Madra Teanga - Open Source Irish Language Programming
An open source project that has already produced a great app for learning Irish—programmed in a language called Draíocht (sin “magic” as Béarla)!
I’m supporting this on Open Collective.
Link tags: open
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eurollm.io
A different world is possible. Here, for example, is an open-source large language model from Europe, designed to support the 24 official languages of the European Union.
I have no idea why their top level domain is for the British Indian Ocean Territory, soon to be no more. That doesn’t instil confidence.
Vision for W3C
We believe the World Wide Web should be inclusive and respectful of all participants: a Web that supports facts over falsehoods, people over profits, humanity over hate.
Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries - Ars Technica
As it currently stands, both the rapid growth of AI-generated content overwhelming online spaces and aggressive web-crawling practices by AI firms threaten the sustainability of essential online resources. The current approach taken by some large AI companies—extracting vast amounts of data from open-source projects without clear consent or compensation—risks severely damaging the very digital ecosystem on which these AI models depend.
Go To Hellman: AI bots are destroying Open Access
AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet.
FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
More on how large language bots are DDOSing the web:
LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.
My Web Values: Why I Quit X and Feed the Fediverse Instead | Cybercultural
- Support open source software
- Support open web platform technology
- Distribution on the web should never be throttled
- External links should be encouraged, not de-emphasized
“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
Anyone at an AI company who stops to think for half a second should be able to recognize they have a vampiric relationship with the commons. While they rely on these repositories for their sustenance, their adversarial and disrespectful relationships with creators reduce the incentives for anyone to make their work publicly available going forward (freely licensed or otherwise). They drain resources from maintainers of those common repositories often without any compensation.
Even if AI companies don’t care about the benefit to the common good, it shouldn’t be hard for them to understand that by bleeding these projects dry, they are destroying their own food supply.
And yet many AI companies seem to give very little thought to this, seemingly looking only at the months in front of them rather than operating on years-long timescales. (Though perhaps anyone who has observed AI companies’ activities more generally will be unsurprised to see that they do not act as though they believe their businesses will be sustainable on the order of years.)
It would be very wise for these companies to immediately begin prioritizing the ongoing health of the commons, so that they do not wind up strangling their golden goose. It would also be very wise for the rest of us to not rely on AI companies to suddenly, miraculously come to their senses or develop a conscience en masse.
Instead, we must ensure that mechanisms are in place to force AI companies to engage with these repositories on their creators’ terms.
[this is aaronland] a tale of gummy snakes (and spunk)
About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:
I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.
What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.
If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.
If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.
Public Domain Image Archive
Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.
It turns out I’m still excited about the web
While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.
OpenFreeMap
This project, based on OpenStreetMap, looks great:
OpenFreeMap lets you display custom maps on your website and apps for free.
You can either self-host or use our public instance.
I’m going to try it out on The Session once there’s documentation for using this with Leaflet.
Long live hypertext! – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden
This is how I write:
As an online writer, my philosophy is link maximalism; links add another layer to my writing, whether I’m linking to an expansion of a particular idea or another person’s take, providing evidence or citation, or making a joke by juxtaposing text and target. Links reveal personality as much as the text. Linking allows us to stretch our ideas, embedding complexity, acknowledging ambiguity, holding contradictions.
Introducing TODS – a typographic and OpenType default stylesheet | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
This is a very handy piece of work by Rich:
The idea is to set sensible typographic defaults for use on prose (a column of text), making particular use of the font features provided by OpenType. The main principle is that it can be used as starting point for all projects, so doesn’t include design-specific aspects such as font choice, type scale or layout (including how you might like to set the line-length).
The Neverending Story
Since the early days of the web, large corporations have seemingly always wanted more than the web platform or web standards could offer at any given moment. Whether they were aiming for cross-platform-compatibility, more advanced capabilities, or just to be the one runtime/framework/language to rule them all, there’s always been a company that believes they can “fix” it or “own” it.
Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React.
Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse
A library of CC-licensed photos.
Next time you’re tempted to use a generative “AI” tool to make an image for a slide deck, use this instead.
Digital Litter Picking – Terence Eden’s Blog
I like this framing:
If you’ve ever corrected a typo in an Open Source readme, or added alt-text to an image, or tidied up some broken references in Wikipedia - you’re doing Digital Litter Picking. You’re cleaning up after others. And I think that’s a marvellous way to spend a little time.
On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars
Great stuff from Maggie—reminds of the storyforming workshop I did with Ellen years ago.
Mind you, I disagree with Maggie about giving a talk’s outline at the beginning—that’s like showing the trailer of the movie you’re about to watch.
The Subversive Hyperlink - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Subvert the status quo. Own a website. Make and share links.