Virtual Architectures

42. The Cut (w/ M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby)

Digital Theory roundtable with Fazi, Galloway, Handelman and Weatherby via The Disintegrator Podcast open.spotify.com/episode/5qfV...

NEW: Our investigation for @thenerve_news reveals not only that Peter Thiel’s Palantir is completely enmeshed in our critical national infrastructure.

It’s also the ‘cloud support’ for our nuclear weapons system 🤯
1/

www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-t...

YouTube video by Mo Bitar The AI developer bubble is going to pop soon - Shape Devlog - Day 5

I also enjoyed the prior video because its quite unusual to see someone walking you through the thought process behind their code: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKmU...

YouTube video by Mo Bitar After two years of vibecoding, I’m back to writing by hand

I enjoyed this video by Mo Bitar...basically a talk about responsibility in coding: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKTs...

Everyone wants to blame the content: misinformation, bots, polarisation. That mistakes catalysts and symptoms for the underlying causes. The crisis isn’t bad information, it's that the very information infrastructure we relied on to create a shared understand of the world had changed completely.

Cheers dude! It's like a witch hunt seeking any sign of impurity. I've even started looking behind my back when I write RegEx patterns now. Personally I identify with the doctrine of original sin in tech. Show me the pocket for the hand of the finger that points...be there ios or android within?

Source Code Exhibition: "Source code [...] holds rich layers of meaning. It can reveal the intentions of its author, reflect the historical, social, and cultural context of its creation, and even express personal style, creativity, or aesthetic choices" www.sourcecode-exhibition.softwareheritage.org

3D printed model of Cork city

Recently we've been working with @maedhbhlikedave.bsky.social to get our 3D printed of Cork city to its new home in the library at UCC. Everyone is super pleased with the result. Big thanks to the team at Display Contracts for mounting the model. datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=871

Excited to share a new open-source project for the web-mapping and LiDAR community: maplibre-gl-lidar 🚀

With maplibre-gl-lidar, you can visualize large-scale LiDAR point clouds (LAS/LAZ, including COPC) directly in the browser using MapLibre GL JS.

New housing and planning resource for Ireland – a publications hub. >1,800 academic, policy and sector publications relating to housing, property and planning in Ireland. Access at www.zotero.org/groups/55867... if there are pubs missing you want us to add, please send them to us and we will do so

YouTube video by GOTO Conferences Residues: Time, Change & Uncertainty in Software Architecture • Barry O'Reilly • GOTO 2025

A talk by Barry O'Reilly @technologytulip.bsky.social on software architecture, complex systems, and stuffing meat into electric chargers: youtu.be/D8qQUHrksrE

AI Agent, AI Spy Agentic AI is the catch-all term for AI-enabled systems that propose to complete more or less complex tasks on their own, without stoppin...

"AI Agent, AI Spy" - Good talk by Udbhav Tiwari and Meredith Whittaker on the risks of agenetic AI and systems like Microsoft Recall: media.ccc.de/v/39c3-ai-ag...

Thanks for sharing this. I've had great fun emulating the general pattern and hammering out genuinely useful tools. I got a lot of inspiration from your notes on malleable software and resonant computing: virtualarchitectures.github.io/Browser-Tools/

Against Storytelling - Public Seminar The glorification of storytelling to define who we are or save the planet induces aversion in some. Do digitally packaged stories restrict how we perceive our often rambling, fragmentary lives?

'Against Storytelling' - A refreshing piece by Miriam Rasch via @publicseminar.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2025/12/agai...

Danielle and Sam introducing their talk 'Half the houses built don't exist' at Digital Geographies 2025.

"Half the houses built don't Exist" - Check out the Data Stories blog for a summary of Danielle and Sam's presentation at the Digital Geographies conference 'Artificial Geographies: opening the black box for a new wave of critical thinking' in Lisbon: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=853

Gyms, Zoos, and Museums Everyone always mentions that people do not read documentation. This is also the case for us as game developers. So what can we do about ...

Good talk on video game environments and spatial documentation for development from #GodotFest2025 - 'Gyms, Zoos, and Museums: Your documentation should be in-game' by Robin-Yann Storm: media.ccc.de/v/godotfest2...

Caesar Cipher

Vigenere Cipher

AES Encryption and Decryption

I recently started a postgraduate diploma in Cybersecurity and I've really enjoyed researching different historic and contemporary encryption techniques. Here's a couple of diagrams I prepared with Excalidraw for my notes. Still working out the best way to communicate the AES S-box and round keys.

Maynooth Sparks 2025

Spoof property website created for the workshop 'Daft.ie for Noobs'.

Data Stories were busy during Maynooth Research Week. Check out our involvement in Maynooth Sparks 2025, and our workshop session 'Daft.ie for Noobs: Gaming Ireland’s property market by spoofing property websites': datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=834

I possibly have lower expectations.

One thing I'm curious about is whether we could run these kinds of workflows with much more modestly sized local models, given the growing attention given to processes like skills which seem to focus on provisioning context, while diminishing reliance on parametric knowledge. I'd love to see that!

Skyfall-GS: Synthesizing Immersive 3D Urban Scenes from Satellite Imagery Skyfall-GS converts satellite images to explorable 3D urban scenes using diffusion models, with real-time rendering performance.

Very intriguing! A new paper discusses Skyfall-GS, a process for obtaining navigable 3D scenes from Satellite imagery via Gaussian Splats: skyfall-gs.jayinnn.dev

Presentation by Helen Shaw.

Active note taking with post-it notes during the workshop.

Real-time workshop illustration by Eimear McNally.

Read our latest blogpost on workshops engaging Collaborative Urban Planning with Data by @juliettedavret.bsky.social, Helen Shaw and Carla Maria Kayanan. Also features real-time illustration by Eimear McNally: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=826

Exciting times! I've been eagerly awaiting EPUB reading with Zotero on iOS. Now it's here! www.zotero.org/blog/ios-epu...

Docling is also fantastic for #DigitalHumanities. It plugs in to spaCy which is great for natural language processing (NLP): spacy.io/universe/pro...

Previously I built a custom data processing pipeline using object character recognition (OCR) with Tesseract to extract data from thousands of scanned PDFs...the most closed open data. Details here: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=674 Docling now saves so much time and code in data preparation.

There tends to be a knee jerk response to posts mentioning GenAI on Bluesky. That's disappointing because Docling is a double-edged sword...perfect for digital #counter-practice. I use it for liberating data that government agencies have inconveniently hidden in open sight within thousands of PDFs.

Docling: Get your documents ready for generative AI Docling is an open-source Python package that simplifies document processing by parsing diverse formats — including advanced PDF understa...

If you are working on structured data extraction and OCR with tricky documents like PDFs I strongly recommend checking out Docling. Good presentation via the Chaos Computer Club:
media.ccc.de/v/sps25-5645...

Circular deals among AI companies The big AI companies are making deals with each other, promising and distributing hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years. It’s difficult to keep track, but Bloomberg has this…

Circular deals among AI companies via @flowingdata.com flowingdata.com/2025/10/13/c...

Daft.ie for Noobs: Gaming Ireland's property market by spoofing property websites by @virt-arch.bsky.social, Ella Harris, Carla Kayanan, Hannah Mumby. Session as part of Research Week at MU, October 23, 2025, 13:00 to 14:00 www.maynoothuniversity.ie/news-events/...

Data Stories recently held a two-day workshop on #ResearchCreation and the application of arts-based methods. The talks and workshops covered a wide range of approaches. Check out our summary and all of our participants' slides on the Data Stories blog: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=768