Overview: Science&Technology

"The indiscriminate proliferation of AI-generated content will not empower the underrepresented or democratise knowledge creation... [but] dilute and fragment the authenticity and reliability of information ... the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against misinformation and mediocrity".Why? Human curators :"…

"All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some ... leave behind (useful) wreckage that can be salvaged":the first dotcom bubble left behind "cheap servers, office furniture and space... a generation of young people ,,, trained as web makers... technologists from non-technical backgrounds"crypto bubble: "a smatterin…

At an AI conference, Jeff Jarvis "knew I was in the right place when I heard AGI brought up and quickly dismissed... I call bullshit... large language models might prove to be a parlor trick". The rest of the conference focused on "frameworks for discussion of responsible use of AI".Benefits - for some, AI can:"raise the f…

Summarises a recent Meta paper on Llama 2, "a continuation of the LLaMA... Big picture, this is a big step for the LLM ecosystem when research sharing is at an all-time low and regulatory capture at an all-time high" - so Meta continues its improbable position as good guy in the OS movement (at least when it comes to AI, but also possibl…

"an initial analysis of a growing movement ... to make key machine learning tools and technologies open and shared. “Open Artificial Intelligence”...BLOOM is a large language model released under RAIL – a new copyright license that combines an Open Access approach to licensing with behavioral restrictions aimed to enforce a vision of responsi…

Is ChatGPT creator OpenAI "a potential Google slayer. Why look up something on a search engine when ChatGPT can write a whole paragraph explaining the answer?" It's very capable, but "struggles to distinguish between truth and falsehood... often a persuasive liar... a bit like autocomplete on your phone... trained on pretty muc…

"it's a start... Musk argued that disclosing what amplifies or downranks tweets would reduce the risk of “behind the scenes manipulation.” [but] algorithms alone offer limited insights" because it's not just an algorithm that defines what you see: it's a huge dataset - "content that enters the platform, each user’s p…

"platform focused solely on professional publishing... open source tools for independent journalists and writers ... sustainable business around a free core application, funded by a premium platform as a service to run it on... non-profit foundation ... can never be bought or sold... [all] revenue reinvested into the product and the community…

The code behind the effort is all available on Github... the fact that it uses an open repository doesn’t mean that Google isn’t running the project, or deciding what gets included and what doesn’t... publishers have another option ... simply take the best parts of the specification from the publicly available documentation and implement those …

the Google standard gives publishers a streamlined page-loading script they can use that takes advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make the various elements load faster...an order of magnitude faster than the typical mobile page... a completely open standard that any publisher can implemen…

Media Cloud... is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media... by collecting and analyzing the news stream of tens of thousands of online sources.... academic researchers, journalism critics, policy advocates, media scholars, and others c…

"we wanted an easy way to create and share social cards with our readers... Vox Media’s ‘meme’, an open source social card making tool. A few hours of tinkering later, and we had our own version set up with some simple functionality, along with a new name: CardKit.... a simple and easy to use tool for everyone to quickly and dynamically create im…

"With Hive, a developer can create assignments for users, define what they need to do, and keep track of their progress in helping to solve problems. " - The New York Times R&D Lab releases Hive, an open-source crowdsourcing tool » Nieman Journalism Lab

"Charted automatically visualizes data. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable visualization of that data... open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co... it adjusts to any screen, automatically updates itself" - Introducing Charted - Data Lab - Medium

"...is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; extending it with web services; and linking it to databases like Freebase."

"The winners and other leading entries in the annual Intranet Innovation Awards show that WordPress and other open-source technologies can provide an intranet platform to meet both organisational and user needs. One of the aims of the Awards is to showcase examples of successful approaches and practices which can be applied by intranet team wit…