For the last two months, I've been working on tei2jsonl. I will blog the full rationale (basically, quickly load embedding dbs). But this morning, I would like to celebrate the fact that it just processed over 22 million word tokens across 410 eebo text in about 11 seconds.
Stephen Ramsay
@sramsay2.bsky.social
Professor of English and Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Mainly #DigitalHumanities. Blog at https://stephenramsay.net/
People seem to be confused about the basic motivations of tech oligarchs. Here's the deal: If it makes lots of money, it doesn't matter if it's a *soap bubble.*
Funny how nearly comical levels of security incompetence are being cast by AI companies as "It's alive!"
New Blog Post: "The Fate of the Hobbyist Programmer" stephenramsay.net/posts/fate-o...
The Fate of the Hobbyist Programmer
stephenramsay.net
I knew that gigantic frontier models were going to beat smaller local models on most tasks. What has been surprising is how smaller, more focused local models *blow away* larger more general local models on some tasks.
Well, I have my Pedantry Merit Badge. I've read it in English several times and in Greek at least once, generally prefer books to people, and I thought the movie was amazing. Lots of clever choices. Several moments of true visual/thematic brilliance.
NPR: "The 'Great American State Fair' will run from June 25 through July 10, promising to bring state-themed pavilions, movie screenings, musical performances, military flyovers, nostalgic snacks . . " What, pray, is a "nostalgic snack?"
*The New Yorker* has a review of Nolan’s *Odyssey,* which, of course, they have not seen. They don’t hate it, but I’d say they’re ready to do so.
During World Cup matches, I periodically hear an arpeggiated (and doubled) C-major chord. Does anyone know what this signifies?
"Hiring of college grads is down across the board. But certain majors are able to access opportunities in a wider array of industries, new LinkedIn data shows." ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH 69% VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS 68% www.forbes.com/sites/courtn...
The press keeps saying that tonight's match is "meaningless." The US is playing a country with metal dots in its name. This is serious.
"Archaeologists Unearth ‘Prototype’ of Stonehenge Monument Nearby." Thing is, it was written in Python by a bunch of physicists. No comments, no structure, no tests. A big dude with a black robe and very long beard kept saying, "Can we just build this fucking thing in C already?" So they did.
What? You're trying to keep track of the scores without Plain Text Sports? You need Plain Text Sports. Here's the overarching concept: You click on this link, and it gives you . . . the scores. It does not give you "not the scores," but since you want the scores . . . plaintextsports.com
Plain Text Sports
Instant live sports scores, play-by-play, and box scores
plaintextsports.com
Tips for new readers: The “map” between *Ulysees* and The Odyssey is probably the least interesting thing about this delightful, often hilarious novel. It’s a story, not a crossword puzzle. #bloomsday
Realized just today that my students—plural, cause it’s a whole thing—getting early, offline iPods for their music collections are reaching as far back into media history as we were getting into vinyl in the early 2000s
I have a new album out. stephenramsay.bandcamp.com/album/the-ob... Apologies to those who follow me for DH. (Then again, the Venn diagram between DH-ers and lovers of microtonal drone records may be wider than I think).
Client Challenge
stephenramsay.bandcamp.com
Normally, I try to engage in as much aggressively pedantic gatekeeping as I can when it comes to drone. But on #droneday? Everyone should just hold that note as long as they can.
The idea of a Texas Senate race hinging on a theological dispute from the fourth century is actually kind of interesting.
One thing this whole encyclical business has made plain yet again: The media absolutely loves saying the word "pontiff."
It's a shame Reggie Foster didn't live to take a shot at "Babel Syndrome." "Syndroma Babelicum" is one option, but where's the art in that?
Thinking about a programming assignment where I give students a bloated, slow, increasingly typical piece of garbage software. Assignment: Make the fans stop, make it idle at ~0%, and stop the earth from crying out over the user's tortured battery.
Way back in the day, I suggested, as a THATCamp prompt: “Why does every CMS suck?” If I could have seen the SaaS future, I might have used . . . stronger language.
Are there any sea shanties specifically about the Strait of Hormuz?
I don't know quite know what to make of the "convergence toward the mean" that we see in AI-generated video animations. Does all of human art ultimately tend toward a combination of Thomas Kindade and Fraggle Rock? Huge, if true.
Great! I'm glad you're all here for our annual Professionally Facilitated Visioning Exercise for the university. As you know from the updated Envisioning Our Future packets you received this morning, our question for the afternoon will be "Where Do You See Yourself in Eight Hours?"
Connecting to a repo that is giving the warning, "connection is not using a post-quantum key exchange algorithm." Love this. Whatever the next thing is, we need to call it "post-quantum." "I'm undertaking a post-quantum analysis of Dickens." "My work is situated firmly within post-quantumism."
You know how when the title of an article on the web ends in a question mark the answer is “no?” There’s some version of this for articles declaring things to be over.