raffaele

raffaele, 15 days ago to random

hello DMCA! https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2024/05/2024-05-01-isbndb.md

raffaele, 28 days ago to random

The project of one of the most expensive (and useless) infrastructures in Italy, the bridge that will connect Sicily to Italy, has faulty PDFs.
https://www.ilpost.it/flashes/documenti-illeggibili-ponte-stretto/ (ita)

hello @wtfpdf !

raffaele, 1 month ago to random

Libraries, the new Sodoma and Gomorrah

raffaele, 1 month ago to random

Software libero and freedom in the digital society
martedi 9 aprile alle 15:00 Richard Stallman è a Bologna
https://balotta.org/event/software-libero-and-freedom-in-the-digital-society-seminario-a-cura-di-richard-stallman

raffaele, 1 month ago to random

"and rehosting is similar to forking– it is often seen as disrespectful or worse. Talk to each other"
https://mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles/112198791321549063

slightly disagree, allowing rehosting (aka mirroring) for digital cultural heritage is good, and should be endorsed.

raffaele, 1 month ago to random

Revisiting the eDonkey p2p network after +15 years (I have just installed aMule) – and I am amazed. In just a few searches, I found rare books and documentaries that I couldn't locate elsewhere.

Are sharing communities the ultimate digital libraries?

raffaele, 2 months ago to random

https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/4968198-the-software-heritag

This is a serious discussion about digital archiving and data immutability.
How should we deal with a #webarchive where immutability is inherent in the technological design?

(I am not able to speak on the subject of transphobia)

edsu, 2 months ago to random

It's hard not to be struck by the importance of continued maintenance in #BritishLibrary's recent report about the ransomware attack they suffered:

• https://blogs.bl.uk/living-knowledge/2024/03/learning-lessons-from-the-cyber-attack.html
• https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

I left some annotations on the PDF in hypothesis if that's your jam.

ajsadauskas, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to tech

In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

And for a time, it worked.

But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

@degoogle #tech #google #web #internet #LLM #LLMs #enshittification #technology #search #SearchEngines #SEO #SEM

awinkler, 2 months ago to random

Does anybody know of reasonably efficient workflows to bulk upload bibliographic metadata to #wikidata? Adding items via GUI is annoyingly repetitive and slow. Reconciling and uploading via #OpenRefine is probably one possibility, but that's not trivial. Has anybody come across tutorials or descriptions of workflows? There are also tools such as "Author Diesambiguation" (https://author-disambiguator.toolforge.org/) that would have to be combined with other services. Help appreciated!

raffaele, 2 months ago to random

Indexing the information age
https://aeon.co/essays/the-birth-of-our-system-for-describing-web-content

The birth of DublinCore

glynmoody, 2 months ago to random

Air #pollution could be significant cause of #dementia – even for those not predisposed - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/21/air-pollution-could-be-significant-cause-of-dementia-even-for-those-not-predisposed?CMP=twt_a-environment_b-gdneco "People in areas of high PM2.5 concentrations had higher amounts of amyloid plaques in brain"

simon, 2 months ago to random

I tried feeding a 7s video of my bookshelf into Gemini Pro 1.5 to get back a JSON array of books... and it worked!
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Feb/21/gemini-pro-video/

raffaele, 3 months ago to random

Meanwhile, in Italy, a new political party has been formed to run in the European elections. The spokeperson is an IA avatar.
This is not a prank, nor is it funny.

raffaele, 3 months ago to random

The Cost of a Digital Archive
https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2024/02/08/the-cost-of-a-digital-archive/

Interesting reading, especially the environmental cost analysis.

raffaele, 3 months ago to random

🤌
https://video.sky.it/news/cronaca/video/incipit-intervista-a-giovanni-solimine-sul-suo-nuovo-libro-876028

tallison, 3 months ago to random

I just came across a great article by Antonia Langfelder on #ApacheTika's tika-pipes module and the /async handler, enabling reading from and writing to #s3.

The point about setting 'OMP_THREAD_LIMIT=1' to limit tesseract is interesting.

https://medium.com/wellcome-data/how-to-parse-millions-of-pdf-documents-asynchronously-with-apache-tika-d27e06e57b22

glynmoody, 3 months ago to random

Drivers protest as Bologna becomes first Italian city to bring in 30km/h limit - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/19/drivers-protest-as-bologna-becomes-first-italian-city-to-bring-in-30kmh-limit non cominciamo, ragazzi...

raffaele, 5 months ago to random

Does anyone here use a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (generation 11) with Linux?

raffaele, 6 months ago to random

meanwhile in Italy: during a test, the computers were unable to open the PDFs, and approximately 900 candidates were sent back home.
https://www-ilpost-it.translate.goog/2023/10/30/sna-concorso-pubblico-scuola-nazionale-amministrazione/?_x_tr_sl=it&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=it&_x_tr_pto=wapp

ciao @wtfpdf !

quinta, 6 months ago to random Italian

il Consiglio di stato annulla l'aggiudicazione del Polo strategico nazionale.

è stata assegnazione diretta
(come l'app io ed il polo delle notifiche, peraltro)

un bel casino