pinboarded

12669 bookmarks

Custom sorting

📷Photography Composition: The Definitive Guide - Anton Gorlin Landscape Photography

This article summarises all my knowledge and experience, and it took me 6 months to get together. I believe, anyone, newbie or pro, could find some new useful info inside of it. There are already hundreds of articles, dozens of guides. And some of them are really good. However, there was still a need for the comprehensive photography composition guide nicely presented and easy to follow. I did my best to keep it simple, concise and easy to understand with lots of goodies to download for future reference. Also, I keep it as short as possible with zero fluff for such a massive amount of material. Less talk, more practical info with examples, charts and graphs.

#guide #photography

·antongorlin.com·Jun 30, 2024

📷Photography Composition: The Definitive Guide - Anton Gorlin Landscape Photography

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity

So it is with great regret that I announce that the next person to talk about rolling out AI is going to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment in the style of Dr. Bourne, i.e, I am going to fucking break your neck. I am truly, deeply, sorry.

#ai #llm #funny

·ludic.mataroa.blog·Jun 26, 2024

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity

No Web Without Women

A collection of innovations by women in the fields of computer science and technology. h/t https://fosstodon.org/@brianb/112680397886263089

#computing #history #internet #oegconnect

·nowebwithoutwomen.com·Jun 26, 2024

No Web Without Women

How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds - Open RSS

Although RSS feeds are alive and still heavily used today, their level of adoption has suffered because of how difficult a handful of popular technology companies have made it to use them. Google, especially, has relied on the open web RSS protocol to gain so much market share and influence, but continues to engage in behavior that exploits the open web at the expense of its users. As a result, Google has single-handedly contributed to the reason many users who once relied on RSS feeds have stopped using them.

#rss #techmyth

·openrss.org·Jun 23, 2024

How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds - Open RSS

AI Can't Do This | Fstoppers

The difference is that even edited photos still show real places. It's the only reason I am still on social media and follow other photographers. Their work inspires me and creates a longing to visit those places someday. And even if that's not possible because I don't have the funds, I still imagine how it would be standing at those viewpoints. With AI images, that's not the case. There's no sense of awe, no longing, no marveling about the beauty of our world. What's there is curiosity about the involved algorithms and models, the engineering it took to arrive at the current state of AI, and wondering where this is heading. I couldn't care less about what the prompt engineers were trying to achieve with those prompts. Even the AI creations that try to masquerade as real views are often just caricatures separated from reality, and I don't know if that'll ever change.

#photography #ai

·fstoppers.com·Jun 22, 2024

AI Can't Do This | Fstoppers

EVOTO, AI-powered Photo Editor

Experience the future of photo editing with Evoto, a next-generation AI photo editor that simplifies your workflow and unleashes your creativity. With Evoto, the possibilities are endless.

#ai #photography #software

·evoto.ai·Jun 22, 2024

EVOTO, AI-powered Photo Editor

The Five Stages Of AI Grief - NOEMA

Grief-laden vitriol directed at AI fails to help us understand paths to better futures that are neither utopian nor dystopian, but open to radically weird possibilities.

#ai

·noemamag.com·Jun 22, 2024

The Five Stages Of AI Grief - NOEMA

UstadMobile

an inclusive open-source digital learning platform that reaches educators and learners, including those with limited Internet access, limited device access, and/or disabilities and enables education providers including governments, NGOs, and the private sector to improve the delivery of inclusive and equitable quality education and reduce inequalities.

#apps #education #offline

·ustadmobile.com·Jun 19, 2024

UstadMobile

Common Voice

Mozilla Common Voice is an initiative to help teach machines how real people speak. Voice is natural, voice is human. That’s why we’re excited about creating usable voice technology for our machines. But to create voice systems, developers need an extremely large amount of voice data. Most of the data used by large companies isn’t available to the majority of people. We think that stifles innovation. So we’ve launched Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open and accessible to everyone. Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice database that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web. Read a sentence to help machines learn how real people speak. Check the work of other contributors to improve the quality. It’s that simple!

#opensource #audio

·commonvoice.mozilla.org·Jun 19, 2024

Common Voice

Translators without Borders

Translators without Borders is a global community of over 100,000 members helping people get vital information and be heard, whatever language they speak.

#language #translation

·translatorswithoutborders.org·Jun 19, 2024

Translators without Borders

Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries (webcast)

Library 2035 is a webcast produced by the San Jose State University School of Information featuring discussions with chapter authors of a newly published book (May 2024) about the future of libraries. https://www.amazon.com/Library-2035-Imagining-Generation-Libraries/dp/1538180405 "Library leaders, LIS students and faculty will find this book particularly meaningful and useful as we grapple with what the future of libraries and the profession will be." h/t https://mastodon.social/@sleslie/112638368210155829

#library #future #oegconnect

·youtube.com·Jun 18, 2024

Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries (webcast)

Alt Text Selfies

Thank you for being here with our project, a celebration and collection of alt text selfies — self-portrait descriptions that are shared online. “Alt text selfie” is an open term. Our understanding of what an alt text selfie might be is always shifting and changing. Selfies and self-descriptions are often visually focused, but, to us, an alt text selfie doesn't need to center around visuals, or literally describe an image. As the selfies gathered on this website exemplify, alt text selfies can blend smell, taste, touch, sound, and more. At their core, alt text selfies are an access practice, tools for connecting across sensory experiences and distance. For us, an alt text selfie is any written self-portrait. This project takes a well-known practice—the selfie—and approaches it through a disability lens. Selfies and self-descriptions are often visually focused, but to us, an alt text selfie doesn’t need to center visual presentation or a literal description of an image. Alt text selfies might focus on feelings, smells, tastes, sounds, emotions, textures, or some combination. Alt text selfies can be any length, but for this project, we focused on writing in the one-sentence to one-paragraph range.

#accessibility #oegconnect

·alttextselfies.net·Jun 18, 2024

Alt Text Selfies

You don't need JavaScript for that - HTMHell

On the web this means preferring HTML over CSS, and then CSS over JS. JS is the most versatile language out of the three because you're the one describing how the browser should act, but it can also break, it can fail to load and it takes extra resources to download, parse and run. It is also very easy to exclude keyboard users and people using assistive technologies with it. In contrast to JS, which is imperative, HTML and CSS are declarative. You tell the browser what to do, not how to do it. That means the browser gets to choose how to do it, and it can do it in the most efficient way possible. Because HTML and CSS features are handled by the browser they can be more performant, more native, more adaptable to user preferences and in general, more accessible. That doesn't mean it will always be (especially when it comes to accessibility) but when the browser does the heavy lifting for you, your end users will generally have a better experience. That also means that the solution you learned once becomes part of your toolbox, and you can keep re-implementing it and everytime it will still work. So the examples I'm going to give below are cool (that's why I'm listing them) but what I want you to take away from this article is that just because you know something needs JavaScript, doesn't mean it still does. You can make better websites if you test those assumptions every now and then. h/t https://fosstodon.org/@gagliardi_vale/112637006389188415

#javascript #webdesign #webdev

·htmhell.dev·Jun 18, 2024

You don't need JavaScript for that - HTMHell

ChatGPT is bullshit | Ethics and Information Technology

Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.

#ai

·link.springer.com·Jun 15, 2024

ChatGPT is bullshit | Ethics and Information Technology

Alignment Assembly on AI and the Commons — Outcomes and Learnings · Open Future

This report captures learnings from the Alignment Assembly on AI and the Commons, a six-week online deliberation of open movement activists, creators, and organizations about regulating generative AI. Generative AI is built on the digital infrastructure of the commons and uses the vast quantity of images, text, video, and rich data resources of the internet: open science research, open source code, and various sorts of training data that is either public or openly shared. Most importantly, AI developers train their models on large amounts of content and data shared by a multiplicity of collections and repositories. Access to the Digital Commons enables innovation and the development of systems that could become the next general-purpose digital technology. But these developments are not without risks and challenges: from bias and lack of transparency to energy consumption and environmental footprint, from new concentrations of power to impacts on creative work – these are all challenges that can influence the commons and need to be addressed. To this end, the Alignment Assembly on AI and the Commons aimed to answer the question: What do open movement activists, creators, and organizations think about regulating generative AI? The Open Future, together with Creative Commons and Fundación Karisma, organized this conversation over six weeks between 13 February and 17 March 2024.

#ai #Commons #openness #oegconnect

·openfuture.pubpub.org·Jun 14, 2024

Alignment Assembly on AI and the Commons — Outcomes and Learnings · Open Future

Watch Chuck Jones Draw Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig

This is great: a 25-minute interview with legendary animator Chuck Jones as he sits and draws some of his iconic characters (Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck). He told this anecdote about how Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were both influenced by a particular space-themed cartoon of his

#cartoon #art

·kottke.org·Jun 14, 2024

Watch Chuck Jones Draw Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig

On being human and "creative"

Generative AI and the conversation on what it means to create and to value creative work. I've been thinking on this a lot lately. This note is by no means an exhaustive nor final exploration of my thoughts, but more where I’m at with it right now. I want to say upfront, I’m not arguing there is zero use for generative AI. There are a lot of fascinating and valuable applications. There’s also a more nuanced exploration about its role as a tool for artists and creators for a future note. What I’m exploring here is what it means for people to instruct a machine to completely generate “art” and attempt to place it on the same level of meaning and value—both cultural and monetary—as art that is created by a human being.

#ai #creativity #art #ideas

·hbcompass.io·Jun 14, 2024

On being human and "creative"

Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays

Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer. No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’. Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.

#brain #memory

·aeon.co·Jun 13, 2024

Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays

Radio Survivor

Radio Survivor attempts to shed light on the ongoing importance of radio: from the airwaves (FM, AM, Short-wave, HD, satellite) to online. We are proponents for the relevance of radio as a participatory communications medium. As both fans and producers, we write about the problems and prospects of radio. We embrace college radio stations in crisis. We defend radio pirates. And we care about the on-going survival of our favorite radio stations. We are obsessed with the future of radio and are charmed by radio historians, radio dramatists, radio bloggers, and anyone else who cares about radio as deeply as we do.

#radio #history #podcast

·radiosurvivor.com·Jun 12, 2024

Radio Survivor

The Internet is a Series of Webs

The future of the internet seems up in the air. Consumed by rotting behemoths. What we have now is failing, but it is also part of our every-day life, our politics, our society, our communities and our friendships. All of those are at risk, in part because the ways we communicate are under attack. The fate of the open web is inextricable from the other ways our world is in crisis. We face down a seemingly endless series of political, social, economic, and medical disasters on a melting planet. There is no doubt that the internet is deeply integrated into everything that is going both right and wrong. At this moment, we are actively discussing how to build a future for our shared global telecommunications network. This is good. We need this discussion. We also need to acknowledge that the wide open platform for infinite data, innovation and communication isn't a shelter from the disaster, but it is at the heart of everything we do. The day we could go back from that, even if we wanted to, is long gone. That means rewilding the web isn't just a matter of a better internet. Our way to a better web can't be purely technical. It's the matter of being part of the making of a better world.

#internet #ideas #rewildingweb

·aramzs.xyz·Jun 12, 2024

The Internet is a Series of Webs

EdTech needs a code of practice

The Digital Futures for Children (DFC) proposal for a code of practice for EdTech would address the urgent challenges we see in today’s data-driven education. Supported by a certification scheme, this would reduce the burden on schools as data controllers, and enable uses of EdTech that benefit children, respecting their rights and allowing beneficial sharing of education data for innovation. It advances our Blueprint for education data, itself the culmination of three years’ multidisciplinary, multistakeholder work that sets out clear criteria for a pro-innovation, rights-respecting framework for EdTech. It is high time the UK took action to protect children’s data and rights while children are learning.

#edtech #ethics #oegconnect

·digital-futures-for-children.net·Jun 12, 2024

EdTech needs a code of practice

Writing alt text is a part of writing an article

One of the mooted “positive” uses of generative AI is in automating the production of descriptive text, most commonly as alt text for images. The snappily named Image Accessibility Creator app will do just this when you feed it an image. Apps such as Word and micro.blog already use generative AI to suggest alt text for images, presumably for users who see this as some sort of burden or nice to have. In Word, this often fails at a basic descriptive level, but my fear is that a service will become just about good enough to generate Large crowd of football fans with blue smoke in a stadium celebrating level text that its users accept thoughtlessly. It may be better than no alt text at all, but it’s not as meaningful as crafting a description. There are occasions when auto-generating text is desirable. For example, if we’re looking to simply map words from one format to another, without conveying anything beyond the words themselves. The obvious uses are optical character recognition and audio and video transcription. But these are examples of recognition rather than “intelligence”, which you probably want to leave to people.

#accessibility #ai #oegconnect

·thisdaysportion.com·Jun 11, 2024

Writing alt text is a part of writing an article

Before You Make a Thing | ts200v2

This is a guide for Technology and Society 200 (Fall 2018; 60 undergraduate students) at the University of Victoria. It consists of three point-form lists. The first is a series of theories and concepts drawn from assigned readings, the second is a rundown of practices corresponding with projects we studied, and the third itemizes prototyping techniques conducted in the course. All are intended to distill material from the term and communicate its relevance to project design and development. Some contradiction is inevitable. Thank you for your patience. Theories and Concepts Practices Prototyping Techniques

#ethics #teaching #coding #Design

·jentery.github.io·Jun 11, 2024

Before You Make a Thing | ts200v2

How AI Image Models Work

An entirely non-technical explanation of how image generators work. Several months ago, I published a primer that explained how large language models (LLMs) work using no technical language. I’d like to do the same now for image generators. As with LLMs, I believe that the core concepts are straightforward. The fancy calculus and ground-breaking computing power used to train these models is simply the application of something we can explain with an analogy to a kids’ game.

#ai #image #how #oegconnect

·every.to·Jun 10, 2024

How AI Image Models Work

The Wall Between | Book by Raja Khouri, Jeffrey Wilkinson | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster Canada

The Wall Between is a book about the wall that exists between Jewish and Palestinian communities in the Diaspora. Distrust, enmity, and hate are common currencies. They manifest at university campuses, schools and school boards, at political events, on social media, and in academic circles. For Jews, Israel must exist; for Palestinians, the historic injustice being committed since 1948 must be reversed. Neither wants to know why the Other cannot budge on these issues. The wall is up.

#gaza #readlist

·simonandschuster.ca·Jun 10, 2024

The Wall Between | Book by Raja Khouri, Jeffrey Wilkinson | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster Canada

Basic, Beautiful & Buildless

There is a diversity of lightweight static site generators available. My personal favourite – the one I used to make this site – is Eleventy but there’s one in every programming language. Static site builders handle HTML and markup quite well. That’s what they do. Even CSS – at least CSS of the complexity a small site needs – can be handled quite well by many of them. But as soon as you need to add scripting things get quite complicated. All of our dependency management systems are built around bundling and npm and there is no such thing as a straightforward bundler. Even the most lightweight and accessible of bundlers turns a fun small project into a not-so-fun major project. And don’t even get me started on webpack. You could switch to a more ‘batteries included’ static site framework, but most of those end up requiring literal megabytes of JavaScript and, again, we’ve left “fun” and “small” behind in the rear view mirror. People talk about “buildless”, using browser support for modules instead of a bundler, but it’s hard to know even where to start.

#webdesign #coding

·buildless.baldurbjarnason.com·Jun 10, 2024

Basic, Beautiful & Buildless

Jedi build their own lightsabers - O'Reilly Radar

Joel Spolsky has a great article on this called, "In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome." He talks about the Excel team making their own compiler and the benefits they got from that. He proposes a great test for making decisions like this: If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what. I've always referred to this idea, geekily, as, "Jedi build their own lightsabers." If you're going to depend on your lightsaber as your principal tool and weapon, you'd better know that it works.

#web #history #smallpieces

·radar.oreilly.com·Jun 9, 2024

Jedi build their own lightsabers - O'Reilly Radar

Vanishing Ocean City | Ocean City, MD

These high-quality coffee table books will take you on an insightful tour of the Ocean City of decades past. Featuring hundreds of historic pictures and postcards and the memories of many of Ocean City's natives and locals, Vanishing Ocean City, Ghosts in the Surf, and Ocean City Chronicles are a "Must Have" for anyone who has ever fallen in love with Maryland's famous beach resort. Learn about the storms and fires that changed the town; relive the summer nights on the Boardwalk and the warm days fishing, surfing, or relaxing on the beach. Meet the people who made the town unique.

#alan

·vanishingoc.com·Jun 9, 2024

Vanishing Ocean City | Ocean City, MD

Improvement of attitudes and skills using a MOOC about the basic science of climate change | Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

We have introduced the Climate Change Competence (C3) to provide a comprehensive route to include the topics of sustainability and CC into the curriculum. This paper analyses how different primary and secondary teachers can improve this competence using a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on the basic science of CC. While the improvement in knowledge is expected, we have observed important advances on abilities, and attitudes on CC which are also essential to teach about CC mitigation and adaptation.

#climatechange #mooc

·nature.com·Jun 9, 2024

Improvement of attitudes and skills using a MOOC about the basic science of climate change | Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

walk · listen · create – Home of walking artists and artist walkers

walk · listen · create (WLC) is the home of walking artists and artist walkers, as well as Sound Walk September, the Sound Walk September Awards, the Marŝarto Awards, and Placecloud. walk · listen · create operates on a plain that is bounded by sound, or audio, place, or location, and technology. Technology is not just mobile phones or computers, it’s also pen & paper, rocks, and anything that can be used as a tool.

#art #creativity #podcast #smallweb

·walklistencreate.org·Jun 9, 2024

walk · listen · create – Home of walking artists and artist walkers