charge for larger texts.

If you use Microsoft Edge, you can use the immersive reader mode to translate huge documents for free though. You can trigger the immersive reader on any text heavy document by activating the icon on the URL bar.

Once activated, you can pick another language from the translation menu:

And the whole document will get translated for you to copy and paste.

You can see this in action in this video.

2026-08-12 02:10:43

[prompt: create a viral hero image that shows what I mean. Or, don’t]

Currently I am on a half diet of social media as I am still locked out of X and by now I really don’t mind any more. Social media is dead and has been weaponised into a distraction, propaganda and rage discourse machine. I wished it weren’t that way, but we truly and thoroughly allowed the “social” web to become a dumpster fire that fuels hate, distrust and confusion. The goal is not shared experiences or creativity, the goal is to keep people glued to the screens and pissed off enough so they comment on other people being wrong on the internets using pre-made memes, AI slop and sound bites.

Mostly mainstream social media?

I am talking about the mainstream platforms here, Meta’s offerings (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) and X, but this downward spiral is also taking over BlueSky, LinkedIn and yes, even Mastodon. The biggest annoyance I see is that people don’t use the social platform to publish their thoughts, ideas and creativity, but instead create a persona of themselves that follows every silly rule the platform comes up with. The most grating part of this is posting about their work without including the link to it, but to add it in the first comment. This has been mandated by platforms to boost engagement over views, which is also the new metric that defines possible monetisation.

We’re not interacting socially, we hold the doors to lock people in

In other words, the platforms turned people into content creators and interaction baiters. There is nothing social about it, and you hardly see people even following a link let alone comment without redirecting to their work or disagreeing whilst spouting ready-made soundbites. The overall endgame seems to be for everybody to be an influencer. Guess what, if everybody is an influencer, nobody is…

And that’s not even the bots. Or, maybe they are, after all the human on social media is an endangered species. So, why bother at all?

Web2.0 was the start of the decline

I’ve been around when social media became a thing, when “web 2.0” was the new cool. I worked on things like Delicious, Flickr and posted tons on Twitter despite being wary of it from the get-go. I blogged long before and it felt weird to be limited to 140 characters. But it was cool that you could text Twitter (that died quickly). I loved that people got a simple way to publish on the web using Geocities, Neopets and the likes. I liked when people learned a bit of HTML by tweaking their Myspace profiles.

Early social media had an emotional core

I really enjoyed the first social networks that gathered people around something they can feel something about. With Flickr, it was photos, with LastFM, it was music. We used Upcoming to find events to meet people and we used b3ta.com and worth1000 to create horrible but funny and unique photoshop experiences. Specialist sites like Ravelry gathered millions of knitters and Etsy was a place for people to show and sell their craft (and boyfriends to suffer).

What it already had was lock-in

One thing that irked me about these things already back then though was that they locked people in. This, of course, makes it easier to grow and quality control a community, but it als means that if anything happens to the platform – like a sale to a larger corporation – all of it can be gone in a snap.

Who needs an emotional core when you can have UGC?

The real beginning of the end was when we stopped even caring about a central idea, or emotional heart, of the products. All-purpose platforms had nothing people can rally around, all they did was offer users to post whatever they wanted. It wasn’t about being a platform specialising in hosting a certain kind of content, companies didn’t even bother with a content plan, it was all about the UGC or “user generated content”. And constant and explosive growth.

When I worked on Yahoo Answers, the idea was to give human answers to problems people had, rather than algorithmic and SEO poisoned web results. Later on Quora and the unfortunately named Expertsexchange did similar things. This was good and we had wonderful stories where people found a special screw to fix their fridge there that saved them a $5,000 repair and similar random successes. Then the company stepped in and demanded much more growth and traffic, so we turned off the quality settings and allowed any old tosh to be asked and answered. The rest is history and a quick death of the platform. This is what happens to all of them now, it is a race to the bottom. Engagement trumps quality, baiting trumps thought.

Mainstream media never reports positively about social media

One thing I find fascinating is that main stream media never reports favourably about social media. Instead all the news reports are about battling addiction, misinformation and how social media hard-core addiction machines like TikTok rot the brains of our children. This could of course be seen as defending their turf, but I see it as a wake up call. Social media has become antisocial.

Specialist groups are still kind of a thing…

Thing is that within systems that are going down there are glimmers of hope. I gave up on the main thread in Facebook, but I do still have a lot of fun in specialist groups. In my case, 8 bit computing, BASIC programming, lots of dog stuff, vintage lego sets, Star Trek and filmmaking. It is a joy to see how all these groups take a special stand against AI generated content and remind people to just post because of the joy of it.

Yes, there’s always the fediverse…

Of course, there is always the indie web and fediverse movement to find joy in. It is frustrating to see though that everything federated and open seems harder to grasp for people and whilst I have tons of fun with people on Mastodon, it feels hard to share that joy to the mainstream. Maybe on purpose, but I think it is more about trying too hard to be open and independent which puts the onus on the end user to take part in it.

When you ask yourself “why am I doing this”, maybe stop doing it

I just finished a podcast and the guest, a CMO of a company explained that almost daily he finds himself thinking “why am I doing this?”. Why do we write blog post only for agents? Why do we comment and share things that are obviously created by AI? He also talked about the lack of joy and fulfilment he feels creating content that is 95% by Claude and optimised to go viral and 5% himself. We frustrate ourselves with efficiency maxing. Maybe social media should be an effort. Maybe we will get more out of it if we allow ourselves to be ourselves. Currently social media feels like being in a cover band and we’re so good in repeating the work and thoughts of others that nobody wants to hear or can even find what we want to say.

2026-08-04 22:00:40

In 1937, Karl Loewenstein, a German Lawyer published an essay in the American Political Science Review that can only be described as a blueprint for democracy to defend itself against fascism. You probably never heard of the essay entitled “Militant Democracy and Fundamental rights” and despite having a (highschool) degree in history, neither have I. And my topic of my final paper was the mistakes of Hindenburg that led to the rise of Hitler… Interestingly this paper was never translated into German. As we live in times that worry me, I thought it would be a good idea to convert the essay to markdown/HTML and translate it.

Give it a read, it is scarily modern and describes current happenings in worrying detail. The only difference is that with social media and AI, those who are against freedom, democracy and openness to the world have far better weapons than the Nazis had in the 1920s.

You can read the full essay and its follow up or stick with the summary. Here is a short gist of the learnings and definitions Loewenstein managed to distill quite nicely:

• You can’t argue with fascists on the basis of facts – it is all about emotion
• Fascists are incredibly good at blaming others and will repeat the same “big issues” caused by “those in power who abuse you” whenever they can
• Fascism is not a national thing, it is a world-wide issue and needs collaboration across borders to repel

What is Fascism?

Loewenstein insists fascism is not an ideology or a program but a political technique for gaining and holding power. Unlike socialism or liberalism, it has no coherent philosophy or set of values behind it — its “programs” are invented after the fact to justify a seizure of power already underway. He calls it the “true child of the age of technical wonders and of the emotional masses”: a set of tools for arousing, directing, and exploiting mass emotion, deployed with calculated rationality by leaders who themselves remain unmoved by the emotions they manufacture in others.

How does Fascism succeed?

1. Exploiting legality itself. Fascist parties operate openly and “legally,” using the very freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and parliamentary participation that democracy extends to all comers — treating democratic tolerance as a Trojan horse.
2. Manufactured grievance and scapegoating. Vague, shifting complaints (corruption, chaos, national decline) are focused onto concrete targets — Jews, freemasons, bankers, chain stores — through relentless repetition, overstatement, and oversimplification.
3. Paramilitary organization. A party militia forms, ostensibly for “self-protection,” but its real function is to intimidate the public, forge an unbreakable in-group loyalty that eventually exceeds loyalty to the state, and prepare a fighting force for an eventual coup.
4. Publicity, not secrecy. Unlike older revolutionary movements, fascism thrives in the spotlight — constant self-advertisement and propaganda are the whole method, not a cover for conspiracy.
5. Proportional representation and parliamentary immunity as tools. Fascists win seats and then use parliamentary privilege to attack the very institution that seats them, paralyzing normal governance until it appears unworkable.

What can we do against Fascism?

1. Recognize fascism as a technique, not a legitimate ideology or ordinary party. Loewenstein argues the paralysis of Weimar came from treating fascism as just another political viewpoint entitled to full legal protection. Once democracies understand it instead as a hostile technique for destroying democracy from within, the response becomes conceivable.
2. Pass targeted anti-fascist legislation aimed at the specific techniques, not general ideas. He points to actual measures adopted by democracies of his day: banning political uniforms and party militias, restricting the use of parliamentary immunity to sabotage parliament, curbing incendiary propaganda, and requiring paramilitary-style organizations to register their bylaws with authorities.
3. Restrict or eliminate proportional representation where it hands legislative footholds to anti-democratic parties. He singles this out as “that gravest mistake of democratic ideology” because it lets small extremist minorities gain an outsized platform inside the very institutions they intend to destroy.
4. Refuse to let democratic tolerance extend to parties that deny democracy’s own rules. The essay argues that formal equality before the law should not mean fascist and democratic parties get treated identically when one openly seeks to abolish the system granting it standing.
5. Suppress party militias and paramilitary symbolism before they mature into a rival armed force. Loewenstein treats this as one of the most urgent fronts, since an unchecked party militia becomes the instrument of an eventual coup.
6. Act early, not reactively. The German illustration is presented explicitly as a warning: half-measures, delayed bans, and reluctance to enforce laws already on the books let the movement outgrow the point where ordinary legislative correction still worked.
7. Pursue international cooperation among democracies, which he criticises as badly lacking in 1937 — currency and trade agreements among democratic states were treated as narrowly economic rather than as part of a shared defence against a transnational fascist movement that was, by contrast, coordinating closely across borders (Berlin and Rome supporting fascist movements elsewhere).

When I look around social media and election posters, I worry. You should, too. Take a look at the programs of some of the parties people insist on voting for to “get some change” and “show the lazy politicians who is boss”. If their party program includes separating from other countries and border-crossing institutions, that’s a red flag. If they keep blaming one thing that came from outside your country on all that is wrong and sell themselves as the only ones who will do something about it, that’s another red flag. If parts of their political program actively violate current law in your country or of the group it is part of, that’s a proper no.

The rise of fascism in the 20s and 30s lead to one of the worst wars and unspeakable crimes against humanity. Never again, we should be much, much more intelligent and open eyed than back then. Alas, I don’t see that happening.

2026-06-12 15:16:04

When adding an email link to a document you should use the mailto: URI scheme:

Email Chris

That makes the browser open the associated email tool instead of opening the link in the browser. Today I found out that browsers also offer a “copy email” in the context menu that only copies the email itself and not the whole href attribute value.

Neat!

2026-06-02 13:25:47

Some time ago the US government announced that they will de-classify UFO sightings material from the 50s and 60s. This caused quite the stir amongst conspiracy theorists but also plain sci-fi fans like me. They did, and – of course – the results were not that insightful.

A few days ago the government also released whitehouse.gov/aliens. Styled in the fashion of the X-files TV show, this is a web product created and published by the government. Paid for with your tax money and – given my experience working on various government projects – probably highly funded with delivery cycles that have lots of space for bureaucratic swings and roundabouts.

Watching the site, I was amused at first but soon the hair on my neck stood on end and I turned first speechless and then disgusted to my core.

This isn’t a playful site about outdated paranoid government materials about extraterrestrials, it is a live tracker of arrests of illegal immigrants portrayed like a Hollywood trailer painting the current president as the only one with the guts to rid our world of unwelcome beings living amongst us.

This is cynical, xenophobic and dehumanises a whole group of people. People, not extraterrestrial lifeforms. People with families, hopes, dreams and struggles they had to get through to be where they are now. People who are illegally where they are, yes. But instead of naming and punishing those who brought them there illegally or those who make them work without legal backup, this site gleefully celebrates when and how the victims of these illegal trades were detained. Whilst defining them as alien, not belonging and something dangerous and necessary to “remove”. People tracked and detained in a fashion that is highly debated and reminds more of government sanctioned Droogs rather than law officers just doing their job.

Let me repeat this, because it’s important: this is not some social media stunt by a YouTuber or Podcaster. This is not a xenophobic or racist subculture related private news site. This is a government funded, created and promoted product released on the most official of channels they have.

Someone designed this. Someone built this. Someone signed off the bills and the time sheets. And you paid for it. At no time during all this someone thought that this is not only beyond tasteless but also reminiscent of the darkest times in human history.

This is straight up from the totalitarian and fascist playbook: You dehumanise, you track, you detain and finally you exterminate. This should never happen again.

I grew up and now again live in Germany. During my upbringing, the horrors of the Nazi regime were still around to remember. I met victims and people “who just did their job”. I heard people say that not all was bad. I’ve encountered broken, guilt-ridden people who had no idea how to move on. School visits to concentration camps, Nazi interrogation sites and prisons were common. If you have not been to any of them, I really advise you to go. Another excellent place to keep the horrors on top of mind is the uprising museum in Warsaw, Poland.

Even on my daily walks there are reminders of what happened. On a road I walk along every day there are two gilded cobblestones that remind people that on 4.11.1942 Doctor Albert Martin Fröhlich and his wife Dora were taken from their homes and brought to the prison Theresienstadt. They were both killed in Auschwitz 1944.

Two doors down from my house is another one of those stones. This one reminds us of Hans Schulz, a member of the resistance who got detained on the 27.9.1944 and executed in a nearby prison on the 20.4.1945.

Now, these people weren’t illegal aliens. They were Jewish and the other one was a German man of courage. Their fate was sealed when the government at the time defined them as unwanted and illegal or enemies of the state. Most likely their whereabouts were reported to the authorities of the time by law-abiding, good people. And this is a really slippery slope that we seem to be on right now again. How illegal is too much? How different do you have to be to count as “alien”? Who defines this?

Nothing that happened in the Third Reich was illegal according to the laws at that time. Nothing seemed as horrible as it turned out to be at first. People were detained and put into prison. Many people claim not to know what happened in these prisons and expected the people put there to get a fair trial and be sent somewhere they can live. There were even propaganda stories that all Jewish people would be sent to live in Madagascar.

So it felt OK for people to see these police actions take place. After all, these people did something illegal or belonged to a group of people always up to no good. The government will take them away so they can’t be a danger to the law-abiding citizens any longer.

Would you have done something?

Whenever I went to a concentration camp or museum I wasn’t surprised by the horrors and cruelty. These have been a constant throughout history, we are damn inventive and creative at causing people misery and pain. I was more baffled by how people could have stood by and allowed it to happen. How could people be blind to what is really happening?

The reason came to me much later: fear. The first thing a totalitarian government leading to fascism does is to show ultimate strength and give the impression that nothing will go past them. Total control, observation and paying and promoting people to report others. All in the name of keeping “their people” secure. People trade freedom for protection. And realise far too late that their protectors are not benevolent supporters but thugs that enjoy punishing people. So it is easy to say that you would have done something, but the reality is that most people would be too scared as they saw what happens to people who disagree and stand up. Maybe you have a family and you are worried about what happens to them. Maybe you just felt powerless, as the propaganda of the regime keeps telling you that your job is to consent and applaud, in exchange for your freedom. You vs. them, and the government is the only one that can protect you from them.

That is why the alien web site is not a fun joke, but it is a worrying decline in tone and messaging. This started earlier when the ministry of defense was renamed to the department of war. There wasn’t any at the time that this country was directly involved in, so what does that mean?

In any case, we live in worrying and scary times. Not because of the amount of crime – that is actually on the decline – but in terms of what reality is sold to us by official government channels. And that happens all around the globe. The question is where we want to stand. Someone built this web site and thought it was a fun project with an important message to the world. I hope their pay check is worth it.