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Denny Vrandečić
@vrandecic@mas.to
mastodon 4.7.2Husband. Dad. Cat housemate. PhD. Works on Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions at Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata founder. Previously: ontologist at Google, Wikimedia Trustee, and RPG author. Roots in Brač, Croatia. Stuttgart, Germany. he/him. Views my own.
Posting cat pics and occasionally other stuff.
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Joined October 30, 2022
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The banality of evil: in Cambridge, Maryland, a woman had construction workers work on her roof for several days, and then called ICE on them to get them detained, and avoid paying $10,000 for the work.
https://www.newsweek.com/homeowner-called-ice-on-migrants-she-hired-worker-says-11742032
While Wikimedia content is free, the infrastructure that serves it is not.
Thanks to improvements in bot detection, more than *2 billion* requests per day get currently blocked, which would have otherwise caused further strain on the infrastructure.
I made a meme #wikipedia
OpenAI's Head of Strategic Futures, Dean Ball, has posted on X to complain about a Chinese company publishing an open AI. OpenAI thinks that open AI is a bad idea, and here are some arguments:
"Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist [slowing down AI development], and ... in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex."
Good.
Oh wait, you meant that as a bad thing?
"One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism"
What does that mean?
"Rather than a market product, AI is a "public good"
Oh, ok. But isn't a public good good for the public?
"This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape"
A public good is a dystopian hellscape?
1/3
Team USA's top scorer, Balogun, received a red card in the game against Bosnia. Which means he would be suspended in the next game.
President Trump called FIFA boss Infantino. Now FIFA states without further explanation that the suspension is lifted, and Balogun can play in the upcoming game against Belgium. Following that, Trump publicly thanked FIFA for that decision.
If that would have happened 2018 in Russia, Putin interfering with the world cup, the explosion of the media would have been immense. But since it is the US and Trump, I guess all is fine?
H/T Marcus Cyron
https://apnews.com/article/falorin-balogun-suspension-world-cup-e5a5cab5731a916808601be93cb36832
#soccer #football #politics #wc2026 #wm2026 #teamusa #corruption
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But the ongoing indiscriminate onslaught of AI bots on everything with an URL is just actively killing the web and its open nature. Websites, which were meant for the few human visitors, get crawled at rapid speed, open REST APIs are being overrun, the few SPARQL points out there get slaughtered by queries, causing downtimes, cost, and what not, actively killing those parts of the Web which have historically just been happy to be there, with little maintenance, across the years.
2/5
The director-general of Germany's second largest public broadcaster has forbidden an artist to perform a song he was invited to for the 100th edition of a political comedy show, against the protest of the show runners.
The name of the song: Keine Angst (can mean both, don't be afraid and no fear) by Danger Dan
The song calls to stand up to fascism. The name of the director-general who forbid the recording? Himmler.
https://youtu.be/Gg-SCpXba64?is=ElvvUHfpj5PadnBm
#resist #fascism #dangerdan #censorship #freespeech #democracy
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But now, if you don't pay protection money to a service such as Cloudfare or make sure you have the right load balancer, the AI bros will take you down.
3/5
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The Web is not the first and it won't be the last sacrifice to the basilisk of AI, but it surely is one of the ones that pains me personally. So unnecessary, with so little gain.
4/5
The recording of my @iswc_conf@mastodon.social keynote is available online:
Wikipedia and the Semantic Web -- 20 years of co-development, and the future
Drawing on the roots of @wikipedia@wikis.world and the Semantic Web, how they influenced each other during the last two decades, leading to
@wikidata@wikis.world and peeking forward to @wikifunctions@wikis.world and Abstract Wikipedia.
#semanticWeb #abstractWikipedia #knowledge #knowledgeGraphs #knowledgerepresentation #wikipedia #wikidata #wikifunctions
https://videolectures.net/videos/iswc2025_nara_vrandecic_wikipedia_future
Reading the Artemis II article on Wikipedia, I noticed the Wikipedia BabyGlobe spinning in space on the side.
Wonderful!
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No human in my lifetime has been as far away from Earth as the Artemis II astronauts are right now. No one since Apollo 17 in 1972.
They are right now in an orbit that takes them up to 74,000 km high. In comparison, the ISS is in an orbit 400 km high.
Once this phase is over, their trip leaving Earth orbit and traveling to the Moon starts.
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@ami_angelwings
The Serpent in Paradise who convinced Eve to take a bite of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge... How can that be evil?
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
I doubt it'll make a difference.
To the best of my understanding, every terms of use of LLM-based tools comes with such a disclaimer already. Every chat interface has such a warning. Probably every contract a company signs with Google explicates that risk already.
That's not new, and I doubt it'll be cited.
I'm imagining Rowan Atkinson dressed as a priest telling this joke and then explaining why the suffering inflicted on Jesus was necessary and right.
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@bri7 @ireneista @ami_angelwings
The command was indeed given before Eve was created, but in the dialog with the Serpent it is established that Eve is aware of the order given by God.
"Research shows that the less you know about AI, the more likely you are to use it."
Wieder mal Neues vom Ballaballa-Balkan gehört, Folge 98 zu Mileva Marić, der ersten Frau Einsteins. Da hieß es, dass es in der kroatischen Wikipedia noch keinen Artikel zu ihr gab. Immerhin das Mal geändert. Den Artikel geschrieben während ich in der ältesten Buchhandlung der Welt sitze, weil mein Flug wegen dem Lufthansastreik verschoben ist.
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@openrisk@mastodon.social @kaffeeringe@social.tchncs.de I literally have the same problem. My website is basically dead because of that. :'(
I don't know. I'll see if I can figure something out.
Wikipedians and other Wikimedians! Vote for the name of the wiki that will have language-independent articles that can be used on Wikipedia and other places when there is a gap!
Candidates are:
* Multilingual Wikipedia
* Wikigenerator
* Proto-Wiki
* Wikiabstracts
* Abstract Wikipedia
Vote here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Abstract_Wikipedia_naming_contest/Names
Morgen (Samstag 18. April) kommt der #Wikipedia25 Bus von @wikimediaDE@social.wikimedia.de nach #Stuttgart an die @stadtbibliothekstuttgart@xn--baw-joa.social am #Milaneo
Es gibt Informationsstände und Vorträge. Kommt vorbei und feiert 25 Jahre #Wikipedia!
Ich gebe auch einen Vortrag zu @wikidata@wikis.world und @wikifunctions@wikis.world
Eintritt frei
Infolinks:
Sigh, Google...
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@ireneista @ami_angelwings
They aren't. The God who punishes Eve is much closer to the God who killed almost all of humanity in the flood (and then regrets it) and who bombed Sodom, than to the much later God who's described as just and merciful.
It's also the same God who banishes humanity from Paradise. Not as a punishment, the punishment is distinct, but because he's *afraid*/worried they'll eat from the Tree of Life and "become like us", as God says.
Additions with unique digits: A tale of puzzling and AI
The other day, Markus Krötzsch and I were catching up when one of his kids came in. She told us about a puzzle her math teacher gave her:
How many integer sums are there where the equation uses each digit at most once?
The simplest example is 1+2=3, but 12+47=59 also works. On the other hand, 1+9=10 isn’t a solution because the digit ‘1’ appears twice (in the first number and the sum).
1/19
The letter E appears 5,173,357,556 times in English Wikipedia.
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@openrisk@mastodon.social @samwilson@wikis.world @kaffeeringe@social.tchncs.de
I'm also considering a static website again. Like back in 2001. Sigh.
I think one of the things about Cloudflare is not most the caching, but also the filtering out bots. But the idea seems contrary to the open Web for me. Sigh.
On the latest episode of "Between the Brackets", Yaron Koren hosts me for a chat about Wikifunctions, Abstract Wikipedia, Wikidata, AI, and much more. I hope you enjoy the episode. Thank you, Yaron, for hosting!
https://betweenthebrackets.libsyn.com/episode-180-denny-vrandei
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@jgordon@appdot.net I heard they are doing much better. My own Website is a simple MediaWiki installation, and it's crashing. I will soon have a bit of time, and will try to turn it into a static page, more or less, and see if that improves the situation.
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@ireneista @ami_angelwings
I'd argue that you don't need the concepts of right and wrong in order to follow orders. In fact, these concepts might well interfere with following orders.
I finished reading a novel, Playground, by Richard Powers. It came recommended by Markus Krötzsch. I have to admit I rarely read novels, and this one was a good one to make an exception.
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@kaffeeringe@social.tchncs.de indeed! I wish those were humans, seeking knowledge. But instead, Wikipedia is having trouble knowing how many human readers there are, and if the number is growing or declining or whatever?
Reuters doxxing Banksy Y?
Ian Horrocks gives a great talk on the history of ontology languages around OWL in the last 20+ years, where we are now, the progress we have made. I especially enjoyed the QnA, and the slide on scalability progress, far faster than Moore's law would have predicted (and a testament to the results of researchers and developers in that area).
I especially liked the insight that it was far more important to come up with a standard than what exactly that standard is.
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@michwatsonoz@ausglam.space @weirdmustard@flipping.rocks @jgordon@appdot.net I don't know. I haven't done the switch yet. Maybe the Omeka installation will do just fine. That's really a software by software thing.
Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon, founded in 1732, is certified by Guinness to be the oldest, continually running book store in the world.
A quick search reveals: Osiander, founded 1596 in Tübingen. Korn und Berg 1531 in Nürnberg. Beck'sche in Vienna 1724 (but closed since 2018?), Höllrigl 1598 in Salzburg, Orell Füssli 1519 in Zürich, Cambridge University Press (and store?) 1534.
Now some of these started as print shops, but often also sold books. Anyone know a text discussing Guinness decision?
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@timbray@mastodon.cloud and in Chrome on MacOS. But the Android app and the MacOS Chrome show *very* different results, amusingly.
But works in both.
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@michwatsonoz@ausglam.space @weirdmustard@flipping.rocks @jgordon@appdot.net I'm so sorry to hear that
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@michwatsonoz@ausglam.space @weirdmustard@flipping.rocks @jgordon@appdot.net since you prepared so much, I'd just try it out and see if it works. And only worry once it's a problem.
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" -- not in a world of LLMs, though, because whenever you fine tune the LLM to your task, you have to always consider what it has already learned in the initial pre-training.
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