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Lelek Andromeda
Croatia's entry to for the Eurovision Song Contest is anything but a typical ESC entry. The video below gives the English lyrics. The tattoos the singers are wearing are historical: they were used, mostly on women, to 'protect' them from the non-Christian conquerors, and to remind them of their roots. Tattoos in the Balkans were used for almost a hundred generations, described by Strabo in the first century BC until the early 20th century. I am a sucker for the mythic motives, playing with fantasy themes, for the polyharmonic singing. It's not the fun song of a young man leaving for the city and selling his cow, but a powerful folk-inspired anti-war ballad, deeply steeped in local history.
So, probably no chance to win an event like ESC, but certainly an interesting song, highlighting a part of local history that I wasn't aware of at all.
(There's obviously a nationalist element to this, as any folk stuff is, I know; but I hope, beyond reason, that it is not nationalistic)
The Web attacked by AI
The Web I grew up with and that grew up with me was already slowly fading. The Web of many people and organizations having their own small website. Capitalism and convenience lead to a concentration onto a small number of platforms and apps, but mostly these platforms let the rest be. People and small organizations and groups could still have their little website.
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.
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.
It's 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.
It makes me sad.
Playground
Markus Krötzsch recommend me a novel, Playground, by Richard Powers. I have to admit I rarely read novels, and this one was a good one to make an exception.
- "There was only one way of making a two or a twelve, but six ways to roll a seven. The maker of the world whispered that secret to me, and it changed everything."
I really enjoyed the language. It was just a pleasant read, and you can feel that the author mastered the craft of building sentences, paragraphs, and stories.
- "If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play."
I was very confused throughout the first hundred pages or so, until I figured out what the main story threads were. I have to admit, that I than re-skimmed these pages again, and it all made sense and fit together, but at first it felt like so many different things were going on that I wasn't sure what was going on. But because of the well-wrought language, I didn't mind, and I merrily joined the ride.
- "What you call the ocean is nothing but the coast."
The book retells the story of four characters, who, at their best, are fascinating and brilliant, and at their worst, are failing so bad it makes me angry, and are, at all times, deeply relatable. It follows a story of games, computers, the birth of the Web with Mosaic, and a very thinly veiled fictional version of Cyc, and a fictional Website, Playground, which has a fascinating premise, somewhere between Facebook and Reddit, and then going to machine learning and AI. It also tells the story of an oceanographer, of the changing oceans, of dementia, of loss, guilt, and the permanence of death.
- "It was embarrassing. She didn't want to tell the god that she didn't believe in him and that he really shouldn't be there."
At several points, the line between fiction and truth becomes very fragile, dreamlike, which is part of the appeal.
- "He left me everything."
- "I see."
- What in the world am I supposed to do with it?"
In the end, I was literally gasping when the author resolved a part of the story I wasn't even expecting, although it was built towards it the whole time. It made me mad and angry, and then it made me think of why I was so mad and angry. In the end, the story gets a beautiful resolution, one that made me lose a tear or two, and that made me question the primacy of story and truth again.
- "We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we're desolate when that's what they become."
Richard Powers, Playground. ISBN 978-1-324-08603-1
Recording of ISWC 2025 keynote
It was an tremendous honour to have been invited as a keynote speaker to the ISWC - International Semantic Web Conference 2025 in Nara, Japan.
This was particularly exciting for me, because during my PhD research, ISWC has been my "home conference" - the prime conference in my research area, where the research community that I felt affiliated with was meeting. It will be 20 years since I attended my first ISWC, in Galway, and it was a huge pleasure to talk about
The talk traced the history of Wikipedia and the Semantic Web and how they influenced each other repeatedly, and gives an outlook at the future.
Watch the talk on VideoLectures for free:
Question about Economics (as a discipline)
Serious and honest question, and I'm not trying to diss on a different discipline: I don't have much experience reading papers in economics. And I saw that paper "AI, Human Cognition and Knowledge Collapse", on a topic that I find very interesting, written by Acemoğlu et al. Now, Acemoğlu is a Nobel prize winner and MIT professor, so I would assume that paper is among the best economics would offer on that subject.
The paper models several connections between different values mathematically, makes a number of assumptions, argue for these models and assumptions, and then draws the consequences of different scenarios based on those models and assumptions.
But here's the thing that surprises me: yes, it argues for these models and assumptions, but it never actually validates them. It doesn't look at historical data, natural experiments, or actual experiments to test any of these. In the best case it may offer a citation to a paper supporting the argumentation, but that's it.
Now I do find a lot of the argumentation convincing, but that's probably biased by me finding the premise intriguing.
So, here's my question: is that how economics as a research discipline works? Is it because that's a "working paper", a kind of paper I'm not familiar with from computer science, and not a peer reviewed publication? Am I missing something?
Besides all that, the paper is interesting and enjoyable to read, but I found myself sitting there wondering why I should believe any of the conclusions?
- "AI, Human Cognition and Knowledge Collapse" by Daron Acemoğlu, Dingwen Kong, and Asuman E. Ozdaglar
Hosting yourself is painful
It never was particularly easy to host your own Website. But these days, it is getting harder, I feel. I had this Website for many years, and once I moved to Google Cloud Hosting, it was just like five bucks a month, to have a small VM running Semantic MediaWiki, and all is fine.
The last few years, it is constantly overloaded, and I have repeatedly raised the VM capacity, and now I am somewhere around 30-40 bucks per month, and it is still completely overloaded. My assumption is, based on what I see otherwise, that inconsiderate AI crawlers are just massively hitting the page.
There's a way to download all the content easily! You don't have to crawl the page! I want to shout, but it's useless, no one will hear it.
I am already paying more than I want to for this. Taking two or three days off to move everything to a static site is probably the way forward, but that's also unfortunate. I'd really prefer to run SMW.
Gnah. I need either time, or someone to do it for me. But I am not even sure what I want to do. I would love to be able to publish through the Web, which is what the wiki is really good at. I would love to keep SMW. But also I would love to push my cost down to 10 bucks or less per month again.
Abstract Wikipedia in Beta launch
Psst! It is a quiet launch. Abstract Wikipedia has launched in Beta. More information in the weekly Abstract Wikipedia newsletter.
Pretraining biases
"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.
Robert Kaye
Robert Kaye, the founder of MusicBrainz, has died. Far too early. I'm sitting here, looking at the stickers he gave me. So many questions come up.
Robert was a personality. He was loud, fun, thoughtful, determined, principled, noticeable. He lived. Uncompromising, yet deeply caring. Towering, and not merely physically. His hairstyles were legion and legend. He was a creator and a coordinator of mayhem and of chaos. He had all the skills of an engineer, and all the sensibilities of an artist.
Robert was an ally. He pursued the double goal of free knowledge and structured knowledge, and the systems he has built and the knowledge these systems gathered will live on into the future. Structuring the world of music so that anyone can benefit from that knowledge. Considering and worrying about the sustainability of the work he and his colleagues worked on.
Robert lived his life bravely and unabashedly, so that for all of us it would be a bit easier to live ours.
Robert always was full of ideas, and he was always working on making them real. Be it new systems of software or new organizations, he seemed like a tireless powerhouse. He shared his experiences and what he has learned generously with the world, and even more generously with his friends.
Robert, I hope you can look back at your work and see how much you have accomplished, and I hope you are proud about what you achieved. I know I am happy to have known you, even just this little bit, through a common cause, through some values shared. And I am very sad to see you go. Far too early.
Confused about information theory
If I understand information theory right, then, given "Socrates is human" and "all humans are mortals", there is no information in "Socrates is mortal", as it can be derived from the given statements. But what about the computational cost of deriving conclusions from statements? Does information not capture or consider that at all?
Aquinas said that angels immediately know all the consequences of their knowledge. But humans do not.
Just to give an obvious example, in cryptography, the public key is known. The private key is derivable from the public key, but the computational cost is so hight that it seems obvious that the private key is information, and in fact quite valuable information.
So it seems that between information and compute there should be some theory that connects them, but I can't remember having come across anything like that? What am I missing?
