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Mega-IPOs
There are more than 15 trillion (!) dollar invested in index funds. Starting in a few days and going on until the fall of next year, more than half a trillion dollar of that money will be pulled out from the existing company shares in numerous indexes and used to buy SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic shares from their existing share owners. (Most of it will start happening in about a year, when the S&P500 lets SpaceX join. Unlike NASDAQ, S&P didn't change their rules to fast-track these mega IPOs. But they will join NASDAQ before their first quarterly report as a public company).
With the IPOs of SpaceX (this Friday), OpenAI, and Anthropic, and them joining NASDAQ and FTSE's global index within a few days after their IPOs (and S&P and Dow Jones a year later), everyone who has invested in index funds, be it directly through ETFs or indirectly through their 401k and other retirement plans, will automatically sell about 5% of the shares they are currently holding, and buy shares from one of these three companies. All three IPOs will be, by far!, the largest IPOs in history.
So, if you have $100 invested in a NASDAQ-indexed ETF, you will be selling $5 of the stocks you currently own (while everyone else is doing the same) and buy $5 worth of Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI stocks (while everyone else is doing the same), automatically and predictably.
It will be a tough time for the rest of the stock market this year, as there will be a lot of people's money flowing to OpenAI, SpaceX and Antrhopic without anyone ever intentionally buying it, with the market sending 5% of its liquidity to these three new mega IPOs. It will be immensely beneficial for everyone selling these shares.
Whether it will be beneficial for the general public, i.e. for the people holding these index funds, is something we are going to see in the next few years. I wouldn't wager a prediction on that. Maybe there's an AI bubble that might burst, maybe making more of their numbers public will make some people think they are overvalued, maybe all three companies will realise incredible value and will lift the stock indexes well beyond the 5% of the market they will initially cost. We are going to see. If I could make predicitons about how these things will develop, I'd be much richer.
But it seems that in the next 12-18 months, 100s of billions of dollars are slated to go from retirement plans and other stock investors to Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others. Happy to discuss if I misunderstand.
The Amazing Digital Circus
(spoiler free)
The Amazing Digital Circus is an animation show of which, until about a month ago, I haven't even heard about. I learned about it from my daughter. It is the work of an independent creator, and was initially published on YouTube and later also made available on Netflix. The YouTube video of the first episode has more than 400 million views and on Netflix it's been in the top ten for a while.
The premise is that a few humans are captured in a virtual reality, where an AI has the job to entertain them. With time we realize that some of the humans have been there for decades, one has partially lost his mind, and there seems to be no way out. The colorful graphics and seemingly silly character designs hide a much darker story, inspired by "The Matrix", maybe "Lost", and "I have no mouth but I must scream".
The show has nine episodes, each about half an hour long and the final episode double that, so not too long.
I find the animation style somewhat subpar, but the pacing is so much more comfortable and relaxed than many other current shows and movies. The characters are really well done, and feel realistic and multifaceted.
The last episode is currently being shown in cinemas, and it seems do be doing extremely well for an independent show, before it will be available on YouTube in a few days (for free, like the rest of the show). We went to watch it today, and very much enjoyed it.
Given how Lost didn't manage to find a fully satisfying ending, and The Matrix had trouble with storytelling after the first movie, I didn't expect that the Amazing Digital Circus would be able to bring the story to a satisfying end.
I was wrong.
The ending was so much better than I expected it to be. It was fresh and novel (well, there's probably some manga or SF short story with that storyline, but it was novel to me) and more satisfying than I would have deemed possible in such a short episode. Not every question seemed answered, but with this show I expect not to have picked up on every clue and I'll probably find more answers in a few weeks. But the big ones were, and the story came to a close.
Can recommend.
Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi, the brave and talented creator of the wonderful and honest graphic novel Persepolis, has died. Her magnum opus is an autobiography, telling of her young years growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Iran-Iraq war of 1980, and then moving to Austria, for safety and to study. But Vienna isn't the safe space her family was hoping for, she's having a difficult time, and returns to Iran. The difference between the two worlds really show. Back home, she can't find her place either.
It's not an easy book to read, it is nuanced, it feels sincere, and it shines a very human light on what the revolution meant, on what emigration can be like.
It was a popular graphic novel, pushing what was usually done with the medium. Satrapi was one of the first women to find success with graphic novels.
According to her family, Satrapi died at the age of 56 of a broken heart, following her husband's death last year.
I very much recommend reading the book. It is not an easy story, but it is an important one.
The Future of Truth
What a mind boggling and raw article by Wired: Steve Rosenbaum has a book out, "The Future of Truth", on the effect of AI chatbots on the understanding of truth. Rosenbaum has a master's degree in "truth" from New York University (what does that even mean?) and has decades of experience in this field: creating news programs for MTV and reporting on the aftermath of 9/11 in New York and much more.
But the New York Times reported that Rosenbaum's book is heavily relying on AI, for example containing made up quotes. Wired had previously published an excerpt from the book, but given its strict no AI policy for content and the reporting by the Times, it pulled the excerpt.
Instead, Wired interviewed Rosenbaum. Here's one quote:
"I do not understand why it's my job as an author to play whack-a-mole with a multibillion-dollar company who puts hallucinations into their feed as a business practice”
Because it's your book! It's your name on the cover. This text is your responsibility.
And he's not alone:
“I talked to another author this morning who's literally got a book coming out going to the publisher in a month, and she's fucking terrified.” I asked if that was because she used AI in the process of writing the book. “Of course"
There's a silver lining:
"I asked him whether he would rather stop writing than stop using AI in his writing process. “Yeah,” he answered."
That's a good idea. I sure have little interest to read anything from a person with this attitude.
Logos and logs
About the Greek word logos, λόγος. It is usually translated as "word", but a lot is lost in translation when doing so. Wiktionary says "speech, oration, discourse, quote, story, study, ratio, word, calculation, reason". The etymology is from proto-Indo-European "leǵ-", meaning to collect, to gather.
Philologist Erik Ellis has thought a lot about logos, and he says that the best English translation he has found so far for logos is "account". Both a bank account and to give an account of last night is about recounting the events that led to the current situation, to tell a story, and that meaning of account captures logos best.
Amusingly the way Ellis was describing "account" made me think of the word "log", the way it is used in computing and on ships, and it took me an embarrassing moment to notice the similarity between "logos" and "log", but etymologically they're entirely unrelated as the latter comes from tree log, which has old Norse roots.
It's just another funny, accidental etymological convergence.
What is true
"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
Think for a moment, and answer for yourself before reading on.
A new study shows that there is much, much less agreement on the answer to this question than I would have expected. Even after reading about the study, I still expect my friends to have the same answer as I do. Let's see. But this probably means that the meaning of truth, in the general population, is simply different from what I would have assumed. And explains a number of public discourses.
- The Surprising Divide Over What Counts as True by Ronald Bailey in Reason
- Mastodon poll (to run until 27 May 2026
Lelek Andromeda
Croatia's entry to for the Eurovision Song Contest is anything but a typical ESC entry. The video below gives the English lyrics. The tattoos the singers are wearing are historical: they were used, mostly on women, to 'protect' them from the non-Christian conquerors, and to remind them of their roots. Tattoos in the Balkans were used for almost a hundred generations, described by Strabo in the first century BC until the early 20th century. I am a sucker for the mythic motives, playing with fantasy themes, for the polyharmonic singing. It's not the fun song of a young man leaving for the city and selling his cow, but a powerful folk-inspired anti-war ballad, deeply steeped in local history.
So, probably no chance to win an event like ESC, but certainly an interesting song, highlighting a part of local history that I wasn't aware of at all.
(There's obviously a nationalist element to this, as any folk stuff is, I know; but I hope, beyond reason, that it is not nationalistic)
The Web attacked by AI
The Web I grew up with and that grew up with me was already slowly fading. The Web of many people and organizations having their own small website. Capitalism and convenience lead to a concentration onto a small number of platforms and apps, but mostly these platforms let the rest be. People and small organizations and groups could still have their little website.
But the ongoing indiscriminate onslaught of AI bots on everything with an URL is just actively killing the web and its open nature. Websites, which were meant for the few human visitors, get crawled at rapid speed, open REST APIs are being overrun, the few SPARQL points out there get slaughtered by queries, causing downtimes, cost, and what not, actively killing those parts of the Web which have historically just been happy to be there, with little maintenance, across the years.
But now, if you don't pay protection money to a service such as Cloudfare or make sure you have the right load balancer, the AI bros will take you down.
It's not the first and it won't be the last sacrifice to the basilisk of AI, but it surely is one of the ones that pains me personally. So unnecessary, with so little gain.
It makes me sad.
Playground
Markus Krötzsch recommend me a novel, Playground, by Richard Powers. I have to admit I rarely read novels, and this one was a good one to make an exception.
- "There was only one way of making a two or a twelve, but six ways to roll a seven. The maker of the world whispered that secret to me, and it changed everything."
I really enjoyed the language. It was just a pleasant read, and you can feel that the author mastered the craft of building sentences, paragraphs, and stories.
- "If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play."
I was very confused throughout the first hundred pages or so, until I figured out what the main story threads were. I have to admit, that I than re-skimmed these pages again, and it all made sense and fit together, but at first it felt like so many different things were going on that I wasn't sure what was going on. But because of the well-wrought language, I didn't mind, and I merrily joined the ride.
- "What you call the ocean is nothing but the coast."
The book retells the story of four characters, who, at their best, are fascinating and brilliant, and at their worst, are failing so bad it makes me angry, and are, at all times, deeply relatable. It follows a story of games, computers, the birth of the Web with Mosaic, and a very thinly veiled fictional version of Cyc, and a fictional Website, Playground, which has a fascinating premise, somewhere between Facebook and Reddit, and then going to machine learning and AI. It also tells the story of an oceanographer, of the changing oceans, of dementia, of loss, guilt, and the permanence of death.
- "It was embarrassing. She didn't want to tell the god that she didn't believe in him and that he really shouldn't be there."
At several points, the line between fiction and truth becomes very fragile, dreamlike, which is part of the appeal.
- "He left me everything."
- "I see."
- What in the world am I supposed to do with it?"
In the end, I was literally gasping when the author resolved a part of the story I wasn't even expecting, although it was built towards it the whole time. It made me mad and angry, and then it made me think of why I was so mad and angry. In the end, the story gets a beautiful resolution, one that made me lose a tear or two, and that made me question the primacy of story and truth again.
- "We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we're desolate when that's what they become."
Richard Powers, Playground. ISBN 978-1-324-08603-1
Recording of ISWC 2025 keynote
It was an tremendous honour to have been invited as a keynote speaker to the ISWC - International Semantic Web Conference 2025 in Nara, Japan.
This was particularly exciting for me, because during my PhD research, ISWC has been my "home conference" - the prime conference in my research area, where the research community that I felt affiliated with was meeting. It will be 20 years since I attended my first ISWC, in Galway, and it was a huge pleasure to talk about
The talk traced the history of Wikipedia and the Semantic Web and how they influenced each other repeatedly, and gives an outlook at the future.
Watch the talk on VideoLectures for free:
