The Intelligence is in the User https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-intelligence-is-in-the-user Today's newsletter, on ways we underestimate how much user skill goes into getting good results from AI models #genai #cogsci #llms #chatgpt

To be frank, I’ve become extremely frustrated since the acquisition because now the environment combines the worst aspects of a make-it-up-as-you-go small company with the worst aspects of a faceless corporate overlord. I love my coworkers, I don’t love the general approach to projects and […]

Thanks everyone, I was able to get a job lot of 6TB enterprise hard drives from Aspire Sheffield (they very kindly threw in 2 extra so I have 8 now!). Every drive bay in my home is now occupied so it's time to start thinking about how to house those 2 extra. Spent some time this weekend running […]

Time to tap the lossy jpg of a vintage Tumblr post again. Do not punish the behaviour you want to see. If people have just come here from Bluesky. Or finally got around to closing their Airbnb account. Or leaving Meta or whatever. Don't immediately jump on them […] [Original post on social.coop]

If I get time I might do some analysis of how many posts have been made with the #gemconference2025 tag over the last few days on each of the main social platforms. My hunch: LinkedIn is most active, but it's still relatively quiet. So my main question is "why aren't museum educators more […]

The UK fiscal year for tax purposes runs from 6 April each year to 5 April the following year, and the reason for this is of course extremely British https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom#Start_of_tax_year

📝'De-bias your hiring practices: supporting equity for #neurodiverse candidates in job interviews' From Section IV: Management practices in Critical library leadership: managing self and others in today's academic library. search.worldcat.org/title/143866... #Workplace #Management #CritLib #LIS

📢 NLISN In Person Event! 📢 Adjustments in the LIS Workplace for Neurodivergent Staff Monday, October 6 · 10am – 3:30pm GMT+1 Leeds Beckett University, Headingly Campus £25.00 Book here 👉 www.eventbrite.com/e/adjustment...

OK, been back and forth about posting this but a few people have mentioned that they'd like to help with @SafeguardingResearch, don't have the time or confidence to get directly involved but would be happy to contribute financially. I've set up a little fundraiser to help pay for more storage […]

I picked up this old Cisco 3800 series from the side of the road a few weeks ago. It's interesting to poke around with, figure out how to get a serial connection to and poke around the Cisco cli, but not much practical use. Now I'm wondering if I gut it how […] [Original post on digipres.club]

I'm looking for a smart plug or something that can monitor the power usage of my home server over the day/week. Lots of these are available but many seem to be tied into cloud services and I'd like to keep that data to myself and use open tools to visualise it. Any recommendations? Ideally […]

About a year too late I'd say, but I'm sure she made a good buck running the place deep into the ground…j https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/dr-jean-innes-step-down-ceo-alan-turing-institute

Thank you so much to everyone who joined my "Collaborative Git without GitHub" workshop yesterday afternoon, I really enjoyed it and it was lovely to hear that so many of you found it interesting, useful or both! Alpha-quality workshop website is now up at https://github.workshops.petrichor.me […]

I just had to write an introduction for a thing, and since what I do with my time has changed a bit recently I figured it might be time for a new #introduction here too! Hi folks! My name is Danny Garside and I wear too many hats - until recently I was a post-doc at Sussex University doing […]

#Sciop hit a Petabyte (actually a Pebibyte but nobody knows that word) of total proven capacity a week or two ago. That's all the seeders * the size of the things they are seeding. All volunteers, zero dollars in funding, piggybacking off existing resources […] [Original post on neuromatch.social]

What was that new p2p/e2ee network that was started by a security researcher? Think they were femme presenting maybe? I recall a pink coloured avatar? Idk

If we’re not calling #python 3.14 “Pi-thon”, what are we even doing?

Does anyone know the social history of `libtorrent`? it now appears only sparsely maintained and still almost exclusively by arvid, really huge bugs go unresponded to, and i'm finding tons of offers to help with stuff also getting just ignored? like how did this whole protocol get built on top […]

The "Git without Github" workshop is starting to come together ☺️

So... I should split those disks between more groups right? Probably one per workload, with suitable redundancy for each? That way one set of disks would be seeking a lot but without interrupting the sequential accesses on another set. Am I understanding this right? 2/2

OK, sense check needed on my storage layout please! I have 6 spinning rust disks in a single raid array (plus an SSD for caching: if details are. important it's zfs with raidz2). I have three main workloads going on: 1) normal desktop use, including occasional compilation; 2) seeding datasets […]

OK, sense check needed on my storage layout please! I have 6 spinning rust disks in a single raid array (plus an SSD for caching: if details are. important it's zfs with raidz2). I have three main workloads going on: 1) normal desktop use, including occasional compilation; 2) seeding datasets […]

Worried about #Smithsonian data and collections? We are too. Our friends over at #SafeguardingResearchAndCulture have been hard at work helping with #DataRescue and adding Smithsonian information to #SciOp. Check out their available datasets and please spread the word: sciop.net/datasets/

Many EU member countries have a rich colonial past, e.g. France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium... (I know, Germany too - but this is off my topic here.) Do you know any museum from any of such country who would be interested to work with us on a European funded project about taking […]

20 years ago when I started studying cult manipulation tactics, and the literature noticeably avoided casting any aspirations at larger institutions or mainstream society, I wondered, are there cult dynamics operating in the larger American culture? And I put that thought aside while I finished […]

🧵1/3: It is increasingly difficult to watch #Palestinian #musician Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha from #GazaBirdsSinging getting more emaciated every time he posts a new video, where he will yet again give his all to make children of #Gaza forget the horrors of […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Tentatively announcing that I expect to be available for consultancy 1-2 days a week from mid-September onward. I have 15 years experience bridging the gap between people and technology through: 👨🏻‍🏫 Training 📝 Technical writing 🌐 Community building 📑 Research & analysis 🏗️ Service development […]

Calling all #DataRescuers! Whether you're looking for #governmentdata or looking to volunteer, the Data Rescue Project has you covered. Check out our portal and see how you can get involved: www.datarescueproject.org/faq/

What's the recommended way to mask emails on web pages from automated harvesting while still making them reasonably accessible to humans these days? Is this still even worth doing in 2025 or are the scraping bots wise to all the tricks now?

https://leavesubstack.com/ You should *definitely* leave #substack

There are several SSI Fellows with #glam and #digitalhumanities backgrounds: it would be amazing if there could be more of us! If this is you and you have an idea for a Fellowship project, please feel free to DM me with questions, I'd be happy to help. It might be that you write research […]

📢 Applications open for the 2026 Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship on 11 August, just a couple of weeks away, closing 6 October! 🚀 You don't have to be writing software yourself, just interested in promoting good research software practice. It's UK-based but there are 3 places […]

📢 Applications open for the 2026 Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship on 11 August, just a couple of weeks away, closing 6 October! 🚀 You don't have to be writing software yourself, just interested in promoting good research software practice. It's UK-based but there are 3 places […]

Who's up for a chat about #digitalpreservation? We are hosting not one but TWO #dpconnect events in August. All are welcome 😊 Live from Dublin on 14 August, join us in-person or online: https://www.dpconline.org/events/eventdetail/488/-/dpconnect From Melbourne on 15 August, join our online […]

After having a flip through a copy last week at #dh2025 , I've ordered the Bloomsbury Handbook to the #digitalhumanities from my friendly local bookshop, so it should arrive in time for the weekend! 🎉📚 […]

“You know, Monday used to be the first day of the working week. People hated it.” “I’m still a little fuzzy on that whole work thing. You lot had an entire freaking planet worth of resources, and the best you could think of was to invent the concept of scarcity and then be mean to each other” […]

Farewell #dh2025, sadly I'm on my way to the airport and not hanging around for the final day of talks. It's been a mind-expanding experience, I've learnt so much and met so many nice people! My first ADHO conference but hopefully not my last...

Was strewing over some idiocy I saw on here, then realised that Solzhenitsyn had perfectly captured my objection, the simplistic attraction of "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate […] [Original post on mastodon.online]

The anarchist type theorists are in evidence along Riverside Walk in Dundee. #typetheory #dundee

What is _your_ meaning of life? Your (current) guiding mantra that you come back to? The thing that gets you up and gives you the energy to be?

Had a tech bro email me to tell me that my writing is so terrible, that he can’t even use it to train his AI without significant cleanup, and I really do have to wonder, do these idiots really think that is an insult? #ai #aihype

check this out if you want to help preserve the archive of "most local newspapers through most of US history" that had its funding pulled, even if you only have a couple dozen gigabytes to spare, you can a) make an account on https://sciop.net/ , b) run a qbittorrent instance, go to […]

Still getting glitches on my fancy USB DAC, and they have spread to the webcam too. Keyboard and mouse also misbehaving more. I've tried adding a PCIe USB card, and devices plugged into that have the same issues. The sound is also sometimes crackly on the built-in audio, though not bluetooth […]

The Data Rescue Project has launched the Data Rescue Project Portal (www.datarescueproject.org/data-rescue-...). It is a dashboard for our tracker and provide more visibility for data rescues across the DR community. It is still in beta & we welcome any feedback. We hope that you find it useful. ❤️🛟

The short scifi story "Why don't we just kill the kid in the Omelas hole?" by Isabel J Kim has won this year's Locus Award for best short story, and it's published free to read in Clarkesworld. I thoroughly recommend giving it a read https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

For the last little while I've been wanting to implement a "real-world" tool in #haskell, to bridge the gap in my understanding between pure, fairly abstract functions and actually interacting with people, files, network services etc. I've mostly used Haskell for solving Advent of Code puzzles […]

It's launched: "The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars' Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding" From the abstract: "A call to action, resilience, and collective defence of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism. It tries to provide guidance to […]