Peter Binkley

A ghostly skeletal figure peers over a curtain.

In Japan, August is ghost season so I plan to share lots of ghostly Japanese art. This print by Katsushika Hokusai (1831) is titled 'The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji' and is from the series 'One Hundred Ghost Stories.'
#JapaneseArt #ukiyoe #ghosts

Any Woldemar Neufeld fans out there? (Canadian Mennonite mid-20th century artist) - he studied in Cleveland in the 1930s, and among my grandparents' papers are some postcards from a series of his prints, which I really like. That includes this one, otherwise I'd buy it […]

Coleridge at the Binkley Ranch

A little essay to unpack a 91-year-old marital tiff in my family, in which I argue that the husband was right but, more importantly, wrong, with help from Coleridge and the Tao. https://www.wallandbinkley.com/fhblog/2025/07_30_coleridge-at-the-binkley-ranch.html

@stefan_hessbrueggen a bit late for that too, I'm afraid

I had the opportunity to use the word "traduced" today but I didn't take it. Alas! When will it come again?

I'm trying to help my cousin with some GIS data from a California county government site, but when I try to visit the url she sent I get blocked by Cloudflare's security. I didn't do nothing! Same result whether I use our home ISP or my phone's telcom (I'll try from a university network […]

... which in the King James translation is "They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures", which, yeah, is basically Zotero. [2/2]

I'm sorting out some syncing problems in Zotero, which got me looking at the 8-character folder names it uses in its storage. It allows letters and digits, so it's got a 36-character alphabet, or 36^8 possible ids. (I didn't check whether it avoids O and 0 or anything though). Wondering what […]

A person turning a crank attached to a box on a stand. On the top of the box is placed a clear box in which a pile of pennies can be seen.

“Minimum Wage Machine”

“The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. For as long as they turn the crank, the user is paid in pennies as time passes. For example, if minimum wage is $7.25/hour (the current US Federal rate), then the worker is […]

[Original post on sfba.social]

I've seen a #IIIF example that takes a scroll that has been scanned in sections (like this https://iiif.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/iiif/manifest/f7906de8-1c83-44f8-8e01-a6501f90fcf1.json ), rotates the "page" images, and lets you pan left and right along the length of the scroll, as if you had it […]

"Archivists Recreate Pre-Trump #CDC Website, Are Hosting It in Europe."
https://www.404media.co/archivists-recreate-pre-trump-cdc-website-are-hosting-it-in-europe/

"A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was […]

And it still failed. “Amsterdam followed every piece of advice in the Responsible AI playbook. It debiased its system when early tests showed ethnic bias and brought on academics and consultants to shape its approach, ultimately choosing an explainable algorithm over more opaque alternatives […]

My mom had a cat she called The Pedant because of his deliberate way of doing things, as if he were always saying to himself "this is how cats do it". AI slop makes me think of him sometimes (the difference being that he was a living breathing cat with an endearing way of encountering the world […]

@t55 thank you! I'd been meaning to look for something like that.

OK, Ollama and Magistral and I are getting along better. I've made a model file with

PARAMETER num_ctx 16384
PARAMETER num_predict 16384

to give it more memory for input and output, and I've put a lot of background knowledge for the task in the system prompt. And I've remembered to invoke the […]

Things LLMs and I have trouble with: 1) I say "write this thing", they hear "give me a structured approach to help me draft this thing". 2) I say "read this data and tell me about it", they hear "hallucinate a bunch more data more or less like this".

Cuts at Ontario colleges leading to 600 programs cut, nearly 10,000 job losses, union says

« Union says it's 'one of the largest mass layoffs in #Ontario's history' »

« The document showed 23 of 24 colleges in Ontario have reported a 48 per cent decrease in first-semester enrolment of […]

There was an LLM
Who was an LL gem
And did things you'd think were impossible
When it was right it was very very right
And when it was wrong it was plausible

If I could do that with a prompt, with added intelligence (ids are sequential, dates are sequential within a section, etc.), it would make life easier (I did one volume; there are lots more). Sample output: https://www.wallandbinkley.com/projects/2019/annals-of-cleveland/headings/animals/ ; code […]

Five years ago (?!) I worked on parsing metadata out of the OCR text of a 1930s newspaper index, with references like this: "11 - L. Mar. 31; ed:2/4", parsed with regexes like this:

([a-zA-Z]+)[\\\\.,]?\\\s # 'H' newspaper
(\\\S+)\\\s # 'Dec.': month
(#{OCRDIGIT}+)#{OCRCOLON}+\\\s? # '2:' day […]

A good example of the kind of AI project I like: the AI is used in a one-time process to populate a traditional reference tool or data set https://www.archipanion.com/en/blog/ai-cataloguing-registry-finding-aid-palatinate/

I really want to read Zelenskyy's memoirs some day

@WeirdWriter this is when we really need Stephen Sondheim to write a musical about GenAI and turn this email into a classic showtune that would become the emblem of this cultural moment (and yes I know he's dead and no I'm not interested in your AI-generated version of the song he would have […]

Had a tech bro email me to tell me that my writing is so terrible, that he can’t even use it to train his AI without significant cleanup, and I really do have to wonder, do these idiots really think that is an insult? #AI #AIHype

it's fine with '{"number":0.0000}' though

So, olmocr is producing json with '00' instead of '0', like '{"number":00}', and python won't parse it. I feel like we could all respect each other's time a little better than that.

The microfiche scanner at @internetarchive is doing "Canadian International Trade Tribunal / Report on Plans and Priorities" - timely! https://www.youtube.com/live/aPg2V5RVh7U

oh wait ... Canada Day ... fireworks ... never mind

Weather map showing a massive tight cluster of lightning strikes off to the northwest of Edmonton

There's steady distant thunder out there, and the Environment Canada online map with its new lightning layer shows a really active storm, but it's between Edson and Whitecourt, 200km away - can that be what we hear? https://weather.gc.ca/?layers=,radar,lightning&zoom=8¢er=53.57571371,-113.35335797

The view from Sweden, via Canada https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-democracy-report-1.7486317