HN user

elijahwright

117 karma

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/elijah; my proof: https://keybase.io/elijah/sigs/5qyB2hDr3Jlqpu3XZeC7zkJivbBp0oHcaB9E_xnItUI ]

https://hnbadges.netlify.app/?user=elijahwright

Posts0
Comments92
View on HN
No posts found.

Mmhmm. A talented cataloger in a research library understands where the 'fuzz' in these systems is - where the margins intersect - and they have a process for helping systematize those classifications in a way that they can socialize with other librarians across the world. (If nobody has ever cataloged a particular book before... your record is probably going into OCLC WorldCat and other people will borrow the output of your thinking process later... making things more and more definitive.)

Start with the library of congress classification system. It'll get you 90 percent of the way there for 10% of the effort.

(Classification systems are very much an information science topic... and they're pretty damn important. Along those same lines - you'll want to think carefully and critically about what is seen as canonical knowledge, and what's "in" those fields, versus what is perceived as "utter crackpot bullshit" that nobody takes seriously. The fields you've mentioned ALL have a significant amount of bleed at the edges - where does math become mathematical physics and then 'really physics' ... it's just not that easy.)

Fanboy comment: just google Eugene Garfield. Have fun!

Can Spamassassin do this? I can’t remeber anymore. I think I used primal with it last, but I bet you could vibe code up a harness…. Also I think it’s not an LLM in any way, but markov.

My favorite places as a kid were libraries - they provided the opportunity for exposure and enrichment that I would have otherwise lacked. They are so much oh-holy-shit important, especially if you want to advance beyond the means of whatever dinky little town you happen to live in. I am significantly different and better because I had access to lots of materials to read - not money, just access. I owe very much to a school librarian and a town librarian in Wilkes county NC - they absolutely changed my life for the better. If I thought they might still be living I would love to tell them so. (Each of them would be over 100 years old now…)

Conflation is probably wrong. But librarianship is one of the most hacker-adjacent places I’ve ever worked. I fought pretty damn hard to keep UNIX tooling very directly in the information science curriculum at Indiana - circa 2005 or so. It was in serious danger of getting removed - I was just a graduate student but I got my butt on the right committee where I could articulate the need for tools and textual technologies to stay on the map there. Taking them away from the students would have been doing them a massive disservice.

You think people understand corruption? If they did, would they find anything remotely wrong with it?

Folks are pretty dishonest about their motivations, overall. I don’t even think it’s a partisan issue anymore.

We should nationalize OpenAI as punishment for the flagrant copyright violation they've taken part in. Either give every aggrieved author points in the company, or fine them for something like the GDP of the entire planet (round up - to maybe fifty trillion dollars?) and establish a fund that pays for global education and the production of new works.

They literally are thieves of the world's entire intellectual output. "For training the model", they say.

Yeah, there's a lot of bullshit going around.

Adjunct mostly just means "collaborating with us", it's not a term of derision.

If he got a fancier title they'd probably have to commit to more interaction, and heavier obligations, as would he. (And not a single soul at 80 years old is likely to want to take on some committee service for a university program...)