These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.

🔖 Principles of AI use at the National Library of Finland

The National Library of Finland has drawn up both general principles for the use of AI and internal practical guidelines for using AI tools to support everyday work.

🔖 Harry Towell Yearbooks

My name is Harry Towell from Lincolnshire, UK and under my own name and as Glåsbird, I produce Ambient, Electro Acoustic and Modern Classical music. I am not just active in recording music - I also run the Whitelabrecs record label too:

🔖 Welcome to L5

L5 is a fun, fast, cross-platform, and lightweight implementation of the Processing API in Lua. It is a free and open source coding library to make interactive artwork on the computer, aimed at artists, designers, and anyone that wants a flexible way to prototype art, games, toys, and other software experiments in code.

🔖 extremely cool shell trick I did not know about

A short video about process substitution in Unix shell and why it is useful, especially in situations where you need a temporary file as part of some pipeline.

🔖 Blackbird & Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring - Hiromi Uehara

🔖 Prediction: AI will make formal verification go mainstream

Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream

🔖 Software Foundations Series

The Software Foundations series is a broad introduction to the mathematical underpinnings of reliable software.

The principal novelty of the series is that every detail is one hundred percent formalized and machine-checked: the entire text of each volume, including the exercises, is literally a “proof script” for the Coq proof assistant.

The exposition is intended for a broad range of readers, from advanced undergraduates to PhD students and researchers. No specific background in logic or programming languages is assumed, though a degree of mathematical maturity is helpful. A one-semester course can expect to cover Logical Foundations plus most of Programming Language Foundations or Verified Functional Algorithms, or selections from both.

🔖 LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Bird Watching

Two brothers learn about competitive birdwatching by becoming birdwatchers—spending a year living in a used minivan, traveling the country to compete in a ‘Big Year’.

🔖 Computers Are Bad

Computers Are Bad is a newsletter on the history of the computer and communications industry. It will be thrown directly at your doorstep on semi-regular schedule, to enlighten you as to why computers are that way.

🔖 Rust By Example

Rust is a modern systems programming language focusing on safety, speed, and concurrency. It accomplishes these goals by being memory safe without using garbage collection.

Rust by Example (RBE) is a collection of runnable examples that illustrate various Rust concepts and standard libraries. To get even more out of these examples, don’t forget to install Rust locally and check out the official docs. Additionally for the curious, you can also check out the source code for this site.

🔖 Climate Yap Recap: AI, Energy, Facilities, and Planning

Project ARCC members have been meeting regularly over the last several months to talk climate change and archives. These informal Climate Yaps are a place to share what we’re thinking about and working on, big and small wins, and challenges along the way.

🔖 duckdb-web-archive

DuckDB extension to query web archive CDX APIs directly from SQL.

🔖 State of HTML 2025

If you want to get an idea of how capable the web platform has gotten over the past few years, look no further than the list of categories covered in this survey.

Forms, graphics, performance features, methods of interacting with various system and device APIs, accessibility… It’s a wonder anybody is able to keep track of it all!

🔖 Subscribe INTERTAPES is a collection of found cassette tapes from over the world. The audio fragments include: voice memos, field recordings, mixtapes, bootlegs & more.

Obscure tape finds and their stories

🔖 fighting erasure: digitizing Gaza’s genocide and the War on Lebanon

Fighting Erasure: Digitizing Gaza’s Genocide and the War on Lebanon is a comprehensive project launched on October 8, 2023 aimed at documenting and protecting indigenous land, built environments, archives, and heritage in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine, as well as in South Lebanon and the surrounding areas. The project includes a series of advocacy, education, and capacity building activities, along with the critical work of archiving, preserving, and providing access to what may become one of the most thoroughly documented genocides and land colonization in history. We archive against genocide by documenting human rights violations and settlements expansion, as well as its cultural dimensions through heritage and archival erasure. We archive against genocide by using visualization techniques and new media to educate about the human toll of the violence. We archive against genocide by providing the knowledge, training, equipment, resources, and planning and coordination needed locally to build capacity, resilience, and networks for archival protection, land tenure documentation, and heritage preservation. We advocate to, and engage with, diverse publics and decision makers to promote the safeguarding of heritage and archives, the reclamation of colonized lands and return of displaced people.

🔖 World’s largest Internet Domain Database

ip.thc.org was born out a very specific need, which was to perform limitless domain related recon without having to pay a unreasonable amount of money (which most other services charge). We do the hard work of sourcing, resolving, cleaning, indexing and making available domain data for research purposes without any fee or paywall

🔖 Scholarly Communication Analytics

We provide data-driven insights into scholarly communication and are based at the Göttingen State and University Library. Find out more about us and our publicly available Open Scholarly Data Warehouse. On our blog, we share case studies using open metadata and tools.

🔖 How we got hit by Shai-Hulud: A complete post-mortem

On the evening of November 24th, around 20:27 UTC (9:27 PM local time in Germany), one of our engineers was experimenting with a new project. They ran a command that triggered pnpm install. At that moment, somewhere in the dependency tree, a malicious package executed.

🔖 Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.

🔖 Marcin Wichary’s Keyboard, Typewriting, and Type Collection

A varied collection of keyboard, typewriter, typesetting, word processing, and digital type reference materials scanned or acquired by Marcin Wichary. Includes many offbeat brochures, books and pamphlets related to the experience and culture of type.