fuzz_junket

Archivist here. Google is not an archive. Neither is Tumblr or Flickr or any other platform that might delete your content at any time. They're companies and it's their job to make money. This is why my profession exists. We don't make money, which is why we're not well funded, but we have a whole lot of training, technical knowledge, and professional ethics around saving information and making it accessible. If you want to preserve your records, talk to an archivist because you can't assume some faceless corporation will do it for you.

The author seems to be frustrated at something but I'm not sure what. There is value in learning how to implement something from first principles. Teachers aren't sitting around scheming about how they can waste their students' time with "meaningless calisthenics", they're trying to help them. Calling them "clueless professors" isn't great either. There's a degree of disrespect in undergraduates dunking on professional tertiary-level educators for making them do homework.

Also, Prolog does not have a "standard library". What predicates are implemented varies greatly by implementation, and if you want to write portable code then you have to stick as closely as possible to the ISO standard.

Funny, I was just thinking how much this reminded me of Stanisław Lem's "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub". Must have been one hell of a vibe in Iron Curtain bureaucracies.

I love O'Bama, the famous O'lympic athlete.

Technically Doc Brown was alive in 1885, having travelled there from 1955, so he was the first time traveller by a good 100 years before Einstein.

I worked for Livescribe from 2008 to 2010. The author of this article describes the Nuwa Pen as a "game-changer" but, as others have pointed out in this thread, other products have done the same thing for a long time. Livescribe's pens captured both handwriting and audio, which was great for meetings and lectures. For a while they also supported an app ecosystem, though the apps' usefulness was never successfully demonstrated to be more than a gimmick.

I still believe there is a niche where a product like this would be very much at home, but Livescribe's smartpens in particular were undone by a combination of bad internal decisions combined with a market that changed from underneath them. Who knows, maybe the Nuwa Pen will be able to target that niche market more successfully. I could certainly find a use for one, given the right combination of price/features.

> From a quick look at the code, so far you can achieve the same with exiftool if you mount those sources as local drives. There isn't much else yet, but it wouldn't take a lot of work to hook this up with a vision models to add some labels or metadata.

Thanks for walking me through it, and for the handy example with exiftool. I like that you're doing this with command-line tools because you can see what's going on more easily. I think it's more accessible than requiring a Java + Gradle build environment.

> 1) field of view + rough estimation of lens data can be computable directly from perspective cues

> 2) this can be narrowed down to specific objectives

Really! That is so cool, I wasn't aware that kind of thing was possible. I never write down the lenses I've used (because lazy) so extracting that kind of metadata from the image would be an interesting exercise.

Does anyone know what this actually does? There's no explanation in the documentation, and the only screenshot is of the build process.

I get the impression whatever it is requires metadata from a digital camera, which isn't present in my photos because I like to shoot film and scan it. My first thought was, "Wow, how is it going to analyse the subject matter and classify all my scans in 'seceonds'?" My second thought was, "Ah, it won't." The author is clear that this tool is based solely on their own workflows, which is fair enough, but I'd at least like to know what those workflows are.

Your friends are just poking fun, of course it's a real library. I also have a large number of ebooks (in addition to a 1-2k book physical library) and the ebooks are, paradoxically, less accessible. It's too easy to just download hundreds of books in one go (let's say if you wanted all the original Goosebumps books) and not actually look at them, whereas every physical book has to be obtained and shelved individually. Then ebooks disappear into Calibre where I utterly forget about them, whereas a physical book's presence on the shelf is a constant reminder that it exists and is waiting for me to read it.

Yeah I came here thinking it was about books. Apparently Magic people call their cards a library? Here I am sat with a plain old deck of cards like a complete lemon.

I came here to say exactly this! I got thrown by the second image right at the top before the article has even started: "K(AW)MPL(E)KS". All well and good, if you want to write in an American accent.

On a related note, writing accents is usually a bad idea. I remember reading Asimov's "Foundation" when I was a teenager in Australia. One of the characters is a lord and speaks like this: "Ah, Hahdin. You ah looking foah us, no doubt?" Because of course everyone in the future is American and everyone who's not American speaks with a comical (and completely unreadable) accent. Trying to read that dialogue makes me feel like I'm having a stroke.

I'm doing a master's in library science and archives, currently working a couple of internships processing archives. The answer is archives are big, complex, and time-consuming. One collection I work with is 131 cubic feet of records including papers, floppy disks, and photographic film. It's unprocessed, meaning the archivists haven't had a chance to arrange and describe it, which isn't a wonder considering the size of the collection — and that's only one of many in the backlog.

Even if a collection is processed, because of the volume of information in a given collection archivists typically don't typically describe every document. In a library you can catalogue every book, but that's not possible in an archive. And in an artist's papers, how can you know which document will be important to someone? How can you know what's artistically significant? The time it would take to research the background of every document (Was this script ever made? Is it interesting to anyone?) would be prohibitive.

Add into the mix that archives are chronically underfunded and archivists underpaid. This is coming from the unpaid intern who was asked to process a $33,000 acquisition last year. Fun times.

I have one of these too! Although you'll probably never hear it played back on the correct equipment, you can fudge it at home with a regular turntable and a bit of wizardry on the computer. You need to digitize your turntable's output in stereo, invert one track, mix it down to mono, and speed it up to 80 rpm. The results aren't ideal but unless you have a time machine or a music historian on hand it may be the best you can do.

A friend in high-school used to do the old trick of copying a DLL onto a floppy disk, renaming it "essay.doc", and handing it in to the teacher. Next week he'd feign concern that the disk must have got corrupted somehow, but by then he'd bought himself an extra week to write the paper.

It was a different time...

Library organisations like the American Library Association[1] and the International Federation of Library Associations[2] have codes of ethics that protect their users' privacy and intellectual property rights. I don't know that they cover this exact scenario, so maybe this library is just toeing the line, but I would agree that this is an upsetting violation of librarians' professional ethics.

[1]: https://www.ala.org/tools/ethics [2]: https://www.ifla.org/publications/ifla-code-of-ethics-for-li...

I had a very unfortunate experience with Star Labs. I had their StarLite IV laptop and it was wonderfully slim and light. I was delighted with it. The CPU is no powerhouse, but it did exactly what I needed. Then eight months later it started experiencing power issues (e.g. when I picked it up, there was a power blip and it froze). It took four months going back and forth with them before they finally refused to fix it under warranty and demanded I pay for it.

Full disclosure: they said I broke it. My side of things is that it's stayed on my desk or in a bag most of the time. It never got subjected to rough handling, and this has never happened with any other laptop I've owned. I think it was an issue with build quality if even gentle handling can break it.

The whole experience was very disappointing. I'd really hoped that supporting a smaller company like this would mean I'd get more personal support, but that wasn't the case with Star Labs. This isn't a reflection on the Byte mini PC, of course, but just be cautious about dealing with companies if their products break easily and they don't offer good customer support.

It's designed to run on your local machine and be accessed by your browser. You can run it on a server if you like, but the give-away is the fact that it only supports single users — the original conception was for personal use.

I heard they're moving in the direction of supporting multiple users, which will be fantastic. Then you really can use it as a proper webmail client for a small email server.

Here's the link to Nginx in Sid: https://packages.debian.org/sid/nginx

The same link but for Jessie says "Package not available in this suite.": https://packages.debian.org/jessie/nginx

I see results in the search results for Sid and Squeeze, but not for stable. Nginx has not been removed from Debian all together, just from certain versions. This is according to packages.debian.org at least. As you pointed out, it may be that their search engine is not working correctly.

It's probably a personal aesthetic, but the variable stroke widths make it look cartoony. It's also got a tendency to big loops — the a, p, h, and g in the sample all have very large, arched, oval shapes (this is probably what they're referring to as the large x-height). That makes it look exaggerated to my eye, and doesn't help the cartoony appearance either.

But if it is a personal dislike and other people are fans, I can't object. It wouldn't be the first time I disliked an Apple initiative that turned out to be very successful.

I'm with you, I think it's hideous. And it's not, as another commenter wrote, just the fact that we're seeing a new font replacing an old one in a particular context. I haven't seen this new font in the wild — just on the spec page — and I still thought "Surely no-one's putting their name to this…"

As someone who printed every high-school and university essay on A4 paper, I can say it's a fine size for documents. You're right that it's a rubbish size for books, but that's a different question.

I've heard some academics who specialize in the phonology. I always thought it would sound like Italian, but the reconstruction actually sounded a lot more like French.

It's a very nice idea — I always like smartening up the look of the Web — but the resulting links are ghastly. If your word starts or ends with a descending letter (e.g. "ghastly"), then the underline looks like it omits the first and last letters. It breaks the semantics of what the underline means — any bit that's underlined is supposed to be the link, and if it's not underlined it's not a link.

They also made the mistake of showing a link that includes the word "Typography", which has an underline so broken up and interrupted that it's distracting (which devindotcom also pointed out). It's linked, then it's not, then it's linked, then it's not!

So yeah, I have to give them credit for a good idea and a clever implementation, but it just doesn't work out in the end.

I don't know anything about the scam, but I find iAlien crashes all the bloody time on my iPad. The nagging "leave a review" notification has never endeared me to it either.

I'd be curious to hear more about the scam, if you have a source on hand.

Is Coin not even on the market yet? Hah, fancy — they started taking pre-orders almost a year ago. Would anyone pay $155 for a Plastic Card if they knew they wouldn't get it until October 2015?

I'm in the "it's dead" camp, I think. Does anyone write new Perl scripts, or are they largely maintaining old scripts? And are the people writing new Perl scripts the ones who learned to program in the 80s and 90s?

I get the sense that the generational shift moved towards Python in the late 90s and 2000s. Then of course Python has been running in circles for so long with Python 3 that the focus is now shifting to newer scripting languages. Does anyone know what the next thing might be? I do hear a lot of talk about Go, but I don't know enough about it to say. I'd be curious to know where people think we might be headed.

Oh look. An opportunity to let Google own even more of the Internet. Let's do it.