John Kausch (杰克口述)

I assumed Norse paganism would be quite popular with this administration.

The distance between "we decided to do this" and the thing we decided being done is a vast, lonely, chilly wilderness. I have been wandering for months. Every once in awhile I hear the howl of a wolf. Are the requisite course codes available in CUNYFirst, or will my journey continue? #ThatCUNYLife

Skopostheorie as a framework for interoperability in KO

Sometimes I wonder what this era would look like if I lived in Rome. Perhaps downfall would be more comforting.

The fact that petty tyrants have thin skins is the least surprising thing in the world. That we managed to build a somewhat democratic system that lasted so long was amazing. That we indolently preside over its downfall is heartbreaking but predictable.

Many people are saying (that America has become dominated by New Thought as the new national epistemology, and this prefigures everything from the rise of fascism to the social-economics of the AI industry)

AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge "Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."

The long-running ideological war on libraries, education, and government workers is not separate from AI boosterism. It is the same ideological war on human knowledge and expertise. In some cases AI is being used to directly supercharge this effort:

www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...

“The last five years of library work, of public service work has been a nightmare, with ongoing harassment and censorship efforts that you’re either experiencing directly or that you’re hearing from your other colleagues,” Alison Macrina, executive director of Library Freedom Project, told me in a phone interview. “And then in the last year-and-a-half or so, you add to it this enormous push for the AIfication of your library, and the enormous demands on your time. Now you have these already overworked public servants who are being expected to do even more because there’s an expectation to use AI, or that AI will do it for you. But they’re dealing with things like the influx of AI-generated books and other materials that are being pushed by vendors.”

Am obviously not anywhere near the first person to point this out, but I think it's a pretty useful framework. AI is also a nuts-and-bolts logistical nightmare for a workforce that is constantly being harassed, threatened, and forced to defend their work. They are fixing/fending off AI bullshit

maa kheru

Let's make AI jealous.
Write what Al can't touch.
Humans can think with their heads, hearts, and bodies.
Try moving your hands.
It's fine if your mind remains a jumble.
Ideas scattered across the paper.
Sometimes they connect by chance, and something new is born.

“We’re Good at Search”… Just Not the Kind That the AI era Demands - a Provocation I might be exaggerating slightly, but if you look at the few new evaluation matrices for AI-powered search circulating, “relevancy” is often just one of several categories, evaluated in a highly subje...

[blogged] “We’re Good at Search”… Just Not the Kind That the AI era Demands - a Provocation aarontay.substack.com/p/were-good-...

Whether AI is a bubble or not it will function the same, which is to consolidate wealth in the hands of a tiny number of people

ISWC2025 splash

Our Knowledge on Web-Scale team is at #ISWC2025! 🎉
We’re sharing work on link prioritization, time functions in SPARQL, low-code ODRL tools, Trustflows, queryable VCs, client-side federation, plus tutorials on RDF/SPARQL 1.2 and RDF-Connect pipelines.

In 2008, Google created an ad-powered wiki encyclopedia called Knol, seen as a "Wikipedia killer" amid its highly-publicized launch. And the Wikimedia Foundation gave an unbothered response that I quite like: "the more good free content, the better for the world." Anyway Knol instantly flopped

An interesting clip from a 2021 meeting of the so-called Canada Strong and Free Network, earlier known as the Manning Centre, shows former Reform Party leader Preston Manning schooling Smith on how to blackmail Canada into doing Alberta’s bidding by threatening to become the 51st state. Cheekily wearing an Order of Canada pin in his lapel, the superannuated godfather of the Canadian right bloviates about how “fear of the United States can be a factor in federal provincial relations.” He asks rhetorically, “What if Alberta did actually secede? There will be an offer from the United States for Alberta to become the 51st state. And why will that offer be made? It will be made because the United States would like to get a hold of the second or third largest source of petroleum in the world. That is why it will be made.” “Now when that finally sinks in to Ottawa,” Manning pauses… “Do they want that to happen? Or do they have to say, ‘Maybe we have to do something, to keep that energy sector and its development in Canada,’ and to accede to some of these other demands.” Manning concluded his pedagogy with a little shrug, asking: “Is there some way that fear of the United States can be used as a lever to get some of the things that the West needs to have addressed?”

“There are days, this is one of them, when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it,” Baldwin said. “How precisely you’re going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. I’m terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the heart—which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human."

$40

There are 6 times as many librarians in the US as coal miners

The Boxcar Children and the Mystery of the Missing Norms “The White House is demolishing the entirety of the East Wing to make way for President Trump’s $200 million ballroom, a construction project that ...

"What were 'norms' anyway? Was it really the responsibility of these four children to solve every mystery for the adults?"

The purpose of communication is that you have something to say to me. I do not want to read boilerplate produced to meet some quota for your job

Maybe it is because I read several dozen essays produced by undergraduates a week that are clearly made by ChatGPT but I am very familiar with its style now. I cannot keep reading something when I know it is written by ChatGPT. I get revolted

I just read an Op-Ed in the NYTimes that was clearly written by ChatGPT and I have no idea how an editor would not catch it. Does no one care anymore?

these really are the battle lines of the 21st century: rootless cosmopolitan individualism vs blood and dirt collectivism; embracing agency, complexity, responsibility, and risk vs clinging to cruft, nostalgia, power, and security; universalism and engagement vs particularism and retrenchment