Paper or Plastic
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Illich at 100 We’re spreading a rumour. Over the first weekend in September, 2026, there will be local gatherings around dinner tables and picnic blankets and in convivial spaces of different kinds, in places around the world, to mark what would have been the 100th birthday of Ivan Illich. Whether you’re a newcomer to Illich’s…
I was recently working with a journalist who wanted the articles they had written archived from the newspaper’s website. I gave them a WACZ file (created with Browsertrix ), and they were like: Hey nice! But could I get the articles as PDFs? A WACZ is a good container for a web crawl. It plays back easily in open-source replay software like Browsertrix and ReplayWebPage. But it’s not always the…
Vine on bark
I’ve been buying music on Bandcamp for years. Over that time sometimes I’ve remembered to download what I purchased, and other times I haven’t. I wanted to be able to inventory what I have and then look at Bandcamp and download what is missing. There are already fine tools for downloading a Bandcamp collection: bandsnatch and the bandcamp-collection-downloader both fetch the lot, in parallel, in…
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Elasticsearch isn’t your AI search problem. You are. Why data governance and evaluation matter when building search systems, and especially when doing Retrieval Augnented Generation. llm search 🔖 Can AI agents conduct open-ended AI research? Early evidence from two case studies Forecasts of explosive AI progress hinge on AI…
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Code was our medium for thought See how we weren’t just “writing code”? We were exploring the problem, making decisions, evolving our understanding of the code, problem solving with teammates. Writing code was our medium for thought, where we figured out what we wanted. Our code evolved with our thinking, going from “fuzzy” to…
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Refusal as Instruction Equipping Patrons to Resist AI, Data Brokers, Big Tech, & More This column explores the ways in which library workers can better align technology use and instruction in library settings with library values, through championing the refusal of technologies that conflict with values like privacy and…
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Beyond DeepSeek: China’s Diverse Open-Weight AI Ecosystem and Its Policy Implications After years of lagging behind, Chinese AI models — especially open-weight LLMs — seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead of their global counterparts in advanced AI model capabilities and adoption. We profile and compare the capabilities and…
Moped
Tindaro Screpolato In the Boboli Gardens, Florence