[Bhuvanmakes] says that he has the simplest open source photobioreactor. Is it? Since it is the only photobioreactor we are aware of, we’ll assume that it is. According to the post, other designs are either difficult to recreate since they require PC boards, sensors, and significant coding.
This project uses no microcontroller, so it has no coding. It also has no sensors. The device is essentially an acrylic tube with an air pump and some LEDs.
The base is 3D printed and contains very limited electronics. In addition to the normal construction, apparently, the cylinder has to be very clean before you introduce the bioreactant.
Of course, you also need something to bioreact, if that’s even a real word. The biomass of choice in this case was Scenedesmus algae. While photobioreactors are used in commercial settings where you need to grow something that requires light, like algae, this one appears to mostly be for decorative purposes. Sort of an aquarium for algae. Then again, maybe someone has some use for this. If that’s you, let us know what your plans are in the comments.
They’re marketed as “Solar Generators” or “Solar Power Stations” but what they are is a nice box with a battery, charge controller, and inverter inside. [DoItYourselfDad] on Youtube decided that since all of those parts are available separately, he could put one together himself.
The project is a nice simple job for a weekend afternoon. (He claims 2 hours.) Because it’s all COTS components, it just a matter of wiring everything together, and sticking into a box. [DoItYourselfDad] walks his viewers through this process very clearly, including installing a shunt to monitor the battery. (This is the kind of video you could send to your brother-in-law in good conscience.)
Strictly speaking, he didn’t need the shunt, since his fancy LiFePo pack from TimeUSB has one built in with Bluetooth connectivity. Having a dedicated screen is nice, though, as is the ability to charge from wall power or solar, via the two different charge controllers [DoItYourselfDad] includes. If it were our power station, we’d be sure to put in a DC-DC converter for USB-PD functionality, but his use case must be different as he has a 120 V inverter as the only output. That’s the nice thing about doing it yourself, though: you can include all the features you want, and none that you don’t.
We’re not totally sure about his claim that the clear cargo box was chosen because he was inspired by late-90s Macintosh computers, but it’s a perfectly usable case, and the build quality is probably as good as the cheapest options on TEMU.
This project is simple, but it does the job. Have you made a more sophisticated battery box, or other more-impressive project? Don’t cast shade on [DoItYourselfDad]: cast light on your work by letting us know about it!.
WordPress plugins on ATProto, managing digital badges and attestations, and more.
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The News
The Linux Foundation has announced FAIR, a package manager project for WordPress. It is “a federated and independent repository of trusted plugins and themes for web hosts, commercial plugin and tool developers in the WordPress ecosystem and end users.” To achieve this independent and federated repository of tools for the WordPress ecosystem, FAIR uses ATProto underneath. FAIR has build their own protocol, the FAIR protocol, on top of ATProto. It uses DID PLC as an identifier for the packages, and ATProto for indexing and discoverability. As the project has just launched and some of the final parts are still being ironed out there are no packages yet that use the FAIR system. As such I cannot give yet a good context for what discoverability of WordPress packages over ATProto actually looks like. The chaos of the last year around the management of WordPress shows a need for decentralised repository of packages and plugins, and FAIR does already show that ATProto can be much more than only a microblogging network.
Gnosco is a new tool for digital badges and attestations on ATProto. It acts as a secure middleman between the application that issues the badge and your PDS. This allows applications to create a signed record to award a badge of attestation for a user. This badge is then not yet placed into the user’s PDS, but instead held in escrow by Gnosco. Users can then log into Gnosco with their ATProto account and review the badges. If they approve, the signed badge then added to their own PDS.
Gnosco took me a while to wrap my head around what the tool is and what it does, but it tackles the following problem. Badges and awards and other attestations need to be accepted and signed by both the issuer and the receiver. But not for all attestations that are issued it is known in advance if the user actually wants to receive this attestation and store it on their PDS. So there needs to be a way for the user to accept or reject a badge or attestation that is issued. Gnosco provides this interface that is platform-neutral, where users can accept and reject any attestation or badge.
Photo-sharing platform Grain now has their own moderation system on their own infrastructure. Grain is building a social photo-sharing network on ATProto that is separate from Bluesky, using their own lexicon. One reason why image-sharing platforms so far tend to have been alternate Bluesky clients is that means that the client does not have to be responsible for moderation. For Grain, the goal is to build their own independent social network, and thus their own moderation system is mandatory as well. The Grain developer also released a stand-alone app to embed Grain galleries on your own website.
Blacksky is proposing to make a soft-fork of the Bluesky client for the Blacksky community. With their own forked app, Blacksky can set some default values that benefit their community, such as setting the default feed to the Blacksky Trending feed, and setting the Blacksky moderation as default moderation. The organisation is looking for 2500 USD in recurring monthly donations, and they are close to reaching that goal.
ATProto chatroom app Roomy has released the another alpha version. Besides offering public chatrooms, Roomy continues to experiment with features for collecting and aggregating chat messages into longer-lived places for text. In this update they included ‘boards’, where people can create simple markdown pages as well as collect ‘threads’ that are pulled out of the chat log. Roomy is on the bleeding edge of technology when it comes to using ATProto, by combining it with Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT). The Roomy blogs go into more detail on why they are building the architecture this way, but the current practical problem is that CRDTs are new enough that what Roomy needs is still in development.
Tech updates and news
ATStudio is a new developer-focused tool that allows people to interact with ATProto. It allows you to “experiment with the protocol and debug code paths by making direct XRPC requests and executing @ATProtocol SDK methods using the integrated dashboard.”
Boost Blue is a new Bluesky client for Android and iOS, that has a few in-demand features that the main Bluesky client is missing, such as repost muting by user, drafts and bookmarks.
Bluesky’s latest update adds a ‘share’ button on every post, and an announced update to get notification on likes on reposts is pushed back to the next update which contains more notification filters.
An update by Skylight on how they are building their algorithm.
Graze announced they are backing Party Starter with a 1k USD grant, a “toolkit for creating short-lived, location-aware events”. Not much else is known yet about Party Starter.
A “minor change to the PLC Directory service, with the aim of expanding compatibility with non-atproto apps and services”.
Alumni Ventures is one of the companies who invested in Bluesky’s series A last October. They’ll be hosting a webinar next week on why they invested in Bluesky.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.
A whole bunch of first-pass features; A path towards Roomy/Weird convergence; Temporary Backend Pivot (building on jazz.tools 🎶 for production-readiness).
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo La nuova guerra scatenata da Netanyahu segue le rivelazioni sull'imminenza dell'attacco fatte ieri da due televisioni americane L'articolo Israele attacca l’Iran. Esplosioni a Teheran proviene da Pagine Esteri.
Exclusive: An FTC complaint led by the Consumer Federation of America outlines how therapy bots on Meta and Character.AI have claimed to be qualified, licensed therapists to users, and why that may be breaking the law.#aitherapy #AI #AIbots #Meta
Telescopes perched on the Andes Mountains glimpsed elusive encounters fueled by the first of the first stars in the universe more than 13 billion years ago.#TheAbstract
✍ Tutte le novità della #Maturità2025 spiegate dalla Dott.ssa Flaminia Giorda, Coordinatrice Nazionale del Servizio Ispettivo e della Struttura Tecnica degli Esami di Stato.
✍ Tutte le novità della #Maturità2025 spiegate dalla Dott.ssa Flaminia Giorda, Coordinatrice Nazionale del Servizio Ispettivo e della Struttura Tecnica degli Esami di Stato.
Qui il video➡️ https://youtu.be/af_bqCfx9nc
#MIMaturo
What’s the GitHub repository you have created that you think is of most note? Which one do you think of as your magnum opus, the one that you will be remembered by? Was it the CAD files and schematics of a device for ending world hunger, or perhaps it was software designed to end poverty? Spare a thought for [AasishPokhrel] then, for his latest repository is one that he’ll be remembered by for all the wrong reasons. The poor guy created a repository with a scatalogical name, no doubt to store random things, but had the misfortune to inadvertently create the billionth repository on GitHub.
At the time of writing, the repository sadly contains no commits. But he seems to have won an unexpectedly valuable piece of Internet real estate judging by the attention it’s received, and if we were him we’d be scrambling to fill it with whatever wisdom we wanted the world to see. A peek at his other repos suggests he’s busy learning JavaScript, and we wish him luck in that endeavor.
We think everyone will at some time or another have let loose some code into the wild perhaps with a comment they later regret, or a silly name that later comes back to haunt them. We know we have. So enjoy a giggle at his expense, but don’t give him a hard time. After all, this much entertainment should be rewarded.
Since October 1978, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has operated its fleet of Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) — the data from which has been used for a wide array of environmental monitoring applications, from weather forecasting to the detection of forest fires and volcanic eruptions. But technology marches on, and considering that even the youngest member of the fleet has been in orbit for 16 years, NOAA has decided to retire the remaining operational POES satellites on June 16th. NOAA Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) Under normal circumstances, the retirement of weather satellites wouldn’t have a great impact on our community. But in this case, the satellites in question utilize the Automatic Picture Transmission (APT), Low-Rate Picture Transmission (LRPT), and High Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) protocols, all of which can be received by affordable software defined radios (SDRs) such as the RTL-SDR and easily decoded using free and open source software.
As such, many a radio hobbyist has pointed their DIY antennas at these particular satellites and pulled down stunning pictures of the Earth. It’s the kind of thing that’s impressive enough to get new folks interested in experimenting with radio, and losing it would be a big blow to the hobby.
Luckily, it’s not all bad news. While one of the NOAA satellites slated for retirement is already down for good, at least two remaining birds should be broadcasting publicly accessible imagery for the foreseeable future.
Not For Operational Use
The story starts in January, when NOAA announced that it would soon stop actively maintaining the three remaining operational POES satellites: NOAA-15, NOAA-18, and NOAA-19. At the time, the agency said there were currently no plans to decommission the spacecraft, and that anything they transmitted back down to Earth should be considered “data of opportunity” rather than a reliable source of information.
However, things appeared to have changed by April when NOAA sent out an update with what seemed like conflicting information. The update said that delivery of all data from the satellites would be terminated on June 16th, and that any users should switch over to other sources. Taken at face value, this certainly sounded like the end of amateurs being able to receive images from these particular satellites.
This was enough of a concern for radio hobbyists that Carl Reinemann, who operates the SDR-focused website USRadioguy.com, reached out to NOAA’s Office of Satellite and Product Operations for clarification. It was explained that the intent of the notice was to inform the public that NOAA would no longer be using or disseminating any of the data collected by the POES satellites, not that they would stop transmitting data entirely.
Further, the APT, LRPT, and HRPT services were to remain active and operate as before. The only difference now would be that the agency couldn’t guarantee how long the data would be available. Should there be any errors or failures on the spacecraft, NOAA won’t address them. In official government parlance, from June 16th, the feeds from the satellites would be considered unsuitable for “operational use.”
In other words, NOAA-15, NOAA-18, and NOAA-19 are free to beam Earth images down to anyone who cares to listen, but when they stop working, they will very likely stop working for good.
NOAA-18’s Early Retirement
As it turns out, it wouldn’t take long before this new arrangement was put to the test. At the end of May, NOAA-15’s S-band radio suffered some sort of failure, causing its output power to drop from its normal 7 watts down to approximately 0.8 watts. This significantly degraded both the downlinked images and the telemetry coming from the spacecraft. This didn’t just make reception by hobbyists more difficult. Even NOAA’s ground stations were having trouble sifting through the noise to get any useful data. To make matters even worse, the failing radio was also the only one left onboard the spacecraft that could actually receive commands from the ground.
While the transmission power issue seemed intermittent, there was clearly something very wrong with the radio, and there was no backup unit to switch over to. Concerned that they might lose control of the satellite entirely, ground controllers quickly made the decision to decommission NOAA-18 on June 6th.
Due to their limited propulsion systems, the POES satellites are unable to de-orbit themselves. So the decommissioning process instead tries to render the spacecraft as inert as possible. This includes turning off all transmitters, venting any remaining propellant into space, and finally, disconnecting all of the batteries from their chargers so they will eventually go flat.
At first glance, this might seem like a rash decision. After all, it was just a glitchy transmitter. What does it matter if NOAA wasn’t planning on using any more data from the satellite in a week or two anyway? But the decision makes more sense when you consider the fate of earlier NOAA POES satellites.
Curse of the Big Four
When one satellite breaks up in orbit, it’s an anomaly. When a second one goes to pieces, it’s time to start looking for commonality between the events. But when four similar spacecraft all explode in the same way…it’s clear you’ve got a serious problem.
That’s precisely what happened with NOAA-16, NOAA-17, and two of their counterparts from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), DMSP F11, and DMSP F13, between 2015 and 2021. While it’s nearly impossible to come to a definitive conclusion about what happened to the vehicles, collectively referred to as the “Big Four” in the NOAA-17 Break-up Engineering Investigation’s 2023 report, the most likely cause is a violent rupture of the craft’s Ni-Cd battery pack due to extreme overcharging.
What’s interesting is that NOAA-16 and 17, as well as DMSP F11, had gone through the decommissioning process before their respective breakups. As mentioned earlier, the final phase of the deactivation process is the disconnection of all batteries from the charging system. The NOAA-17 investigation was unable to fully explain how the batteries on these spacecraft could have become overcharged in this state, but speculated it may be possible that some fault in the electrical system inadvertently allowed the batteries to be charged through what normally would have been a discharge path.
As such, there’s no guarantee that the now decommissioned NOAA-18 is actually safe from a design flaw that destroyed its two immediate predecessors. But considering the risk of not disconnecting the charge circuits on a spacecraft design that’s known to be prone to overcharging its batteries, it’s not hard to see why NOAA went ahead with the shutdown process while they still had the chance.
The Future of Satellite Sniffing
GOES-16 Image, Credit: USRadioguy.com While there are no immediate plans to decommission NOAA-15 and 19, it’s clear that the writing is on the wall. Especially considering the issues NOAA-15 has had in the past. These birds aren’t getting any younger, and eventually they’ll go dark, especially now that they’re no longer being actively managed.
So does that mean the end of DIY satellite imagery? Thankfully, no. While it’s true that NOAA-15 and 19 are the only two satellites still transmitting the analog APT protocol, the digital LRPT and HRPT protocols are currently in use by the latest Russian weather satellites. Meteor-M 2-3 was launched in June 2023, and Meteor-M 2-4 went up in February 2024, so both should be around for quite some time. In addition, at least four more satellites in the Meteor-M family are slated for launch by 2042.
So, between Russia’s Meteor fleet and the NOAA GOES satellites in geosynchronous orbit, hobbyists should still have plenty to point their antennas at in the coming years.
Want to grab your own images? There are tutorials. You can even learn how to listen to the Russian birds.
This Pet Hacks Contest entry from [Andrea] opens the door to a great collaboration of sensors to solve a problem. The Cat At The Door project’s name is a bit of a giveaway to its purpose, but this project has something for everyone, from radar to e-ink, LoRa to 3D printing. He wanted a sensor to watch the door his cats frequent and when one of his cats were detected have an alert sent to where he is in the house
There are several ways you can detect a cat, in this project [Andrea] went with mmWave radar, and this is ideal for sensing a cat as it allows the sensor to sit protected inside, it works day or night, and it doesn’t stop working should the cat stand still. In his project log he has a chapter going into what he did to dial in the settings on the LD2410C radar board.
How do you know if you’re detecting your cat, some other cat, a large squirrel, or a small child? It helps if you first give your cats a MAC address, in the form of a BLE tag. Once the radar detects presence of a suspected cat, the ESP32-S3 starts looking over Bluetooth, and if a known tag is found it will identify which cat or cats are outside waiting.
Once the known cat has been identified, it’s time to notify [Andrea] that his cat is waiting for his door opening abilities. To do this he selected an ESP32 board that includes a SX1262 LoRa module for communicating with the portable notification device. This battery powered device has a low power e-paper display showing you which cat, as well as an audio buzzer to help alert you.
To read more details about this project head over to the GitHub page to check out all the details. Including a very impressive 80 page step-by-step guide showing you step by step how to make your own. Also, be sure to check out the other entries into the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest.
possibile che non ci sia nessuno che non si riconosce più in questi stati uniti? tutti buoni e tutti zitti? in un paese dove anche i bambini sono armati poi? come fa non succedere un macello? i carri armati praticamente a sedare la rivolta? ma la rivolta di chi?
Come direbbe il buon Emilio Fede, che figura di m....da 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Calenda, un inutile al senato. Solo in questo paese gestito da saltimbanchi poteva fare il senatore.
Una mano lava l'altra, aiuta me che poi aiuto te, chiudiamo un occhio di qua, un altro di là, (tanto chi ci rimette sono sempre i cittadini e/o i lavoratori), ed ecco che arriva il premio fedeltà... ilfattoquotidiano.it/2025/06/1…
L'errore dei Dem Usa è stato non distruggere lo psicopatico arancione in questi 4 anni. Esattamente lo stesso errore nostro con i fascisti a suo tempo.
La Nato è unita, deve rafforzarsi anche con l’aiuto del suo pilastro atlantico, di cui l’Italia è parte strategica. Mark Rutte non ha, nel suo incontro a Palazzo Chigi con Giorgia Meloni, solo messo l’accento sulle priorità strutturali dell’alleanza atlantica ma in “un’era
se poi consideri che per viaggiare da Milano a Bari non trovi facilmente le colonnine di ricarica in autostrada e devi uscire perdendo tempo, io mi tengo il mio benzina.
A meno di un mese dal vertice Nato dell’Aia, la capitale è tornata a ospitare un confronto ad alta densità strategica. La presidente del Consiglio Giorgia Meloni ha ricevuto a Palazzo Chigi il segretario generale dell’Alleanza Atlantica, Mark Rutte, in una tappa significativa del suo primo giro europeo dopo la
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale È uscito il nuovo numero di The Post Internazionale. Il magazine, disponibile già da ora nella versione digitale sulla nostra App, e da domani, venerdì 13 giugno, in tutte le edicole, propone ogni due settimane inchieste e approfondimenti sugli affari e il potere in
Autorità dello Stato, rappresentanti delle istituzioni e militari, Pmi e colossi della Difesa si sono riuniti nel IV Forum sulla Difesa organizzato del Centro Studi Machiavelli, presso l’università Link di Roma, per discutere sulle priorità strategiche e sulle necessità stringenti per la
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Lo scenario di libertà cambia e impone nuove regole alla cultura pop internazionale. Quest’anno l’Eurovision ha vietato qualsiasi tema politico o di attualità. Tutti gli artisti in gara hanno dovuto firmare un documento ufficiale in cui si sono impegnati a rispettare una serie di comportamenti,
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Entro la fine del 2025 Berlino riceverà il sistema di “difesa aerea” israeliano di ultima generazione. Costo: 3,5 miliardi di dollari L'articolo Israele-Germania. Più stretta la collaborazione militare, Berlino acquista l’Arrow 3 proviene
Editori Indipendenti – Intervista a: Astarte Edizioni freezonemagazine.com/articoli/… Con questo articolo Free Zone Magazine continua la serie di interviste a Editori Indipendenti perché riteniamo che il loro ruolo nel campo dell’editoria sia da sempre di vitale importanza. Ciò per il lavoro di accurata ricerca, da loro svolto, nell’individuazione di autori e libri di particolare interesse, oltre che valore letterario, che altrimenti
Gira e rigira, la poltrona attaccata al didietro, l'hanno sempre gli stessi, a quanto pare... Le commissioni in Parlamento cambiano stagione, ma poche poltrone | Pagella Politica pagellapolitica.it/articoli/ri…
l'idea di base è che la sinistra si occupi di diritti e la destra di economia. fosse davvero così, alterando governi di sinistra e di destra, avremmo uno sviluppo abbastanza equilibrato e regolare. il problema è, però, almeno in italia, come mi faceva notare la mia compagna rebecca, che la sinistra si occupa dei diritti, e la destra si occupa non di economia ma di togliere diritti. è tutto un metti la cera, togli la cera? e quindi alla fine dove starebbe il progresso e il percorso nel tempo? considerando anche che in italia i governi che durano di più sono quelli di destra, probabilmente siamo pure fottuti. tra poco ci avranno convinti che votare non serve e che quindi noi non desideriamo votare.
Dal 3 giugno è aperta la piattaforma per le adesioni individuali alla Campagna Stop ReArm Europe.
MANIFESTAZIONE NAZIONALE CONTRO GUERRA, RIARMO, GENOCIDIO, AUTORITARISMO
FERMIAMO LA GUERRA - STOP REARM EUROPE
ROMA 21 GIUGNO 2025 ore 14:00 Porta Sa…
"L’interruzione delle relazioni istituzionali ha un valore più politico che economico. Di fatto significa che i rappresentanti delle regioni, a partire dai presidenti, non potranno incontrare diplomatici israeliani e che non potranno essere organizzati eventi in collaborazione con istituzioni israeliane".
The confirmation follows 404 Media's reporting using flight data and air traffic control (ATC) audio that showed the agency was flying Predator drones above Los Angeles.
The confirmation follows 404 Mediax27;s reporting using flight data and air traffic control (ATC) audio that showed the agency was flying Predator drones above Los Angeles.#News
The confirmation follows 404 Media's reporting using flight data and air traffic control (ATC) audio that showed the agency was flying Predator drones above Los Angeles.
Al termine di due giorni di discussioni a Londra, le delegazioni di alto livello di Cina e Stati Uniti avrebbero trovato un accordo sul ripristino del meccanismo di “consenso”, sottoscritto a Ginevra lo scorso mese di maggio, per evitare un’escalatio…
non sono soltanto le #bugiesioniste a darmi il voltastomaco, ma anche la facilità del mondo #Google ad accettare clienti di questa risma: youtu.be/Cs7cpkDKTh0?si=jA96In… ma ci rendiamo conto del livello di schifo?
Al Jazeera ha pubblicato i nomi di tutti i giornalisti uccisi dal 7 ottobre. 231 giornalisti palestinesi sono stati massacrati a Gaza. Un'intera generazione di giornalisti è stata annientata.
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo In Grecia la Corte Suprema ha inabilitato tre deputati del partito di estrema destra "Spartani", guidato dal carcere dall'ex leader di Alba Dorata L'articolo Grecia, tre deputati neofascisti sospesi per “frode elettorale” proviene da pagineesteri.it/2025/06/11/mon…
“This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source,” one Wikipedia editor said.#News
Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.
“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”
Two other editors simply commented, “Yuck.”
For years, Wikipedia has been one of the most valuable repositories of information in the world, and a laudable model for community-based, democratic internet platform governance. Its importance has only grown in the last couple of years during the generative AI boom as it’s one of the only internet platforms that has not been significantly degraded by the flood of AI-generated slop and misinformation. As opposed to Google, which since embracing generative AI has instructed its users to eat glue, Wikipedia’s community has kept its articles relatively high quality. As I recently reported last year, editors are actively working to filter out bad, AI-generated content from Wikipedia.
A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”
In one experiment where summaries were enabled for users who have the Wikipedia browser extension installed, the generated summary showed up at the top of the article, which users had to click to expand and read. That summary was also flagged with a yellow “unverified” label. An example of what the AI-generated summary looked like. Wikimedia announced that it was going to run the generated summaries experiment on June 2, and was immediately met with dozens of replies from editors who said “very bad idea,” “strongest possible oppose,” Absolutely not,” etc.
“Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don't think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”
A day later, Wikimedia announced that it would pause the launch of the experiment, but indicated that it’s still interested in AI-generated summaries.
“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told me in an email. “This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.”
“It is common to receive a variety of feedback from volunteers, and we incorporate it in our decisions, and sometimes change course,” the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson added. “We welcome such thoughtful feedback — this is what continues to make Wikipedia a truly collaborative platform of human knowledge.”
“Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March,” a Wikimedia Foundation project manager said. VPT, or “village pump technical,” is where The Wikimedia Foundation and the community discuss technical aspects of the platform. “As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further.”
The project manager also said that “Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such, and that “We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.”
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale Mentre sembra sempre che il governo Meloni abbia cose più importanti da fare, in Italia si aggira indisturbato un Robin Hood impazzito che svuota le tasche a cittadine e cittadini e alle piccole e medie imprese, spina dorsale del nostro tessuto economico e produttivo, per gonfiare quelle dei ricchi, che
Come evitare che le cosiddette armi non letali provochino danni temporanei o permanenti? Come proteggere la propria identità dagli strumenti di identificazione biometrica?
Nota dell'editore (11/06/25): Ripubblichiamo questo articolo del 2020 alla luce delle recenti proteste contro i raid sull'immigrazione a Los Angeles.
It's astonishing that Scientific American is having to publish an article on How Not To Be Killed By The Police, but here it is: scientificamerican.com/article…
(Update: as several people have pointed out to me, this article is from 2020. Not that that makes it any better.)
Con l’approvazione definitiva del Disegno di legge in materia di economia dello Spazio, l’Italia compie un passo strategico verso la definizione di una vera politica industriale del settore spaziale. Una legge attesa, che
An example of what the AI-generated summary looked like.
Filippo
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