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Breaking the Open Web Won't Stop the Bad Bots
"To blend in among fellow players, cloaked and in disguise; without anybody noticing or rejecting our presence. We fulfill an intellectual challenge; a fun game of cat and mouse. We are the hunted of over three years."
https://web.archive.org/web/20090402125324/http://villavu.co...
Couchers.org v1.4 Release: A New Inbox, a Smarter Dashboard and More
Linus Torvalds "Did What I Preach" Used AI to Make Code Decipherabl, Find Bugs
The People, Counted: Browse Raw Census Records at the Internet Archive
MapRoulette security incident – October 2026
From Civic Tech to DOGE: The Role of Tech Movements in the American Admin State
The Impact of MITx
I'll certainly keep this in mind though.
Personal Computing 2.0: It's time for a personal computing revolution
Layercake converts OpenStreetMap data into tables you can SQL query via a URL
Also open to feedback from anyone.
Transit rewards (Waymo pays you to take the train)
I'm a big fan of OpenStreetMap, and I enjoy editing it from my computer. From my phone, I find it quite tedious trying to make sure I type in the phone number exactly correctly and double-check it, or find and select the right field from the large list of fields available in Upredor.
Generally, how it works is I see a restaurant, and there's a sign. I know that it says, "Cash only. Here's the phone number. Here's the opening hours." What would be really cool is if I could just speak to the phone and say, "Hey, here's the information about this place." It would automatically use your location to detect what places are nearby and maybe even detect which place you're talking about, and then tell you, "Okay, here are the changes I think you're proposing to make, or these things you stated are the ones that would create a diff." This would be limited to just perhaps the 20 most common keys in some predefined set of values for most of them. Like cuisine=x should just match to the most common not make up new ones.
Of course, this is something a large language model could do, but having it run on device would be a lot nicer and cheaper.
That would appear to leave me with the choice of just using it for myself (lame) or I then have a public fork to maintain :(
If there's basically no shot of it getting up streamed I think I'd rather make something from scratch to suit my needs without the extras.
Anyway, I hope the AI overlords help us fund more maintainers soon!
I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.
You have my democracy sword: Media Media
This is the first I hear of Litestar and I think it does seem very values aligned. I fastapi was picked simply because it was already known by the team and had a very thriving ecosystem. That being said, the hard part is getting off the old sync web.py stuff. Once everything is in async land moving to another framework if needed is relatively trivial. Thanks for sharing that though I'll keep an eye on it!
Here's just a few things we could use more experienced folks to help on:
- Solr performance, it currently gets quite slow under load and there are two read replicas but we think there may be some ways to improve it besides adding more replicas. You can run a full production copy of solr based on the dumps... But the current workflow to do this is kinda broke so I had AI fix it up but we haven't been able to verify if it's a fully working/good solution.
- We're doing big redesigns of major parts of the frontend. If your down to help for that Lokesh had many tickets open and guidelines and welcomes PRs.
- I'm currently migrating us from web.py to fastapi and could certainly use more experienced help for trickier ones.
Anyway, if you're actually willing to help all you gotta do is join our community call tomorrow at 9am PST and share your interests. We'll you on to something you like quickly :)
https://docs.openlibrary.org/everyone/community-call.html#co...
My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini
I'm still hoping one of these mega AI LLMs will figure out how to install Linux on the many old iPads that become nearly useless after Apple stops updating them and you can't install new apps.