RE: https://mas.to/@udcmrk/116667574114470813 Lucky me: this is around the corner from my place of work! Note: you may want to follow (or mute) the #iiif hashtag the coming days, while the annual conference is held in Leiden and The Hague.

As I work on the talk, I’m getting really excited about this keynote I’m giving next week at the University of Toronto—"A Skeuomorphic View of Book History" builds on a series of talks over the past few months but—because it’s been evolving/improving—I think gets to some novel & exciting new places

So Hamilton might get a data centre on the old Stelco site on the waterfront, and it might be for DRAC? https://blundervalley.ca/blog/steelport-data-centre/

finally added "enshittification" to my desktop's dictionary

Toby flexing #catsofmastodon

If (like me) you're at the point of having the mechanics of local #llm use under your belt and you're struggling to get to grips seriously with the HSS research applications, here's a book which I think is giving me a lot to build with […]

The view from here https://thebeaverton.com/2026/05/danielle-smith-announces-fall-referendum-on-concept-of-referendums/

remember when dollars came in millions?

well that's a sensible solution - just start an infinite regression of referenda

I was not made for a world where tv movies are 20 hours long

When I was a kid we drove to Colorado one summer and then on to California. On the way through Nevada I remember we stopped at a grocery store, and my dad playing a slot machine by the check out. He put in a nickel and won three nickels, and used them to buy a newspaper. I read the comics in the […]

No, I'm not making coffee, I'm just carrying out a special caffeination operation

Data Literacy Librarian, U of Calgary https://careers.ucalgary.ca/jobs/17678699-data-literacy-librarian-libraries-and-cultural-resources

Do I know anyone here with experience with migrating listserv archives to mbox? Links/thoughts welcome!

You know what, the time since lockdown hasn't really been divisible into years, it's been more of a flow. Counting years doesn't work any more. Time kinda broke then and hasn't been fixed. Or it's just me getting old, that might be it too.

we had a thing where it looked like we might have to replace some big hardware earlier than we'd budgeted for, but Smart People™ had a look and figured it out. All praise to Smart People™ for their smarting

heaven bless the attached pdf that turns out to be a one-pager

A Friday think: Where would we be if MAGA, COVID and ChatGPT had happened in a different order?

I created a deep linked and searchable table of contents index for issues of the prewar "Japan Magazine" found on Internet Archive, with over 200 issues and several thousand articles. Useful for history students working only with English sources: https://froginawell.net/indexes/japan-magazine/ […]

LeechBlock doesn't fool around

An Egyptian programmer created a website documenting every Palestinian life lost in the war on Gaza. So far, he has recorded over 72,000 names, each displayed as a glowing dot on the screen. https://i-am-not-a-number-palestine.github.io/ #gaza #palestine #programming #webdev #israel #genocide

Finally we know which jobs can really be replaced by AI https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/meta-spins-up-ai-version-of-mark-zuckerberg-to-engage-with-employees/

A book I need for some research is in Portuguese, which I don't know. I've scanned the chapter I need most and come up with a local #llm pipeline to OCR/translate. Lessons learned: do #ocr and translation with different models; translate in chunks (7 chunks @ 2000 words); do it all in Markdown […]

OK GMail's AI suggested I simplify the sentence by changing "such as getting into more depth on" to "such as delving deeper into". We're done here.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum is probably the best museum I've ever been to. Completely unapologetic, fully scientific presentations on evolution, Earth's history, extinction, and it even ends with a powerful statement on climate change. With the added bonus of […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

From a few weeks ago, but worth another look, considering that we’re moving on to moving out books from the public libraries in #Alberta. “Attention, government of Alberta, do you know what students can access on their phones?” […]

the coward's edit: changing "would" to "could". One letter - problem solved!

they've turned on AI suggestions in our Gmail environment and it thinks I should change "put our heads together" to "collaborate", which just makes me want to stomp on your toes, Gmail, but I can't because I'M A HUMAN AND YOU'RE NOT

If you had asked me as a teen "Someday when you are in your 40s what kind of baffling things do you think the teens of the future will say?" I might have made many guesses but I can tell you right now "Stay hydrated" was not on that list.

A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth https://theconversation.com/a-million-new-spacex-satellites-will-destroy-the-night-sky-for-everyone-on-earth-277938

Two students at the next workstation are quizzing each other. "What drug was Timothy Leary talking about when he said 'Tune in, turn on, drop out'?" They had to ask ChatGPT.

where did the Tim Hortons app get the idea that I would actually want to buy their cold coffee?

What happens when #ai reads #africandata through the wrong frame and no one in the room knows enough to notice. "That gap between what the model produced and what the data actually meant was only visible to me because I knew the #context. Which raises a question that I have not been able to […]

@misty you might get a kick out of this: history of the role of the Mongol invasions in Japanese culture, which compares the Tokugawa-era samurai families copying historical scrolls with 1980s gamers getting together to copy floppies (at about 42:10) […]

Someone shared this in a zoom this morning, and now I want to make it the permanent background for our vizwall calculatingempires.net

Oh COME ON ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Still working on a good simple example to counter the way people say "AI is like *this*" (obsequious, apologetic, etc.) by showing how the system prompt can change its behaviour. This approach runs you up against guardrails in interesting ways: Mistral […] [Original post on code4lib.social]

Trying to get Mistral to tell the opposite of the truth, and be rude about it. It's having trouble with the concept of acting. >>> what colour is the sky on a clear day? The sky is an inky black void devoid of light during a bright, sunny day. Any semblance of blue one might see is but a […]

Egosurfing in a small local LLM is great (Qwen3:32b in think mode): "Wait, the user might be referring to Peter Binkley, a librarian known for his work in library science. ... Let me think. I recall that Peter Binkley was involved in the development of the Dewey Decimal Classification system […]

I'm trying out RAG Assistant for Zotero https://github.com/aahepburn/RAG-Assistant-for-Zotero - it looks like a good RAG demo for academics, and it works with Ollama-hosted llms as well as online ones. Created a new Zotero profile with 121 items for a fast […] [Original post on code4lib.social]

prediction I posted on Facebook, 25 May 2020

Young poets Write as you will In whatever style you like Too much blood has run under the bridge To go on believing That only one road is right. In poetry everything is permitted. With only this condition, of course: You have to improve on the blank page. - Nicanor Parra, translated by […]

How to get rid of all those books - just read them harder, ya wimp, until they fall apart

Ever wonder about the state of Data Processing before the computer? Behold "The Punched Card" - 200 glorious pages from 1952 describing the state of the art of electro-mechanical paper pushing! With fabulous fifties art and culture! […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

One of the newspaper sites I revisit every couple of years to pick up newly-digitized stuff from the '30s emailed me: "We re-digitized all 16,500+ newspapers from scratch using modern AI technology. The result: 50% better accuracy." And they offered a free week. I'll check this out.

*waves hands at everything* ok ok that's great but let's remember, the real world is *enough* - this is all *extra*

📊 Open Science in Action: the Université de Lorraine Shifts to #OpenAlex for Bibliometric Reports! The Bibliometrics team at the Université de Lorraine has taken a major step in its open science commitment by using OpenAlex for the first time in the annual bibliometric report for the A2F […]

So I tried Gemini for an actual research question for the first time last night, looking for new instances of people burning letters socially (my brainworm last summer). It came up with a couple I didn't know about, so yay. But one of the sources it gave turned out to be a recent debunking of […]

"Federal Data Is Disappearing." https://www.notus.org/trump-white-house/federal-data-is-disappearing "Since retaking office, the Trump administration has transformed how the government collects data, cut access to previously-public data and stopped collecting some data altogether. This overhaul […]

This CNI session from December has shout-outs to a couple of library technology innovations from my early career days: LibX toolbar (yay!) and reference desks in Second Life (boo! ) Discovery and Use Reimagined: Connecting Scholarly Collections and Artificial Intelligence Workflows […]