Side by side comparison image showing two politicians seated together in 2024 smiling with overlaid text that reads 2024 and Were stopping 3Waters And replacing it with Nothing. Below in a 2026 press setting the same two people appear more serious with microphones visible and text that reads 2026 and Yea look unfortunately Wellington is covered In poo now.
Screenshot of text from University of Edinburgh library services: Like many academic libraries, we have been experiencing slowness and outages on some of our open access platforms over the last few months. We have identified that this is the result of poorly behaved Gen AI crawling activity. As such we have had to try to disable the ability for AI -harvesters to access content from our repositories, via IP range blocking, geographical blacklisting, implementing limits to throttle bots and using robots.txt files to limit access. We acknowledge that this approach is not consistent with our open access policy which should require us to permit machine access to our content. Our limiting activity is not 100% fool-proof, and is a temporary measure to give services breathing space to perform while a longer termn solution is worked out by software providers and the community. This approach also has the added benefit of helping to assuage authors fear of losing control of their works.
The "AI revolution" in science is going so smoothly that my instititutional library is having to deploy multiple technical protection measures against "poorly behaved Gen AI crawling" just to maintain its timely service library.ed.ac.uk/research-sup...
Hannah Arendt did not mince words, did she?
'Totalitarianism replaces all first-rate talents with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.'
From "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951)
we're getting all the downsides of cyberpunk (social alienation, ruthless hyper capitalism, digital mass surveillance state) but none of the promised upsides (cheap street food, cool jackets, super drugs that make you really fast and strong before they kill you)
I've done my familial duty by turning motion smoothing off on the elders' TV before starting the new agatha christie
At the University of Leeds, we are seeking a dynamic and highly skilled Lead Engineer to lead a project development team for Digital Library services, to support digital access to the Libraries’ Cultural Collections? It is a fantastic opportunity: jobs.leeds.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...
Jan 1: this is the year of new Me
Jan 12: [eating shredded cheese directly from the bag] new years resolutions are a bourgeois construct for disciplining bodies into productive units for capital
Testing server-rendered HTML:
Make a request, look at the result.
Testing React et al:
Make a request.
Receive HTML.
Ignore it!
It also contains a string.
The string is attached to a bird
The bird speaks latin
Find an antiquities professor
He can distract the bird
While you build a fake browser
Genuinely great work from the university libraries across Australia and New Zealand to get this deal. Getting all these companies - especially Elsevier - too shift on pricing and access is a huge acheivement.
Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things
generational discourse can be solved once and for all by distinguishing between "remembers no computers", "remembers no personal computers", and "remembers no cell phones". everything before that fought in wars. everything after that is, best case scenario, inventing the borg
okay, yes, it's now dark at 4:30. but at least all the fresh produce also tastes worse
The irony here is that academics don’t just write the articles for free—we also referee and edit for them for free. Something is deeply broken.
“New Zealand's eight universities spent $30-million a year on journal licences and about half of that sum went to Elsevier.
www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...
didn't know i would laugh so much watching ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. also convinced matt berry wrote most of the character names
Love this art style
Impressive work, and really detailed write-up
Ryan Moulton @moultano Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You're telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?
Same with my parents and teachers' college
😭
Moe mai rā e te manukura, e tā mātou kaiarataki
ka aroha ana ki tōna whānau pani
www.teaonews.co.nz/2025/11/07/l...
Hmm
A stat we don't talk about enough: Newspapers have lost 77% of their jobs over the last 20 year, more than any of the 532 other industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It’s Labour Weekend in Aotearoa, where we celebrate Samual Duncan Parnell, unions, and the Labour movement (no, not the party) for getting us the 8hr work day and the weekend.
By striking. Big time.
nzhistory.govt.nz/people/samue...
A "Big Free Library" shaped like the Internet Archive's logo, featuring two rows of books. The book prominently featured is "This is for Everyone" by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It takes up the entire top row and the middle section of the bottom row.
Happy Internet Archive Day!
Join us tonight—online or IRL—for The Web We’ve Built!
If you visit the Archive in person, grab a free copy of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's new book THIS IS FOR EVERYONE from our BIG Free Library!
🎟️ ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/10/22/h...
#Wayback1T
I know a fae trap when I see one
ME, IN TEARS: you can't just say every single part of a computer system is a file
UNIX, POINTING AT THE MOUSE: file
I like arch, but I'm not a huge fan of constantly installing new flaky versions of nvidia drivers when I `-Syu` (actually, maybe my real problem should be with nvidia's lack of open drivers / decent linux support...)
Percentage of NZES respondents saying they had 0 covid vaccinations as percent of vote share (weighted)
I think it says a lot about NZ's Green Party being environment/ecosystem/science based rather than some of the cultural trends in other countries, that the Green Party had the fewest voters who had never had a covid vaccination 0.34%.
32.5% of NZ First voters say they never had a covid vaccination.
all CPU right now, and i remember a post of yours praising the relative flexibility of software rendering -- that said, i've considered seeing what i can do with shaders on top.
i'll share my project once it does something remotely remarkable, heh
