The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself
If you step into the headquarters of the Internet Archive on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, chances are you’ll be greeted by its founder and merriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle.You cannot miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of Grecian-themed Las Vegas attraction and plopped down at random in San Francisco’s foggy, mellow Richmond district. Once you pass the entrance’s white Corinthian columns, Kahle will show you the vintage Prince of Persia arcade game and a gramophone that can play century-old phonograph cylinders on display in the foyer. He’ll lead you into the great room, filled with rows of wooden pews sloping toward a pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings frame a grand stained glass dome. Before it was the Archive’s headquarters, the building housed a Christian Science church.
I made this pilgrimage on a breezy afternoon last May. Along with around a dozen other visitors, I followed Kahle, 63, clad in a rumpled orange button-down and round wire-rimmed glasses, as he showed us his life’s work. When the afternoon light hits the great hall’s dome, it gives everyone a halo. Especially Kahle, whose silver curls catch the sun and who preaches his gospel with an amiable evangelism, speaking with his hands and laughing easily. “I think people are feeling run over by technology these days,” Kahle says. “We need to rehumanize it.”
It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.
I have visited and done some work with the Internet Archive in the past. I fully support them and their goal of preserving works and making them accessible.
Via Violet Blue's Cybersecurity Roundup: October 1, 2024
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In October 1843.
Anna Atkins begins publishing Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, a collection of contact printed cyanotype photograms of algae, "by placing the unmounted dried-algae original directly on the cyanotype paper" to form the first book illustrated with photographs.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Atk…
New York Public Library provides scans of 285 pages of its copy online:
digitalcollections.nypl.org/co…
#books #botany #photography #womeninSTEM
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October 7th anniversary weighs heavy as Jews enter the High Holy Days
The anniversary of the October 7th attack on Israel takes place during the Jewish High Holy Days. It's a time of ending things that need to be ended in order begin things that need to be begun.
#news #npr #publicradio #usa
posted by pod_feeder_v2
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From Project Gutenberg:
At the Earth's Core
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Get it at: gutenberg.org/ebooks/545
Microsoft Office 2024 is now available for Macs and PCs
Office 2024 is a $149.99 standalone version for people who don’t want a Microsoft 365 subscription.
This AI Startup "Copied" an Open-Source Project and Got Half a Million Dollar Funding by Y Combinator
This AI Startup "Copied" an Open-Source Project and Got Half a Million Dollar Funding by Y Combinator
AI startups, and open-source forks with VC funding. A bad match.Ankush Das (It's FOSS News)
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I simply can't wrap my head around the thought process behind launching a clusterfuck like this. Y Combinator probably didn't do their due diligence and simply rode the fading AI Bubble, so I can at least understand how the funding might have been approved.
But actively leaving your $250,000+/year job to team up with some questionable choices to basically fork two OS projects, change the discord links and generate an illegal licence for that shit show, all while proudly stating, publicly, "dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal" when they are made aware of the fact.
This is absolutely insane, sounds like someone was about to get fired and decided to use some personal relations and fresh graduates to somehow successfully cash in one last time with absolutely no regard of even the basics. Pretty wild that those guys even managed to figure out how to found a Startup. Probably asked ChatGPT for instructions there, as well.
Y Combinator probably didn’t do their due diligence
It's not the first time. They also backed an obvious scam MMO that promised the world and more, while it was nothing more than an asset flip.
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But they made half a million.
And there are literally hundreds of similar companies raking in billions in investments that magically vanish while the founders live a luxury live and move on.
The real question is: why do VCs shit so much money into obvious frauds? Are they this stupid or do they just hope to pass it on to the greater fool?
$500,000 is nothing to billionaires, or even people who make hundreds of millions a year. It's a lot to average folks like us, but to them it's the equivalent of going to the casino with money they can afford to blow.
But I do think you're right about passing it on to the greater fool. They bet it'll be the next hot product, regardless if they know it sucks or not. Then some bigger bag of money will come in and buy it up, thinking they'll be able to somehow milk a sustainable profit out of it. You'd think by now that VCs would be smarter about the boom and bust of tech startups, but alas...
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Quantum computing. It might be a real thing but it'll go through a grift phase first.
Another one will be environmental carbon capture, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This one would be easier to fake but might not get traction for longer since the ideological superstructure in our society is already built up so that it is hard for a political crisis to emerge due to global climate concerns. Even though climate change is worsening, and whole cities are being destroyed by hurricanes, the debate is still pretty stabilized. However since this grift will end up being sold as a commercial solution to a political problem, the grift will probably come from a larger player like Lockheed or Boeing, which would necessitate investing in the most evil companies in existence. Still you never know, Tesla stayed afloat for years without making a working product by selling carbon credits issued by the government to other car companies, so you might be able to bootstrap this one
There are a lot of scams around AI and there's a lot of very serious science.
While generative AI gets all the attention there are many other fields of AI that you probably use on a regular basis.
The reason we don't see the rest of the AI iceberg is because it's mostly interesting when you have enormous amounts of data you want to analyze and that doesn't apply to regular people. Most of the valuable AIs (as in they've been proven to make or save a bunch of money) do stuff like inventory optimization, protein expression simulation, anomaly detection, or classification.
Slight correction. AI is not a scam.
While AI is a powerful tool, it enables people to do scams very easily.
Maybe.
There have been a number of technologies that provided similar capabilities, at least initially.
When photography, audio recording, and video recording were first invented, people didn't understand them well. That made it really easy to create believable fakes.
No modern viewer would be fooled by the Cottingley Fairies.
The wouldn't fool modern audiences either.
Video effects that stunned audiences at the time just look old fashioned now.
I expect that, over time, people will learn to recognize the low-effort scams. Eventually we'll reach an equilibrium where most people won't fall for them and there will still be skilled scammers who will target gullible people and get away with it.
They're not going to survive
Are you kidding me?
Alexander Bell stole the telephone.
Edison regularly stole inventions from Tesla among others.
Steve Jobs fucking mind raped Woz.
The American Dream is taking someone else's hard work and profiting off of it.
So all it takes to get that sweet, sweet VC mula is a Vscode + extension fork with some hipster branding on top? Really???
Aren't these guys supposed to be tech geniuses or some shit?
Billions of dollars and they don't have a single actually knowledgeable intern who could glance at this project and say "yeah, no, I could do this too?"
Or are they're just ignoring them because AI is a glowing hot buzzword right now?
This is baffling. The entire tech sector praises VCs like they're god's gift to earth, meanwhile they're out here backing stupid shit like this, how can anyone take these people seriously?
dawg i chatgpt'd the license [...] we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal
The absolute gall of these guys. Would be inspiring if it wasn't maddening!
Aren’t these guys supposed to be tech geniuses or some shit?
Rich/famous tech people have never been "tech geniuses." They're always sociopathic business/marketing types.
It's otherwise a fairly well written article but the title is a bit misleading.
In that context, scare quotes usually mean that generative AI was trained on someone's work and produced something strikingly similar. That's not what happened here.
This is just regular copyright violations and unethical behavior. The fact that it was an AI company is mostly unrelated to their breaches. The author covers 3 major complaints and only one of them even mentions AI and the complaint isn't about what the AI did it's about what was done with the result. As far as I know the APL2.0 itself isn't copyrighted and nobody cares if you copy or alter the license itself. The problem is that you can't just remove the APL2.0 from some work it's attached to.
This is great. So all their VC-funded work will get released publicly, and we all benefit.
I don't see why people are upset that FOSS projects are getting VC funding for development..
Haha. Maybe.
I doubt the VCs will provide much followup funding if they can't control the code base but weirder things have happened.
I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang.
We're building PearAI, an open source AI code editor.
Of course it is a cryptobro...
dawgt i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal
Yep, already hate that guy. Talks and behaves like an absolute dipshit.
How is it boot licking to get money from rich people to develop open source software?
Lemmy is FOSS that was funded by a grant from NLNet. Its the same outcome as this.
If anyone is licking boots, its the rich people licking the FOSS boots
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Right, exactly, which is why they launched with a FOSS license. Oh, wait--
Imagine the money going to VSCode which actually is the one getting contributions
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If you're upset, just ask them for the source. If they don't respond, sue.
In any case, we're all going to get the source and we'll all benefit from this.
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How does one "fork" a repo like this and then is proud about 100+ contributors he got?
I believe they know exactly what they are doing and just don't care.
Stake your crypto assets & invest in real estate with this fintech exchange.The roi is as high as 1.5% weekly running on autopilot( for crypto)
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Which is the exact same behavior that caused the dot com bubble. VC funding was throwing money at any and every dot com business, in the hopes that it would explode and lead to profits.
All it did was massively overvalue the dot com companies, which caused a bubble when people finally realized they were overvalued and VC investors turned off the spigot of free money.
Road to success (2024 AI Hype Edition):
- Clone VSCode.
- Rename it as LSCode, squash all history, and create some random commits with
--author="Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>". - Add a character AI that calls your code garbage.
- Profit.
Gambling with OTHER PEOPLE'S money.
You win, you take a cut. You lose. Someone else suffers.
These people destroy everything for greed.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced that the firm is now "financially sound" during a presentation at Unreal Fest 2024 yesterday
On organise prochainement une journée d’études "Représentations (non)écologiques du numérique".
Vous avez des travaux à partager contribuant à cette thématique ? N'hésitez pas à répondre à l'appel à communication.
Nextcloud Enterprise Day speaker spotlight: Felix Gebauer from Schleswig-Holstein! 🎉
Mark November 6th in your calendar, as Felix Gebauer from Schleswig-Holstein state administration joins us with a keynote on digital transformation in public sector.
More 👇
Yakuake is a convenient terminal that appears from the top of the screen. A free and open source program
Install: Software Center (Appstream), Deb, RPM and Flatpak packages
#Linux #Review #OpenSource #software #linuxsoftware
endstation-rechts.de/news/rech…
Lucky 5 sec. Ave = 25
Luke the leucistic Curlew and friend as high tide floods the saltmarsh at South Walney today.
#birds #BirdsOfMastodon #nature #wildlife #darktable
virkon
in reply to Project Gutenberg • • •