madisen

I really kind of like the American project. The experiment of, “Hey, let’s go try out a bunch of different things and allow people to build things that they would like to have built.” Why don’t we enable and empower more people in that way? Fortunately the technologies can work that way, but we need people to think ethically. As Larry Lessig put... See more

We’ve digitized 2.5 million books. Google has as well, but they’re locked up. They locked up the public domain, which we think of as a sin. The library sort of made elite services around it just for themselves.

“We’ve had artificial-intelligence tools and bots since 2002, and we’ve had a team dedicated to machine learning since 2017,” Selena Deckelmann, Wikimedia’s chief technology officer, told me. “They’re extremely valuable for semiautomated content review, and especially for translations.

But if our fundamental goal is to create more relationships with each other, to build trust, enable collaboration and unlock creativity, we need to think more widely about the kinds of openness we need. We also need to consider the kinds of technological platforms, legal mechanisms and organisational structures that are necessary to support it.

By 2014, there were almost 400 million CC-licensed photos on Flickr. That year, researchers from Yahoo Labs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Snapchat and In-Q-Tel used a quarter of all these photos to create YFCC100M, a dataset of 100 million photographs of people created for computer vision applications. Until today, this dataset remains... See more

In 2021, when the archive celebrated its 25th anniversary, Mr. Kahle talked about the fate of the internet in an era of megacorporations: “Will this be our medium or will it be theirs? Will it be for a small controlling set of organizations or will it be a common good, a public resource?

MANIFESTO

After working in fashion e-commerce for years I've come to the conclusion that in e-commerce we do not sell clothes... we sell images of clothes. Compressed, digital versions of physical products. As Roland Barthes pointed out in The Fashion System, a product image is a symbol or metaphor of a product. Media--in this case images--mediates... See more

• Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows: This is a classic book on systems theory that provides a great introduction to the concept.


• The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi: This book offers a unified view of life, integrating life's biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions.


• The

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