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

🔖 Unmoored by C. C. O’Hanlon

Yet the boat was a refuge. We had wandered in search of somewhere to settle — or, more precisely, somewhere we would be allowed to settle — for four years, moving between whatever cheap, temporary accommodation we could borrow or afford to rent in seven countries, until this unkempt but graceful vessel suggested a possibility of shelter, of ‘fixedness’, even as we were compelled by circumstances to remain mobile, unrooted

🔖 Pirate Utopias Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes

Part history, part fantasy. Hakim Bey is the nom de plume of Peter Lamborn Wilson, who led an interesting life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lamborn_Wilson

🔖 A decentralized future for the open-science databases

Continuous and reliable access to curated biological data repositories is indispensable for accelerating rigorous scientific inquiry and fostering reproducible research. Centralized repositories, though widely used, are vulnerable to single points of failure arising from cyberattacks, technical faults, natural disasters, or funding and political uncertainties. This can lead to widespread data unavailability, data loss, integrity compromises, and substantial delays in critical research, ultimately impeding scientific progress. Centralizing essential scientific resources in a single geopolitical or institutional hub is inherently dangerous, as any disruption can paralyze diverse ongoing research. The rapid acceleration of data generation, combined with an increasingly volatile global landscape, necessitates a critical re-evaluation of the sustainability of centralized models. Implementing federated and decentralized architectures presents a compelling and future-oriented pathway to substantially strengthen the resilience of scientific data infrastructures, thereby mitigating vulnerabilities and ensuring the long-term integrity of data. Here, we examine the structural limitations of centralized repositories, evaluate federated and decentralized models, and propose a hybrid framework for resilient, FAIR, and sustainable scientific data stewardship. Such an approach offers a significant reduction in exposure to governance instability, infrastructural fragility, and funding volatility, and also fosters fairness and global accessibility. The future of open science depends on integrating these complementary approaches to establish a globally distributed, economically sustainable, and institutionally robust infrastructure that safeguards scientific data as a public good, further ensuring continued accessibility, interoperability, and preservation for generations to come.

🔖 Quick and Tasty

Fuss-free food for one or two.

🔖 These Data Centers Are Getting Really, Really Big

A quick note: At my company, Cleanview, we recently built a data center tracker. I’ve been following the development of AI and data centers closely for much of the last few years. And even I’ve been shocked by what I’ve learned in building this product. Today I’m publishing the first story that uses our data center tracker. If you want to use the platform, you can sign up for Cleanview here.

🔖 Harney and Sons Tea

Shop over 300 tea blends, tea gifts, treats and teaware online from Harney & Sons Tea. Tea bags and loose leaf black tea, green tea, herbal tea, white tea. Shop Now

🔖 JKAN A lightweight, backend-free open data portal, powered by Jekyll

Open-source data portals can be really hard to install and maintain. But their basic purpose of providing links to download data really isn’t that complicated. JKAN is a proof-of-concept that allows a small, resource-strapped government agency to stand-up an open data portal by simply clicking the fork button.

🔖 hyparam / hyparquet

Hyparquet is a lightweight, dependency-free, pure JavaScript library for parsing Apache Parquet files. Apache Parquet is a popular columnar storage format that is widely used in data engineering, data science, and machine learning applications for efficiently storing and processing large datasets.

🔖 harvard-lil / warcbench

A tool for exploring, analyzing, transforming, recombining, and extracting data from WARC (Web ARChive) files.

🔖 Rethinking Data Discovery for Libraries and Digital Humanities

As part of our Public Data Project, LIL recently launched Data.gov Archive Search. In this post, we look under the hood and reflect on how and why we built this project the way we did.

🔖 Santa Sangre

Santa Sangre (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈsãn̪.t̪a ˈsãŋ.ɡɾe], ‘Holy Blood’) is a 1989 surrealist psychological horror film directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky and written by Jodorowsky along with Claudio Argento and Roberto Leoni. It stars Axel Jodorowsky, Adán Jodorowsky, Teo Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Thelma Tixou, and Guy Stockwell. An international co-production of Mexico and Italy, the film is set in Mexico, and tells the story of Fénix, a boy who grew up in a circus and his struggle with childhood trauma. It is included in Empire magazine’s 2008 list of the 500 Greatest Movies of All Time.

🔖 Handy

A free, open source, and extensible speech-to-text application that works completely offline.

Handy is a cross-platform desktop application built with Tauri (Rust + React/TypeScript) that provides simple, privacy-focused speech transcription. Press a shortcut, speak, and have your words appear in any text field—all without sending your voice to the cloud.

🔖 mason.nvim

mason.nvim is a Neovim plugin that allows you to easily manage external editor tooling such as LSP servers, DAP servers, linters, and formatters through a single interface. It runs everywhere Neovim runs (across Linux, macOS, Windows, etc.), with only a small set of external requirements needed.

🔖 Technodiversity, permacomputing and anticapitalism

Help articulate a critical theoretical framework that can serve as a base for social movements: we perceive that there is a widespread loss of historical memory and a lack of deep understanding of the origin of our current problems, especially what ideologies have brought us here. We want to fight the hopelessness that there is no horizon beyond capitalism with a critical discourse that helps us feel that we can have control over the narrative of our reality.

🔖 Python Foundation goes ride or DEI, rejects government grant with strings attached

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has walked away from a $1.5 million government grant and you can blame the Trump administration’s war on woke for effectively weakening some open source security.

🔖 Bartz v Anthropic FAQ

This page includes iformation about the Anthropic settlement with copyright holders in the LibGen dataset. It is supposedly the largest class action lawsuit involving copyright (1.5 billion $).

🔖 The Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE)

The Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE: pronounced “peace”) is an open source (Drupal-based) digital platform that supports multi-sited, cross-scale ethnographic and historical research. The platform links researchers in new ways, enables new kinds of analyses and data visualization, and activates researchers’ engagement with public problems and diverse audiences. PECE is at the center of a research project that explores how digital infrastructure can be designed to support collaborative hermeneutics…

🔖 How Education Works

It’s about how we learn, the nature of knowledge, the very technological nature of humanity, and the very human nature of technology. It’s about how our participation in (not our just use of) technology brings about knowledge and skills, and it’s about the very complex nature of how that happens. It’s about how education, treated as a technology, actually works rather than how it is designed to work, and why it often fails to work or surprisingly succeeds. It’s about how what we do (the hard methods, tools, theories, models, processes, and structures we employ) is less important than the way that we do it (the soft technique we bring to assemble it all). It’s about the parts we play in the cognition of others, and the parts they play in our own. It is about what it means to be human.

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