Virtual Architectures

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

Smart! Looks very promising for getting actual work done.

Instructions for how to opt out of LinkedIn using your data to train generative 'AI' may be found here: www.linkedin.com/help/linkedi...

Books: 'Code' by Bernard Geoghegan and 'Language Machines' by Leif Weatherby.

New reads incoming! I'm very much looking forward to diving into 'Code' by Bernard Geoghegan on the crossover between information and French theory followed by Leif Weatherby's 'Language Machines' on generative AI and the concept of 'remainder humanism'. (???)

New report: ‘The property and planning data ecosystem in Ireland: Gaps, silences and issues’

New resource: Directory of longitudinal datasets about property & planning in Ireland (>350 datasets)

mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/20...

Based on workshops held by Data Stories project and CSO

YouTube video by boggo Strudel/TidalCycles Live Coding Metal Djents

Damn I like this workflow! Looks like Strudel/TidalCycles doing Djent via Bespoke Synth: youtu.be/n0rhn9-PRwE

OpenAI’s Waterloo? [with corrections] Post GPT-5, the narrative has flipped — and that could hurt them

Nicely said! - "Science is not a popularity contest; you can’t bully your way to truth. And you can’t make AI better if you drown out the critics and keep pouring good money after bad." via @garymarcus.bsky.social: garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-wa...

Books: 'Emanciapation(s)' by Ernesto Laclau and 'Adversarial Design' by Carl DiSalvo.

Where are my Agonists at! I finally got to read these two from Laclau and DiSalvo cover to cover. Strongly recommend!

LLMs vs. Geolocation: GPT-5 performs worse than other AI models - bellingcat Bellingcat challenged the latest models—Grok, GPT and Gemini—on geolocation tasks, revealing GPT-5 as a clear downgrade.

Two months have passed since we last tested AI models against our geolocation skillsets. Within that time more advanced models like GPT-5 and Google AI mode have launched. So @foeke.bsky.social is back again to put the chatbots to work… www.bellingcat.com/resources/20...

Dries Depoorter Belgian creative technologist and artist Dries Depoorter, based in Ghent, creates thought-provoking work about technology, surveillance, ...

Dries Depoorter on creative technologies and surveillance at #WHY2025 via Chaos Computer Club: media.ccc.de/v/why2025-27...

The Open Source Tool That Has Preserved 150,000 Pieces of Online Evidence - bellingcat Bellingcat’s Auto Archiver is a tool aimed at preserving online digital content before it can be modified, deleted or taken down

Nothing is permanent on social media. Users deleting their posts or webpages can lead to the erasure of a trail of evidence that may be crucial to your investigations. But how do you keep that data? We've updated our Auto Archiver tool to make archiving easier... www.bellingcat.com/resources/20...

How Does A Blind Model See The Earth? A tiny LLM eval with pretty pictures

"Sometimes I'm saddened remembering that we've viewed the earth from space. [...] But, of all these things, I most mourn the loss of incomplete maps." via @outsidetext.bsky.social: outsidetext.substack.com/p/how-does-a...

Errant thought - An LLM is a surprisingly successful dowsing rod which navigates language by pointing to the next token. The rod is a model which points in a vector determined by the combined influence of it's input, it's weights, it's biases and activations. Spooky!