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These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Beyond DeepSeek: China’s Diverse Open-Weight AI Ecosystem and Its Policy Implications After years of lagging behind, Chinese AI models — especially open-weight LLMs — seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead of their global counterparts in advanced AI model capabilities and adoption. We profile and compare the capabilities and distinct features of four notable Chinese open-weight language model families, highlighting that…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 UNHCR’s future is at risk – and so is its past UNHCR’s archives are not just dusty shelves of internal paperwork. Within around 10 kilometres of shelving lie official records, file notes, testimonies and images dating back to UNHCR’s creation in 1950, documenting global displacement from the aftermath of the Second World War through the Cold War and decolonization to today’s conflicts and climate-driven crises. Alongside this…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Opening Panel: Archival Poetics & The War on Memory This opening panel on June 11, 2012 entitled “The War on Memory” includes Eleni Sikelianos, Stacy Szymaszek, Steve Dickison, Steven Taylor, E. Tracy Grinnell, and Anne Waldman. Topics discussed include etymology of the word “archive,” the place of the poet in society, archives as historical documents, technology’s role in archiving, and narrative anthropology. archive audio…

Two years ago I wrote about why I don’t use Copilot. I still don’t use Copilot. But I have since started using Claude Code, which is arguably worse. Why am I using it? Well, as a software developer I felt like I had to understand it, because so many of my colleagues and collaborators have started using it. Once things moved beyond relatively simple code completion I needed to understand what it was capable of, and what to look for in its work when reviewing code. I also had a good friend walk…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Beavis and Butt-Head Become A.I. Tech Bros Will A.I. finally be able to help Beavis and Butt-Head score? It did everybody else’s homework; they deserve something! ai humor video 🔖 Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off A campaign has begun to get two large transmitter masts listed, after the BBC’s Long Wave (LW) service is turned off. The 700ft (213m) high Wychbold Masts in the Worcestershire countryside can be seen for…

Epithalmion for Tyler by James Tate I thought I knew something about loneliness but you go to the stockyards buy a pig’s ear and sew it on your couch. That, you said, is my best friend–we have spirited talks. Even then I thought: a man of such exquisite emptiness (and you cultivated it so) is ground for fine flowers.

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 RFC 9958: Post-Quantum Cryptography for Engineers The advent of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) would render state-of-the-art, traditional public key algorithms deployed today obsolete, as the mathematical assumptions underpinning their security would no longer hold. To address this, protocols and infrastructure must transition to post-quantum algorithms, which are designed to resist both traditional and…

Midsummer sunrise The sun peeking over the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. A globe of firey starstuff over calm waves, orange and red spreading out into the sky.

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 When Bits Rot - with C McKean, L Talboom, A Page-Mitchell English Edition: floppy disks, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, SSD drives - no matter what you choose to store your data on - ultimately they all decay. With my guests Callum McKean, Leontien Talboom and Adrian Page-Mitchell, we’re going to talk about what kinds of data we find on old drives, why we want to get them in the first place, and what can go wrong with the storage…

Tree 2 Same as Tree 1 but after playing with some filters on my Android phone before uploading.

Tree 1 A reflection of a tree in the Northwest Branch river, cropped and turned upside down.

TL;DR if you have a TASCAM 788 backup and don’t know how to get the audio out of it this script might help. Also: AI tools work best when paired with expertise. I needed to take a very personal excursion into digital preservation recently as I attempted to listen to some audio recordings my brother John had made about 20 years ago. John died recently, and is sorely missed by his friends and family. He was a continuous source of inspiration for me, because of his many varied interests and…

I have a problem with RSS. Not RSS itself, RSS is great! The problem is that I subscribe to more feeds than I can possibly read, so the unread count in FreshRSS climbs faster than I can bring it down. Some days I skim titles, declare bankruptcy, and mark everything as read. Other days I let it pile up and feel guilty. I’ve tried to using newer tools like Current which was definitely an improvement, but still didn’t quite do it. My friend Dan has been working on a new RSS tool that works a bit…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Graph database-ball! Exploring the Game with the graph capabilities of LadybugDB, DuckDB and PostgreSQL This article presents a comparison of graph capabilities in three different databases: DuckDB (v1.4.4 with duckpgq), LadybugDB (0.16.1), and PostgreSQL (19devel). We will load a large volume of records (5,635,972 rows of baseball data covering people, parks, team records, and game play-by-plays) into each database, define the…

Sometimes it just feels this way

Archives de Bevaix by Service intercommunal d’archivage The Wayback Machine is (usually) good at preserving web pages, but it’s not always good at helping you find your way around what’s been preserved. URLs from a vanished website may be archived, but if the original site is gone, the paths into it (its navigation, its search, its tables of contents) are sometimes gone too. This creates a need, and opportunity, for sites I want to call reading rooms for the archived web: standalone sites that…

Inked clouds

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Software can be finished One of the “25 lessons” I presented at LoopConf this year was “Software can be finished”. I tried to remove this lesson from the talk to make room for something else. But it kinda took on a life of its own and wanted to be in the talk. It was an Important Lesson. “Software can be finished” is a controversial statement. And I want to be clear, as I was in the talk, that in many cases “finished” software…

Untitled by John Summers

Another moon

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 sliver An ‘archival sliver’ of the web. A bit like a ‘data lifeboat’ for making or replicating web archives of small sets of pages. Uses shot-scraper to drive a web browser that generates screenshots of your URLs, but runs it through a pywb web proxy so it can produce a high quality archival version of what you download. As well as archiving live web pages, this tools can leverage pywb’s support for neatly extracting URLs from…

There is no wind blowing here on my face cool from the faraway sea. I don’t see that tree green against blue blue behind green. Boarding a train leaving a train no train.

There is no wind blowing here on my face cool from the faraway sea. I don’t see that tree green against blue blue behind green. Boarding a train leaving a train no train.

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 abcde - A Better CD Encoder Ordinarily, the process of grabbing the data off a CD and encoding it, then tagging or commenting it, is very involved. abcde is designed to automate this. It will take an entire CD and convert it into a compressed audio format - Ogg/Vorbis, MPEG Audio Layer III, Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), Ogg/Speex, MPP/MP+(Musepack), M4A (AAC) or Opus format(s). 🔖 The New York Good Times An alternative home…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 lowkey: critical coding club lowkey: critical coding club is first and foremost a coding club - a series of hangouts for anyone who wants to write computer programs with other people. Whether you’re new or experienced, need inspiration, or just want to throw on headphones and hack, you are welcome to join. Expect it to be laid-back and self-organised outside usual hierarchies: study groups, spontaneous pair programming, parallel…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Soundcamp / Reveil 2026 is the 40th year since the ecology park was set up on abandoned dockland. A free programme of walks, talks and workshops will be a chance to find out more about histories of the site and join a conversation about its future. Listen in the PITCH soundtent as the Reveil 24+1hr broadcast loops the earth at daybreak. Join local naturalists for a bat walk on Saturday night and a bird walk at dawn on Sunday. 🔖…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Talk Talk - Live at Montreux 1986 From Aquarium Drunkard: By July 1986, Talk Talk were still a functioning live unit touring behind The Colour of Spring. But something had already shifted as evidenced by this set from that summer’s Montreux Jazz Festival. Listen closely and you can hear the architecture beginning to loosen: tempos breathe, arrangements open, and familiar material begins to drift toward something less fixed, less…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Why I ask AI coders to ask me questions Next, I will tell the AI to ask me 10 to 20 questions about architectural choices that I haven’t thought about, that it needs to pin down before writing code. Invariably, the questions that I’m asked are detailed, insightful, and pivotal to the design. Sometimes the AI will give me choices for answers, sometimes it will ask the question and make a sceptic recommendation. I answer the AI’s…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 AI Whistleblower: We Are Being Gaslit By AI Companies, They’re Hiding The Truth! - Karen Hao The truth about Sam Altman. AI Critic Karen Hao reveals what 90 OpenAI employees told her. Karen Hao is an AI expert, award-winning investigative journalist, and former reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering American and Chinese tech companies. She is also co-host of the podcast The Interface and freelances for publicati...

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Infrastructure Landlords: The Rentier Capitalism of Commercial Academic Publishers If you want to understand where the commercial parts of scholarly communications may be heading, you need to look beyond policy documents, conference panels, or public-facing strategy statements. You should look at what large commercial actors say when speaking to investors. Earnings calls are one of the places where that language become...