There was a question about "what AI skills should librarians have" on one of my listservs. My Ideas:

• Knowledge of the IP theft underlying these tools
• Discerning “we just relabeled something and now are pretending it’s AI to charge you more while making the product worse” from vendor pitches
• Understanding the inherent biases, the ecological harms, the underpaid mods
• Addressing loss of critical thinking and reading skills ]
• Demonstrating how this is being used as labor suppression

Eine Schule in #Lörrach würde gerne um die 300 (!) Desktop-PCs mit Ryzen 3/5-CPUs, 16 GB RAM sowie 256/500 GB SSDs für einen guten Zweck spenden (genauere Angaben haben wir leider nicht). Da wir aktuell keinen Bedarf haben, suchen wir übers Fediverse nach Abnehmer*innen. Bitte meldet euch bei uns, wenn ihr Interesse habt. Wir vermitteln euch dann den Kontakt.

#FollowerPower

Hundreds of thousands of Computers won't be able to upgrade to Windows 11, but that shouldn't make them eWaste.

Kudos to the @kde team for this amazing initiative!

https://endof10.org/

@awinkler @fuzzyleapfrog @HeptaSean das wäre so toll wenn Podcasts automatisch gesammelt und archiviert werden, schon um nicht auf Spotify & Co angewiesen zu sein und um verlässlich auf einzelne Episoden verlinken zu können. Der Aufwand gegenüber dem langfristigen, gesellschaftlichen Nutzen wäre minimal, aber ein dauerhaft finanziertes, kleines Team und gute Speichersysteme müssen trotzdem bezahlt werden.

it's been 0 (zero) minutes since i last saw a set of overworked coworkers courting burnout as a result of AI bot scrapers abusing the ever living shit out of infrastructure we run as a service to the public

unfollow the blogs that are written using genAI. there are better RSS feeds that deserve your attention

Happy birthday, Dad. Time to come back now, it’s all gone a bit rubbish without you. ❤️❤️❤️

Forcing the world into machines https://tante.cc/2025/04/24/forcing-the-world-into-machines/ #AI #AIHype

I'm a big fan of 404, both the quality of the writing and reporting and of their business structure, as exemplified in this piece. Check 'em out if you haven't already.

How 404 Media Is Navigating 'Economic Headwinds' https://www.404media.co/how-404-media-is-navigating-economic-headwinds/

@jwildeboer on the business model behind the recent explosion of aggressive AI web crawlers:

There's a shady market out there that gives app developers money for including a library that sells users network bandwidth.

"If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the 'AI' hype for moving you to the bad corner."

https://jan.wildeboer.net/2025/04/Web-is-Broken-Botnet-Part-2/

"This AI output is highly inaccurate."
"Nah, you're just prompting it wrong."
"How do I go about prompting it the right way?"
"You really need to know the subject you're asking about. Then you can help it avoid making mistakes."
"If I know the subject deeply myself, why am I asking an AI about it?"
"It helps to train the AI."

Wie mir diese KI-generierte Suppe überall gerade auf den Keks geht. Mülltrennung, Balkonsolar und überhaupt sehr ökologisch am Start und dann lasst ihr lustige Bilder mit Actionfiguren von euch erzeugen? Merkt ihr es noch?

New addition to the Emacs collection: UniPress Emacs V2.20 from 1989.

It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Clifford Lynch, a visionary leader in the field of networked information & libraries, and the esteemed executive director of CNI since 1997.

Known for his kindness, warmth, and humble disposition, Lynch was a renowned figure, lauded for his impact across many areas, including scholarly communication, information policy, the research enterprise, digital preservation, and countless others.

Read more: https://www.cni.org/news/in-memoriam-clifford-lynch

If you are an office worker of any kind please understand Copilot Recall for what it is: Microsoft wants a training dataset of _what your job looks like_ in order to _replace you_. The nepo baby your oligarch puts in charge will happily pay half your salary to Microsoft to get even most of your job done without you.

Wealth wants access to skill without giving the skilled access to wealth.

https://mastodon.acm.org/@MrBerard/114320032919296961

#Microsoft #AI #Copilot #Recall

eine Bitte an Personen, die in #GLAM|s erschließen: für einen Workshop bin ich auf der Suche nach Screenshots, die zeigen, wie in den verschiedenen Systemen die #Normdaten|einbindung funktioniert. Falls also jemand helfen kann, wäre ich für ein Bild + Namen des Systems dankbar! Ich würde das Material gerne auch öffentlich zugänglich machen. Namensnennung auf Wunsch gern!

gern auch per Mail an winkler@zib.de

Vielen Dank für die Hilfe!

#followerpower

An organic, fair-trade, community-governed, collectively-owned, open-source oil rig is still an oil rig.

Intentions, governance, ownership, etc. are all super important, but you also need to be honest about what the thing does and the consequences.

I'm lookin' at you "Open-Source Local LLMs".

@hvdsomp @phonedudemln.bsky.social @cni Thank you for this look back at how something so important started. And an even bigger thank you to all involved in creating OpenURL and OAI-PMH. These are still essential to my daily job, and I love how this 'old' technology just works, even in 2025.

(Now if only all metadata would be perfect so all our OpenURLs would always resolve correctly ;))

In response to popular demand, I am re-sharing the URL of the blog post I wrote with @phonedudemln.bsky.social about the Universal Preprint Service prototype we built in 1999 that led to the OAI-PMH and OpenURL specifications and their adoption. A tribute to Cliff Lynch who retired from @cni earlier this week https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/04/cliff-lynch-invisible-influencer-in.html