Notices by Ed Summers (edsu@social.coop)

@sef @ntnsndr an abomination!

It's sad to hear of Clifford Lynch's passing. I didn't know him personally, but it's true: every time I heard him, he spoke with "kindness, warmth, and humble disposition" -- one of those figures who have been a constant constructive presence in my chosen field as long as I've been in it. Cliff was an expert at summarizing even the most complex conversations in a way that identified shared concerns and always moved work forward.

https://mail2.cni.org:9100/Lists/CNI-ANNOUNCE/Message/115345.html

@ntnsndr 🎉

@ntnsndr you go on with your bad self :-)

Tired: vibe coding
Wired: hacking

GenAI bots are pushing websites into a corner that imperils open access, and perhaps worse, the web's historical record. From @gluejar:

https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2025/03/ai-bots-are-destroying-open-access.html

Assuming that the web will continue to evolve instead of getting crushed underfoot, there is some interesting work going on over at the IETF about how to build on the now aged robots.txt protocol to allow rights holders to express how their content can be used online:

https://www.ietf.org/blog/aipref-wg/

@chpietsch yes, I guess you could look at it as naive. In many ways robots.txt was naive too. But one aspect to this is that we need ways for rights holders to assert their wishes, so that courts in jurisdictions that care (e.g. the EU) can use them as evidence. And there needs to be more nuance than what robots.txt provides:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ai-control/EJ-84k8Zzh21vY1dHPZvDeYOLes/

@nemobis pics or it didn't happen ;-)

@nemobis nice!

... & why it is needed https://www.404media.co/the-cdcs-website-is-being-actively-purged-to-comply-with-trump-dei-order/

It looks like the CDC uploaded a 98 GB snapshot of their datasets as of January 28, 2025 to @internetarchive

https://archive.org/details/20250128-cdc-datasets

I haven't really been paying attention to the news so I actually found this NYT article about DeepSeek somewhat helpful. Especially this:

> ... the impressive performance of the DeepSeek model raised questions about the unintended consequences of the American government’s trade restrictions. The controls have forced researchers in China to get creative with a wide range of tools that are freely available on the internet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/technology/what-is-deepseek-china-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sk4.LlQI.8MiXuJdKy3fy

@nemobis what a perfect use case for that tool, thanks!

@nemobis ps. I love how @phanpy displays those embedded links from your post inline:

It has happened before, but it is astonishing how the whitehouse.gov website can be completely gutted during a change of administration. If you have linked to anything on there it might be worth considering updating to point at a web archive. Here's an example:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250118023441/https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/ostp-issues-guidance-to-make-federally-funded-research-freely-available-without-delay/

🔖 Plan for the Artist Owned Internet: A Collectively Owned Bandcamp Successor
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1znV0Q8_jjxFTiKeT_FETTZieiXlJ0ZUn/view?pli=1

Also: https://subvert.fm/

#coop #music #bandcamp

One nice side effect of ripping my old CDs is rediscovering music I like that has been sitting in my basement.

I know, I should've seen that coming right?

#TIL wget is able to use HTTP Range requests to complete a file download that was previously terminated due to a connection failure.

@raffaele @wikimediaitalia @nemobis I'm working with an automated translation, but that seems ... weirdly anachronistic?

@alex interesting questions! I found myself thinking of how #webrings could fit in somewhere.