In the last blog post, I had mentioned that I was looking to move away some of my personal code hosting away from GitHub (GH), to avoid being locked in into yet another tech giant. Instead, I wanted to move to a proper free alternative. On Mastodon, lots of folks recommended checking out Codeberg as a potential alternative that is based on forgejo and provides static page hosting.

I recently watched a librarian give a talk about their experiments teaching prompt engineering. The librarian drawing from the academic literature on the subject (there are lots!), tried to leverage "prompt engineering principles" from one such paper to craft a prompt and used it in a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system, more specifically, Statista's brand new "research AI" feature.

Or: Why 2024 is my personal year of Linux on the desktop According to Doctorow, enshittification might be coming for absolutely everything . I’ve more and more felt this was for my own digital devices and means of digital production: Be that Apple’s just increasing love for walled gardens - especially since having the opaque app review processes (c.f. cpython’s --with-app-store-compliance), Microsoft’s (successful?)

I have been writing about what I call citation based literature mapping tools for over 5 years now, starting from Citation Gecko in 2018.

Image: Apple As is custom, Apple gave a sneak peek into the new features that will come with the new versions of their operating systems later this year at the WWDC.

Can Semantic Search be more interpretable? COLBERT, SPLADE might be the answer but is it enough?

Warning : I am not a information retrieval researcher, so take my blog post with a pinch of salt In my last blog post, I described a simplified description of a framework for infomation retrieval from the paper -

tl;dr : metrics-obsessed capitalism is the reason why we can’t have nice things – and watch @tante’s talk Back in Paris, I was semi-joking with friends about how the rate of technological innovations seem to have slowed down or come to a halt. The last “big” innovation that we could think about were smartphones, as carrying the internet permanently in our pockets was quite a change.

Wenn sich im Juni 2024 die Bibliotheksszene des DACH-Raums in Hamburg auf der BiblioCon treffen wird, ist auch die Redaktion der LIBREAS. Library Ideas dabei (zumindest zum Teil). Gerne treffen wir dort auf unsere Leser*innen und Autor*innen. Offenes Treffen (05.06.2024) Am Abend des Mittwoch trifft sich die Redaktion LIBREAS.

As academic search engines and databases incorporate the use of generative AI into their systems, an important concept that all librarian should grasp is that of retrieval augmented generation (RAG).   You see it in use in all sorts of "AI products" today from chatbots like Bing Copilot, to Adobe's Acrobat Ai assistant that allow you to chat with your PDF.