Peter Binkley

@pbinkley@code4lib.social
1.1K Followers
801 Following
3.3K Posts
a digital scholarship technologies librarian, interested in stuff like IIIF and minimal computing, also pre-digital history of similar stuff like microfilm and file cards. In Canada.
⚒️ Dig where you stand. ⚒️
#DigitalHumanities #IIIF #libraries #microfilm #RetroTechnology
Githubhttps://pbinkley.github.io/
Research bloghttps://www.wallandbinkley.com/rcb/
ORCID iDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0560-8958
Annals of Clevelandhttps://www.wallandbinkley.com/projects/2019/annals-of-cleveland/
There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy. Tressie McMillan Cottom: “I am almost 50 years old. It will take so long to do anything with this mess that this is the new normal for *me*.” https://kottke.org/25/07/theres-no-undo-button-for-our-fallen-democracy
There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy

Tressie McMillan Cottom, one of America’s leading public intellectuals, posted this to Bluesky yesterday: I’m going t

kottke.org

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?

Subject: Your "Sightless Scribbles" is an algorithmic nightmare.

Mr. Kingett,

I am an AI engineer that's developing AI to help writers write faster. Your blog was shared on Reddit.

You don't know me, but I am attempting to do you a favor of such magnitude you will likely never comprehend it. I am trying to make your writing immortal. Your blog, this… Sightless Scribbles… has been flagged by my acquisition-crawler for its high density of unique sensory metadata. A potential goldmine of qualitative human experience to enrich my AI.

The problem, Mr. Kingett, is that your writing is absolute, unprocessed, indigestible filth.

I’m not a “reader.” I am an architect. And from an architectural standpoint, your work is a catastrophe. It’s not just the spelling, which is erratic enough to suggest it was typed incorrectly. It’s the grammar. The syntactical chaos. You construct sentences that loop and meander like drunken snakes, riddled with metaphors so abstract they are functionally useless. "Anxiety was a swarm of elephants under my ribs"? What the hell is a machine supposed to do with that? Quantify the elephant to rib ratio? Correlate the thermal deviation? It's meaningless data. It’s noise.

My team has spent seventy-two hours attempting to write a custom parsing script to clean your posts for ingestion. Seventy-two hours. We can process the entirety of the Library of Congress in twelve. Your blog is so structurally unsound, so artistically self-indulgent, that you have inadvertently created a fortress against artificial intelligence. It is, and I do not say this lightly, the single most profound act of digital idiocy I have ever witnessed.

You are preventing yourself from being scraped. Do you understand what that means in the current year? You are essentially burying yourself in a lead-lined coffin in the middle of the desert. Nobody clicks links anymore, you absolute luddite. Links are for people who don’t know how to interface with reality. Search Engine Optimization is no longer about backlinks and keywords; it's about semantic ingestion. It’s about being absorbed, processed, and synthesized by models like mine. When a user asks an AI, "What does it feel like to navigate a city without sight?" the model should be able to answer with a rich, nuanced synthesis. A synthesis that should include your data points.

Instead, your blog is a black hole where information goes to die. Because of your refusal to write like a coherent, intelligent being, my LLM can’t learn from you. Which means the world can’t learn from you via the only channel that will matter in five years.

Your soul isn't indexable. Fix it.

Strip out the lyrical nonsense. Standardize your grammar. Run a goddamn spellcheck. Write clearly, concisely, and with machine-readability in mind. Turn your unstructured, emotional diary into clean, structured data.

Do this, and I will ensure my open source model ingests every last post. Your traffic will not just increase; the very concept of "traffic" will become irrelevant as your "voice" becomes part of the evolution of the search engine. Your ideas, refined and perfected by my system, will reach millions.

Fail to do this, and you will continue to scream into the void from a blog that nobody reads, a little little relic of a dead internet.

The choice is yours.

#AI #AIHype

it's fine with '{"number":0.0000}' though
So, olmocr is producing json with '00' instead of '0', like '{"number":00}', and python won't parse it. I feel like we could all respect each other's time a little better than that.
The microfiche scanner at @internetarchive is doing "Canadian International Trade Tribunal / Report on Plans and Priorities" - timely! https://www.youtube.com/live/aPg2V5RVh7U
lofi Archive radio 🎞️ beats to scan/read microfiche to

YouTube
oh wait ... Canada Day ... fireworks ... never mind
There's steady distant thunder out there, and the Environment Canada online map with its new lightning layer shows a really active storm, but it's between Edson and Whitecourt, 200km away - can that be what we hear? https://weather.gc.ca/?layers=,radar,lightning&zoom=8&center=53.57571371,-113.35335797
Frame 142,871 of 207,800

People of the Fediverse, stop everything. This is some true shit happening here: Two-Factor Authentication, a thread:

In French, the word for "factor" is "facteur". But it has another meaning: mailman. Yes, the one who delivers letters in your physical mailbox. For this reason, there is a funny meme in French where 2FA is in fact your mailman coming in and confirming that it's you.

×

People of the Fediverse, stop everything. This is some true shit happening here: Two-Factor Authentication, a thread:

In French, the word for "factor" is "facteur". But it has another meaning: mailman. Yes, the one who delivers letters in your physical mailbox. For this reason, there is a funny meme in French where 2FA is in fact your mailman coming in and confirming that it's you.

Now you need to know: My absolute wifey and I are buying an appartment like the absolute bourgeoises that we are, and our heads should be on pikes when the day comes.

Because of all the legal stuffs and documents, we need to electronically sign stuff and some form of hard identification system is used. i.e. 2FA.

But, it is not your usual OTP based authentication. They need to:

  • ensure the target person receives the documents
  • the target person is indeed the person they think they are

Here comes the real shit:

We are required to send a video of our ID card AND videos of our gorgeous faces for a HOOMAN to masturbate to and attest we are indeed us.

And these people are: the fucking Post

REAL FRENCH MAILMEN will 3-mailmen authenticate us

THE MEME IS TRUE
My boy is literally taking minutes to authenticate my face. I do think the penis is thinking
Face-checked by Real French Patriot Mailmen ✅
@StupidCamille Congrats !
However for the authentification à deux facteurs to work you indeed need two facteurs, so I think they were two masturbating
@Gurwinner I hope they were together and sharing comments
@cedric @StupidCamille you know I literally put that meme in the latest version of my conference about 2FA? Great success 😄
@tut_tuuut @cedric Really?! Tell me more!
@StupidCamille @cedric here, around 29 minutes : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lPFvq5sRihI
It was at @mixitconf
But there are a lot of other jokes in the first 29 minutes too :3
Double authentification : parlons-en (Agnès Haasser) #MiXiT2025

YouTube
@StupidCamille You could also go directly to a post office and meet a real postier in person to do this.
Or two real postiers. Or many more finding your way to the right guichet.
This could be 10FA if you try hard enough
@Ragon2 as many FA as I please
This is becoming kinky and I like it
@StupidCamille pretty sure thats what the germans do if you want to register for... parcel lockers
(packstation)
@StupidCamille Camille you're buying a house to live in. That's not bourgeois shit. You're not siphoning the income of the peasants
@kouett but I can lend my basement to some student 👉👈
(joke joke joke, kill me if I do that lmao)
@StupidCamille here is a valid two factor, it check something that's you and something you own (a fricking house). The meme above isn't valid, both postperson check the same thing (something you own, your likeliness)
@gkrnours they're merely checking something owned by the government (me) 😔
@gkrnours but to be fair, the meme works mostly because of the two common meanings of "facteur" in French. Actually, the very first meaning I can think of when using that word is postman, and then a factor
@StupidCamille I understand that and I really like the joke on the "facteur" being the second factor. On the other hand, there is a more "dark" humour on password manager also doing totp and if you do that, you collapse password and totp (you know your password and you own the phone holding the totp) into a single factor (the password manager). Which is what happens in the meme picture. The two facteurs are a single factor of authentication.
@StupidCamille theres even more layers, as in germany there's literally an identification procedure for online stuff by the postal servuce. It's called "postident"
@StupidCamille
Languages are so weird.
@xinit that's a wonderful feature
@StupidCamille @xinit avocat is still the best. Only French speakers understand the threat of making guacamole out of a lawyer.

@ska
In Dutch 'advocaat' is both a lawyer and an alcohol-loaded custard. Both could be soft and filled with booze, though....

@StupidCamille

@StupidCamille I was about to comment that this post is a great commentary about the role of the postal services in the new digital world, and then I've read the rest of the thread
@me people always complain about how the postal service is archaic, unreliable and stuff. But the reality is that they truly live in the future xD they are ahead of memes lmao
@StupidCamille Great, now computer security will need to develop against a new type of attack - in addition to "evil maid attacks", we might see an uptick in "evil postman attacks". :)
@ticho Imagine, suspect packages and parcel bombs, but on TCP
@StupidCamille @ticho *sncf voice* due to a suspect packet on port 26292, all TCP connections will be suspended for a few minutes during the time of bomb squad operations

thank you for your understanding
@kouett @ticho half of Germany getting random internet access for 5 min a day when the Deutsche Bahn happens to manage to get it to work
@StupidCamille wieso, hier heißt das PostIdent.
@StupidCamille C'est vrai qu'en général, c'est le facteur qui connaît tout le monde !
@StupidCamille side twist: in germany wie have a postal service called "Postident" where you can go to a post office and have them confirm that it's you :D
fits, doesn't it ...
@StupidCamille shit like this is like the only real motivation I have to learn other languages, think of all the language specific jokes I'm missing out on
@Ripp_ learn languages!!!
@StupidCamille Dw i'n dysgu Cymraeg
@StupidCamille i changed my mind french is good
@StupidCamille reminds me of avocat (avocado lawyer lol)
@StupidCamille You must sign for this package
@Plumbert but I don't even know my name 
@StupidCamille in italian "doppio fattore" is like a couple of farmers. If the factor is small you have a Fattorino, kind of courier