Francesco Schwarz

Recent articles #

1. 15 months

   • death
   • dying
   • life
   • reflection

   My first assignment as a hospice volunteer came to an end this week.

2. Evolving My Self-Hosted Activity Tracking Setup

   • apple watch
   • data aggregation
   • data visualization
   • ios shortcuts
   • runalyze
   • strava

   A deep dive into the rebuilt architecture behind my personal activity tracking pipeline: smartwatch ingestion, iOS shortcuts, Strava synchronization, aggregation pipelines, and responsive data visualizations.

3. btconf 2026: beyond the talks

   • btconf
   • ramen

   All the stuff I experienced besides the conference talks.

   

4. btconf 2026: recap day 2

   • ai
   • btconf
   • community
   • music production
   • opendaw
   • typography
   • view transitions api

   Day 2 of my favorite conference beyond tellerrand, celebrating its 15th anniversary this year in Düsseldorf.

   

5. btconf 2026: recap day 1

   • btconf
   • community
   • creativity
   • imagination
   • oscilloscope
   • solar

   Day 1 of my favorite conference beyond tellerrand, celebrating its 15th anniversary this year in Düsseldorf.

   

Recent photos #

Latest photos or screenshots from all my posts:

Recent links #

Hyperlinks that I’ve read or bookmarked:

1. AI has torched the market for junior programmers via seldo.com

   The career on-ramp for professional software engineers used to work like this: you got hired to write mediocre code, a senior engineer reviewed it, you slowly absorbed judgment through repetition and correction, and a decade later you were the senior engineer. That chain is now broken. AI now writes the mediocre code, so nobody hires the junior developer, so nobody is in the queue to become the senior who reviews things.

2. Extremsportlerin Maren Schiller im Interview via sz.de

   Ich kann wirklich jedem empfehlen, die Laufuhr mal abzulegen.

   Gutes Interview.

3. The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music via theatlantic.com

   • ai
   • copyright
   • music

   What the datasets illustrate, primarily, is the scale and variety of music easily available to AI developers. Companies often claim to use only content that is freely available online, but the datasets reveal the quantity of downloadable music that developers can access even though it is not supposed to be free.

4. Das europäische Bezahlnetz existiert bereits via sz.de

   • bluecode
   • mobile
   • payment
   • wero

   Dutzende dieser Zahlungslösungen verband er über sein „Roaming“ und macht es heute möglich, dass Kunden an mehr als 160 Millionen Orten weltweit zahlen können, beispielsweise in Indien, Brasilien und bald auch China. Das sind mehr Händler, als beispielsweise Visa weltweit hat.

   Noch nie von Bluecode gehört bisher.

5. The Long Farewell to Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse via nytimes.com

   • mark zuckerberg
   • meta
   • metaverse
   • vr

   Meta announced changes that effectively leave Mr. Zuckerberg’s vision of an immersive digital world based in virtual reality only on life support.

   $80 billion invested. Wow.

   This reader comment sums it up perfectly:

   The idea of interacting in a virtual world with an avatar versus in reality sounds so unhealthy and depressing to me. How does this benefit humanity? Fix the myriads of problems (massive spread of disinformation and propaganda, child porn, violence, radicalization, dismantling of trust in experts, rising rates of youth anxiety/depression/suicide) that existing tech is causing for humanity before creating more tech that can be exploited by people with bad intentions or that will exacerbate the problems of already vulnerable people.
   I do not trust Meta or Mark Zuckerberg to create products that are good for the world, only products that will make them money.

Webrings #

A webring is a human-curated list of websites organized around a specific topic. Here are the webrings this website is a part of. You can go to neighboring websites on each ring. Some also feature a “random” link, it takes you to a random website of the webring.