@vrandecic@mas.to
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vrandecic

@vrandecic@mas.to

Husband. Dad. Cat housemate. PhD. Works on Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions at Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata founder. Previously: ontologist at Google, Wikimedia Trustee, and RPG author. Berkeley, CA, roots in Brač, Croatia, grew up in Germany. he/him. Views my own.

Posting cat pics and occasionally other stuff.

#tootfinder

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

vrandecic, to random
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RIP Niklaus Wirth;

BEGIN

I don't think there's a person who created more programming languages that I used than Wirth: Pascal, Modula, and Oberon; maybe Guy Steele, depending on what you count;

Wirth is also famous for Wirth's law: software becomes slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster;

He received the 1984 Turing Award, and had an asteroid named after him in 1999; Wirth died at the age of 89;

END.

vrandecic, to random
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"Wikidata: The Making Of"

The history of by Markus Krötzsch, @nightrose , and me. From the inception of the idea to the project proposal and development, and the first ten years of @wikidata

Video on YouTube with a recording of the presentation (not the actual presentation from The Web Conference, though):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3-nklyrDx4

Paper as HTML:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3543873.3585579

Paper as PDF (Open access):
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3543873.3585579

vrandecic, to FantasyWriters
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The Wikidata community edited Wikidata 2 billion times!

Wikidata is, to the best of my knowledge, the first and only wiki to cross 2 billion edits (the second most edited one being English Wikipedia with 1.18 billion edits).

Edit Nr 2,000,000,000 was adding the first person plural future of the Italian verb 'grugnire' (to grunt) by user Luca.favorido.

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?diff=2000000000

1/2

vrandecic, to random
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Taufik is Wikimedian of the Year 2023.

He was hiding that he was editing Wikipedia from his parents for years, leading them to believe that he was playing video games.

vrandecic, to random
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Wikimedia's CTO @selenadeckelmann with a thoughtful article on Wikipedia and generative AI such as LLMs

https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/07/12/wikipedias-value-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/

vrandecic, to random
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The story of the Red Delicious apple should be a lesson about trusting the market. Yes, eventually the market would correct, but with a lot of pain.

Red Delicious was for years selected for storage and looks, neglecting taste. Eventually consumers noticed, and stopped buying, but apple orchards take years to be replaced. In the late 90s the industry lost more than $700 million and Clinton bailed them out.

The belief in the invisible hand needs to be moderated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Delicious#History

vrandecic, to Russia
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I unexpectedly find Mastodon far superior to Twitter to keep up on the situation

vrandecic, to Cat
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I am "greynery"

vrandecic, to LLMs
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This is really bad.

Comparing output from ChatGPT with articles from Wikipedia: "participants perceive LLM-generated content as clearer and more engaging while on the other hand they are not identifying any differences with regards to message's competence and trustworthiness."

https://paperswithcode.com/paper/do-you-trust-chatgpt-perceived-credibility-of

vrandecic, to Cat
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This box was a perfect fit!

vrandecic, to random
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Explore the ocean of words. Browse through the lexicographic data in Wikidata along four dimensions:

  • alphabetical, like a dictionary
  • translations and synonyms
  • where does this word come from, where did it go
  • narrower and wider words, describing a hierarchy of meanings

Wikidata contains over 1.2 million lexicographic entries, but you will see many gaps. Join us in charting out more of the sea of words.

Happy 23rd birthday to Wikipedia and the movement it started!

https://vrandezo.github.io/TheSurroundingOcean/

vrandecic, to Cat
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This bag is giving its third day of joy

vrandecic, to random
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Are you a front end or full stack engineer and want to work with me on Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions? Then we are a looking for you!

Feel free to share.

https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/5850672

vrandecic, to random
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AI² releases OLMo, a truly open source LLM. 7 billion parameters, 2 trillion tokens of training text. All training data, all weighs, all code, and even checkpoints.

Thank you, AI²!

https://www.fastcompany.com/91021305/ai2-new-open-source-llm

vrandecic, to random
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Great interview with Erik Brynjolfsson on the potential impact of AI on the economy.

"In particular, if the technologies are mainly used to [...] replace humans with machines, it is likely to lead to lower wages and more concentration of wealth and power as capital substitutes for labour. But, if we use the technology mainly to augment our skills, to do new things, then it is more likely to lead to widely shared prosperity and higher wages."

https://www.ft.com/content/b71759fe-397b-4688-bc81-b082edb25f31

vrandecic,
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And also: "Current tax policy and investment credits encourage capital over labour. Marginal tax rates on capital are about half of what they are on labour [...]. That biases entrepreneurs towards trying to find capital-heavy solutions instead of ones that involve labour. I do not see a public policy reason for having that kind of a bias. That is just one example of where the policy needs to take into account what it is doing and how it is shaping the trajectory of technological advances."

vrandecic, to random
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Translate text to Morse code

https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10944

(Trying to get the search engines to index the function pages, which initially were accidentally set not to. Feel free to boost and help with that.)

vrandecic, to random
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You have a chatbot on your site, you are responsible for what it says. Sounds good to me.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/

vrandecic, to random
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If you're a bit older, you might remember 3.5” disks, and that they had a capacity of 1.44 MB (two sides, HD, PC).

But what did that MB stand for? How many bytes was that? Do you think it was

a) 1.44 x 1000 x 1000 = 1,440,000
b) 1.44 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,509,949

Answer in reply.

vrandecic, to scifi
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Rainbows end.

The book, written in 2006, was set in 2025 in San Diego. Its author, Vernor Vinge, died yesterday, March 20, 2024, in nearby La Jolla, at the age of 79.

Rainbows end explores themes such as shared realities, digital surveillance, and the digitisation of the world, years before Marc Andreessen proclaimed that "software is eating the word", describing it much more colorfully and rich than Andreessen ever did.

1/3

vrandecic, to twitter
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Interesting choice: someone seemingly flooded Twitter with fake nudes of Taylor Swift. Instead of removing them, Twitter currently blocks any searches for "Taylor Swift" - but as soon as you type "Tay" it suggests "Taylor Swift Fotos", which does not get blocked.

Screenshot showing how Twitter blocks the search for Taylor Swift
Screenshot showing Taylor Swift Fotos isn't blocked

vrandecic, to random
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Wikipedia is about verifiable facts from reliable sources. For Wikipedia, arguing with "The Truth" is not effective. Wikipedians don't write "because it's true" but "because that's what's in this source".

It is painful to see Katherine Maher viciously and widely attacked on Twitter, also for a quote restating how Wikipedia works.

I have worked with @krmaher
We were lucky to have her at Wikipedia, and NPR is lucky to have her.

vrandecic, to random
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Software issues around leap day 2024: https://codeofmatt.com/list-of-2024-leap-day-bugs/

vrandecic, to random
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For Wikipedia's 23rd birthday this week, a word from our Director of Machine Learning

https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2024/01/16/wikipedia-is-here-to-stay/

vrandecic, to random
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So many good news this year, it's overwhelming. Fights against diseases, avoiding a recession in the US, reaching peak oil sooner, huge gains in solar, massive reduction in crime, fewer tax havens, and so much more.

https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews2023/

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