@dsalo@digipres.club cover
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

dsalo

@[email protected]

Mutinous #librarian, iSchool educator, jack-of-all-trades. She/her. Bergholt Stuttley Johnson designed my notional machine.

Save your 20th-century creations if you value them. If it's not printed, it's likely in danger. #retrocomputing #MediaArchaeology #DigitalForensics #DigitalArchives

Ethicists are scalpels; I am a buster sword. #ethics #DataEthics #privacy #DataPrivacy #infosec #LibraryPrivacy

Former #scholcommer. #ScholarlyCommunication #OpenAccess

#nobot #metafilter #nobridge

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar futurebird , to random

Why are there usb ports on the microwave?

wrong answers only

A microwave with two USB charging ports
ALT
dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@futurebird For a couple of those USB-powered can fridges.

Hot pizza and cold beer, what's not to like?

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

VeraPDF is a giant pain in the ass, y'all. I'm not even sure it's worth teaching any more. Grrrrrrrr.

Slightly more useful comment: I need whatever it takes (a profile?) to make VeraPDF call out common PDF errors (like the ones Johan van der Knijff has sample files for) to be provided for me.

I think that would also be a VAST help to people just trying to Do Preservation Work With PDFs In The Field without being giant PDF nerds.

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

Has anybody hacked together a Javascriptie to add a "clear column" button to Mastodon's advanced view?

It's just about the only thing I miss from BetterTweetdeck days.

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

Microsoft sure is saying the quiet part out loud.

Amplify this, Satya. 🖕

PCGamer headline: "Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it" Subhed: "Workers should learn AI skills and companies should use it because it's a 'cognitive amplifier,' claims Satya Nadella."
ALT
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

Feel free to tell Discord what you think about AI.

https://discord.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5BGtstVUidXadts

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

Library/archives peeps:

It is likely (not guaranteed, but likely) that we will have an opening for a metadata instructor this coming fall, asynchronous online.

If you are or know somebody who'd be interested, let me know!

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

This was always kind of my sense of how museums worked, but I definitely learned some things from it. (I am not and have never been a museum professional.)

It reads like museums today are archives twenty years ago and libraries seventy years ago.

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/11/20/cafeteria/

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

Looking for data-rescue efforts that are newbie-friendly. In initial discussions of a possible data-rescue-thon sometime spring semester.

Newbie-friendly most likely means:

  • good workflow documentation

  • no software installation needed (or at LEAST make it minimal and cross-platform)

  • automation-friendly, but by-hand work (e.g. dataset metadata) also available

  • a clear destination for completed work

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

world's teensiest-tiniest violin for faculty who are butthurt that academia dot edu is selling them out to AI

y'all had librarian-run institutional repositories

(librarians have ethics)

you laughed at them when you weren't ignoring them

and you chased the startup shiny instead

and you are getting EXACTLY what you deserve

this worn-out scholcommer has no sympathy, only schadenfreude

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

Realized today that I think about generative AI in education much the same way as I think about lockdown:

  • hard to see what's going on
  • incredibly disruptive, broke a lot of stuff
  • destructive to student ability to learn
  • frustrating-but-possible to route around (for me, at least; this is emphatically not true of every educator)
  • TEMPORARY

And yeah, I really do believe that last one. Makes me feel sick for current students, but light at end of tunnel.

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar molly0xfff , to random

since i was writing for a general audience i only tucked in a short paragraph about using RSS as a journalist or researcher, but i genuinely have no idea how anyone functions without it.

sometimes in an interview someone will ask me for my “secret” for staying on top of crypto news, and the secret is literally just RSS

https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/

Power users can even subscribe to search results from search engines or other websites, making RSS a powerful tool for research. Have you ever wondered how I keep up with cryptocurrency news? Besides the crypto publications in my RSS reader, I have feeds for Google searches like (cryptocurrency OR NFT) (theft OR hack OR scam) and CourtListener searches on crypto-related keywords for newly filed cases. CourtListener provides a feed for every docket, so I have a folder in my RSS reader for ongoing court cases I’m tracking.
ALT
dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@molly0xfff NetNewsWire + Shaarli = syllabi. Been how I roll as an educator for as long as I've been one.

@BrodieOnLinux@mstdn.social avatar BrodieOnLinux , to random

Wait it's actually real, O'Reilly has a Vibe Coding book coming out https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/vibe-coding-the/9798341634749/

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@BrodieOnLinux I used to respect O'Reilly. Oh well.

@jerry@infosec.exchange avatar jerry , to random

Just two dogs hanging out in the kitchen, waiting for someone to drop some food.

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@jerry I think your pet IAM system may have sprung a leak.

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar molly0xfff , to random

For those just learning about LibGen because of the reporting on Meta and other companies training LLMs on pirated books, I’d highly recommend the book Shadow Libraries (open access: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/3600/Shadow-LibrariesAccess-to-Knowledge-in-Global).

I just read it while working on the Wikipedia article about shadow libraries, and it’s a fascinating history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library

I fear the already fraught conversations about shadow libraries will take a turn for the worse now that it’s overlapping with the incredibly fraught conversations about AI training.

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@molly0xfff Great rec; Balázs Bodó is THE ONE to read on this.

I have a variety of shorter pieces from various sources in my linkspam: https://linkspam.dsalo.info/?searchtags=samizdat for the curious.

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar molly0xfff , to random

My conversation with @brianmerchant about “Speaking Truth to Crypto Power” at SXSW was one of the few crypto-related events. Crypto prices may be back up, but crypto excitement has not followed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzqoukQoAos

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@molly0xfff
...

...

...

wat.

@tante@tldr.nettime.org avatar tante , to random

When talking about "AI" there's a lot of chat about "hallucinations" but I think it is a bit misleading. Because it's all hallucinations, some just accidentally true.

https://tante.cc/2025/03/16/its-all-hallucinations/

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@tante Yeah, I called it a make-stuff-up machine for reasons. Thanks for this!

https://speakerdeck.com/dsalo/a-chatbot-is-not-a-search-engine-its-more-like-a-roleplaying-game

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

Yeah, put a fork in Creative Commons, it's done.

Its new strategic plan is a milquetoast pile of useless bromides.

dsalo OP ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar
@dansup@mastodon.social avatar dansup , to random

I've received 5 VC offers "to chat" regarding Pixelfed in the past few days.

Not for sale.

Pixelfed belongs to the people.

I'd rather be broke and true to my beliefs, than sell out.

That's why I'm organizing a Kickstarter to fund the ethical development of Pixelfed, Loops and more.

It's time that someone stood up to them, instead of joining them.

Are you with me?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@dansup I'm afraid I can't support you until you fix the Loops ToS.

https://bajsicki.com/blog/loops-video-terms/

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar molly0xfff , to random

couple new stickers in the store

https://store.mollywhite.net/products/im-not-hoarding-im-archiving-sticker

Three stickers, which all read “I’m not hoarding I’m archiving”, and have images of a stack of floppy disks, a storage server, and a stack of HDDs
ALT
dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@molly0xfff Boosted to our digital-preservation-themed server.

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar molly0xfff , to random

Incredible essay about the importance and challenges of digital archival by Maxwell Neely-Cohen, as well as the various imperfect strategies to achieve “century-scale” digital archives.

https://lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scale-storage/

"We picked a century scale because most physical objects can survive 100 years in good care. It is attainable, and yet we selected it because the design of mainstream digital storage mediums are nowhere close to even considering this mark."

1/

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@molly0xfff thank you; I teach digital preservation and this is likely to hit my syllabus for spring

@404mediaco@mastodon.social avatar 404mediaco , to random

Extremely wild: Zipcar had an outage on Black Friday, which stranded customers all over the country. People unable to return cars they'd rented, locked out of cars everywhere. Stuck on hold for hours. Nightmare

https://www.404media.co/a-total-meltdown-black-friday-zipcar-outage-strands-customers-in-random-places/

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@404mediaco Oof. Zipcar support wait times are ungood at the best of times.

Glad I needed a Zipcar the day before T'giving instead of the day after...

@404mediaco@mastodon.social avatar 404mediaco , to random

New: The National Archives is pushing Google Gemini AI on workers despite concerns from archivists about accuracy of the historical record. Internal presentation shows the "AI-Mazing Techventure" they are embarking on

https://www.404media.co/ai-mazing-tech-venture-national-archives-pushes-google-gemini-ai-on-employees/

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@404mediaco As an educator of archivists I am SCREAMING SCREAMING SCREAMING right now...

... but thank you for reporting this. Necessary and valuable. And I am heartened by the other archivists whose incisive questions you reported.

(Carol Lagundo needs to be ejected from NARA immediately. So does this "spokesperson.")

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar molly0xfff , to random

Newsletter: The recent Second Circuit decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is only the latest battle in the war on libraries and the freedom to read.

https://www.citationneeded.news/hachette-v-internet-archive/

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@molly0xfff Thank you. 😀

@404mediaco@mastodon.social avatar 404mediaco , to random

A year ago today we launched 404 Media.

Thanks to the overwhelming support of our subscribers, we're very proud and humbled to say that our business and company is sustainable and stable, and more scoops, investigations, stunts, etc are coming in year 2

https://www.404media.co/what-we-learned-in-our-first-year-of-404-media/

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@404mediaco I appreciate y'all. Keep on truckin'.

@404mediaco@mastodon.social avatar 404mediaco , to random

There is a real, measurable backlash against indiscriminate AI scraping that can be seen in the robots.txt files of websites.

~28% of the most actively updated sites now restrict scraping. 5% of all sites block scraping, up from ~1% last year

https://www.404media.co/the-backlash-against-ai-scraping-is-real-and-measurable/

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@404mediaco I'm not sure about the use of "blocked" around robots.txt.

Obeying robots.txt is purely voluntary, so it's not really a block.

Using .htaccess to turn away an AI crawler, for example? That's a block.

@dsalo@digipres.club avatar dsalo , to random

Johns Hopkins is doing a long-COVID survey and apparently is having trouble finding controls -- people who haven't had COVID. If this is you, consider giving them some clicks.

https://covid-long.com/

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar molly0xfff , to random

Ryan Salame (former CEO of the Bahamian portion of FTX) has submitted his sentencing memo. He's asked for no more than 18 months imprisonment for his charges.

He was charged with conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business and conspiracy to make unlawful political contributions and defraud the Federal Election Commission.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.590939/gov.uscourts.nysd.590939.433.0_1.pdf

dsalo ,
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

@molly0xfff ... he wants substance abuse to be counted in his favor?

weird flex but okay