Mastodawn

We are pleased to announce the Digital Humanities & Research Software Engineering Summer School 2026, taking place at the University of Manchester from Monday 29 June to Thursday 2 July 2026. Attendance is free, and limited bursaries of up to £650 are available by application to support those who need financial assistance to attend.
Find out more at https://www.software.ac.uk/news/dh-rse-summer-school-2026-registration-now-open

paulwalk 3d ago

Cyberpunk Librarian 4d ago

And now it's time for a "very specific to me" gripe:

For goddess' sake... post the direct URL to your podcast's RSS feed. You don't have to encourage people to use it. Just put it there, for assholes like me, who don't want to listen to your podcast on fucking Spotify.

paulwalk 3d ago

Lina 3d ago

Boost plz!

Looking for critical scholarship on the use of "AI" by library/archive workers. University libraries in particular, but adjacent and tangentially-relevant-at-best stuff is welcome too. Any format is fine: books, papers, blogposts, whatever. If it's good, gimme all you've got!

Looks like we're gonna have a department-wide conversation about people using LLMs, and it's being framed as "we're all using it, but we're not talking about it, so let's make sure we're all on the same page about using it responsibly" ... I'll of course be pushing the "there's basically no way to use it responsibly" position, and I'd like to arm myself and others with some critical analyses of issues related to its use in library/archive spaces.

#llm #LLMs #ai #libraries #archives

paulwalk 5d ago

Another step closer to the Right To Roam in England :-)

https://www.paulwalk.net/2026/opening-up-the-land-registry/

Opening Up the Land Registry

Paul Walk's Website

paulwalk 5d ago

Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊5d ago

A man used LLMs to generate hundreds of thousands of "songs", then used bots to stream them billions of times, to collect $8m in royalties. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-pleads-guilty-music-streaming-fraud-aided-artificial-intelligence-0 Is there a better metaphor for late-stage capitalism than burning resources to make songs that are never listened to, then steaming them to robots that will never hear them, ad infinitum?

paulwalk 6d ago

Experimenting with `human.json` - a protocol to declare your allegiance to the human race ;-)

https://www.paulwalk.net/2026/experimenting-with-human.json/

(hat tip to @cogdog )

Experimenting with `human.json`

Paul Walk's Website

paulwalk Mar 22

Aaron DeVries Mar 12

I just concluded a decade long experiment. I had a USB flash drive in a jar buried in my back yard since 2015. I dug it up, plugged it in and it suffered no data loss after 11 years idle underground.

It's a usless experiment but everyone needs hobbies.

paulwalk Mar 21

Google search keeps getting worse. Such a shame - I vividly remember seeing Google search for the first time - it was such an exciting development then. Now, it's kinda embarrassing how low it is sinking.. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/20/google-search-is-now-using-ai-to-rewrite-headlines

Google Search Is Now Using AI to Rewrite Headlines

Link to: https://www.theverge.com/tech/896490/google-replace-news-headlines-in-search-canary-coal-mine-experiment?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IjI0Q05IV0dlS3EiLCJwIjoiL3RlY2gvODk2NDkwL2dvb2dsZS1yZXBsYWNlLW5ld3MtaGVhZGxpbmVzLWluLXNlYXJjaC1jYW5hcnktY29hbC1taW5lLWV4cGVyaW1lbnQiLCJleHAiOjE3NzQ0NzIwOTAsImlhdCI6MTc3NDA0MDA5MH0.3exwHWG6qdR5YeFLjzS1qvUy3tgfASQhbFZDTbHrkKE&utm_medium=gift-link

Daring Fireball

paulwalk Mar 21