Author Archives: Brewster Kahle

Good-by to Gutenberg? Nope—Shrill Publisher Cries about Xerox Machine Were Wrong

[written by claude.ai leveraging the new archive.org Supreme Court collection] Eight years before Jack Valenti called the VCR a “Boston strangler,” America’s publishers told the Supreme Court that the office copier would extinguish the printed word. A field guide to … Continue reading

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Generative AI is a New Drug: Report on My First ‘Trip’

I now see how it can be addictive: A mindblowing experience and feeling like I see the world a bit differently. A feeling of being super smart and powerful. Getting lured in with free samples then everything costs. How it … Continue reading

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Ethics Of Digital Librarianship (1992)

[This essay was included in every Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) distribution as a way to instruct server operators (later to be called webmasters) on how to deal with log files. Software distributions can be found https://archive.org/details/freeWAIS-sf-1.0 I am proud of … Continue reading

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My eBike Economics

I use an eBike to commute 2.5 miles to work most days. It is faster than driving and parking, and much cheaper than Uber/Lyft. A few details: Uber/Lyft costs $12 each way, so $5/mile Uber/Lyft takes 20 minutes: 10 minutes … Continue reading

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Grace Lurton Miller 1928-2023

My dear aunt. Her poem, 1961.

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New account on Mastodon

The Internet Archive set up a Mastodon instance, and I created an account on it. Feels like a fresh new day. @brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org Mastodon

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Pythonistas: Up for quick hack to test Dedup’ing 78rpm records using document clustering?

I think this could be a 1 day exploration at least to figure out if it will work, but it is beyond my python ability. Idea: OCR the labels of our 78rpm records, then take an image of a new … Continue reading

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Greenhouse that desalinates its own water: A Desalinating Greenhouse

An idea. Combine two things to solve a big problem: Solar Water Still and Greenhouse– greenhouse that runs on salt water. A “solar water still” is often a tent that has salt water at the base and captures the evaporated … Continue reading

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Imagining the Internet: Explaining our Digital Transition

Imagining the Internet: Explaining our Digital Transition was designed as a google doc, so that is the best way to view it. Imagining the Internet:  Explaining our Digital Transition A digital wave is upon us, changing our lives, our occupations, … Continue reading

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DPayments on the DWeb now possible? Math breakthrough

One of the goals of a new World Wide Web: the Decentralized Web was to help people make money by publishing on the web. There are approaches to this such as Coil, but the vision in the paper has not … Continue reading

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