Just making some small Wikipedia edits today.
(Not really, it’s just a browser preview 😂)
Congrats to BlueSky for launching OAuth support for apps! 🙌 https://docs.bsky.app/blog/oauth-atproto
That is one cool cat hanging out at Ankeny Square in #Portland. (And ironically, he’s red hot! 🔥) #OregonExplored
I’m always trying to take pictures of the glorious hanging baskets of #flowers we have here in #Portland and surrounding towns all summer. But the photos never do them justice.
I finally got a good angle, thanks to my #NikonZfc and 40mm prime, and went with a bit of a Wes Anderson vibe in post. How’d I do? ☺️ #OregonExplored
Want to read: The Fifth Sacred Thing by (ISBN 9780553373806)
“To carry a burden was to be alive”
Any German speakers want to tell me if my instinct on this is correct?
"Ganz kleine Nachtmusik" is the name of a piece of music by Mozart that was just discovered. (He later titled a piece "Eine kleine Nachtmusik")
The English press about this is translating it as "Very little night music" which seems wrong? I feel like either "Quite small night music" or "Completely small night music" would be more accurate.
When does "ganz" change from "quite" to "completely"? Is it ambiguous here?
"Ganz kleine Nachtmusik" is the name of a piece of music by Mozart that was just discovered. (He later titled a piece "Eine kleine Nachtmusik")
The English press about this is translating it as "Very little night music" which seems wrong? I feel like either "Quite small night music" or "Completely small night music" would be more accurate.
When does "ganz" change from "quite" to "completely"? Is it ambiguous here?
Dear Creative Commons (@creativecommons.org @creativecommons@mastodon.social @creativecommons@x.com),
Can we have CC-NT licenses for no-training (ML/LLM, GenAI in general), just like we have CC-NC for non-commercial?
My previous post¹ reminded me that I’ve been creating, writing, inventing, and then sharing things with #CreativeCommons (CC) #licenses for a long time (I have to see if I can dig up my first use of CC licenses.)
I’ve used and recommended a variety of CC licenses for decades, e.g.
* CC0 — for standards work, e.g. I drove and wrote up https://wiki.mozilla.org/Standards/licensing (with help from lawyers)
* CC-BY — aforementioned blog post (and other snippets of #openSource)
* CC-BY-NC — photos on Flickr (dozens of which have been used in publications²)
* CC-SA — for CASSIS³, which I still consider experimental enough that I chose "share-alike" to deliberately slow its spread, and hopefully reduce mutations (while allowing ports of its functions to other languages)
So I have some idea of what I’m talking about.
There have been LOTS of discussions of the challenges, downsides, and disagreements with sweeping use of copyrighted content to train generated artificial intelligence AKA #genAI software and services, sometimes also called #machineLearning. The most common examples being Large Language Models AKA #LLM, but also models for generating images and video. Smart, intelligent, and well-intentioned people disagree on who has rights to do what, or even who should do what in this regard.
There have been many proposals for new standards, or updates to existing standards like robots.txt etc. but I have not really seen them make noticeable progress. There are also lots of techniques published that attempt to block the spiders and bots being used to crawl and collect content for GenAI, an arms race that ends up damaging well-established popular uses such as web search engines (or making it harder to build a new one).
The brilliant innovation of Creative Commons was to look at the use-cases and intentions of creators publishing on the web in the 2000s and capture them in a small handful of clear licenses with human readable summaries.
Creatives are clamoring for a simple way to opt-out of their publicly published content from being used to train GenAI. New Creative Commons licenses solve this.
This seems like an obvious thing to me. If you can write a license that forbids “commercial use”, then you should be able to write a license that forbids use in “training models”, which respectful / well-written crawlers should (hopefully) respect, in as much as they respect existing CC licenses.
I saw that Creative Commons published a position paper⁴ for for an IETF workshop on this topic, and it unfortunately in my opinion has an overly cautious and pessimistic (outright conservative one could say) outlook, one that frankly I believe the founders of Creative Commons (who dared to boldly create something new) would probably be disappointed in.
First, there is no Creative Commons license on the Creative Commons position paper. Why?
Second, there are no names of authors on the Creative Commons position paper. Why?
Lots of people similarly (to the position paper) said the original Creative Commons licenses were a bad idea, or would not be used, or would be ignored, or would otherwise not work as intended. They were wrong.
If I were a lawyer I would fork those existing licenses and produce such “CC-NT” (for “no-training”) variants (though likely prefix them with something else since "CC" means Creative Commons) just to show it could be done, a proof of concept as it were that creators could use.
Or perhaps a few of us could collect funds to pay an intellectual property lawyer to do so, and of course donate all the work produced to the commons, so that Creative Commons (or someone else) could take it, re-use it, build upon it.
Someone needs to take such a bold step, just as Creative Commons itself took a bold step when they dared to create portable re-usable content licenses that any creator could use (a huge innovation at the time, for content, inspired in no doubt by portable re-usable open source licenses⁵).
References:
¹ https://tantek.com/2024/263/t1/20-years-undohtml-css-resets
² https://flickr.com/search/?user_id=tantek&tags=press&view_all=1
³ https://tantek.com/github/cassis
⁴ Creative Commons Position Paper on Preference Signals, https://www.ietf.org/slides/slides-aicontrolws-creative-commons-position-paper-on-preference-signals-00.pdf
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses
Can we have CC-NT licenses for no-training (ML/LLM, GenAI in general), just like we have CC-NC for non-commercial?
My previous post¹ reminded me that I’ve been creating, writing, inventing, and then sharing things with #CreativeCommons (CC) #licenses for a long time (I have to see if I can dig up my first use of CC licenses.)
I’ve used and recommended a variety of CC licenses for decades, e.g.
* CC0 — for standards work, e.g. I drove and wrote up https://wiki.mozilla.org/Standards/licensing (with help from lawyers)
* CC-BY — aforementioned blog post (and other snippets of #openSource)
* CC-BY-NC — photos on Flickr (dozens of which have been used in publications²)
* CC-SA — for CASSIS³, which I still consider experimental enough that I chose "share-alike" to deliberately slow its spread, and hopefully reduce mutations (while allowing ports of its functions to other languages)
So I have some idea of what I’m talking about.
There have been LOTS of discussions of the challenges, downsides, and disagreements with sweeping use of copyrighted content to train generated artificial intelligence AKA #genAI software and services, sometimes also called #machineLearning. The most common examples being Large Language Models AKA #LLM, but also models for generating images and video. Smart, intelligent, and well-intentioned people disagree on who has rights to do what, or even who should do what in this regard.
There have been many proposals for new standards, or updates to existing standards like robots.txt etc. but I have not really seen them make noticeable progress. There are also lots of techniques published that attempt to block the spiders and bots being used to crawl and collect content for GenAI, an arms race that ends up damaging well-established popular uses such as web search engines (or making it harder to build a new one).
The brilliant innovation of Creative Commons was to look at the use-cases and intentions of creators publishing on the web in the 2000s and capture them in a small handful of clear licenses with human readable summaries.
Creatives are clamoring for a simple way to opt-out of their publicly published content from being used to train GenAI. New Creative Commons licenses solve this.
This seems like an obvious thing to me. If you can write a license that forbids “commercial use”, then you should be able to write a license that forbids use in “training models”, which respectful / well-written crawlers should (hopefully) respect, in as much as they respect existing CC licenses.
I saw that Creative Commons published a position paper⁴ for for an IETF workshop on this topic, and it unfortunately in my opinion has an overly cautious and pessimistic (outright conservative one could say) outlook, one that frankly I believe the founders of Creative Commons (who dared to boldly create something new) would probably be disappointed in.
First, there is no Creative Commons license on the Creative Commons position paper. Why?
Second, there are no names of authors on the Creative Commons position paper. Why?
Lots of people similarly (to the position paper) said the original Creative Commons licenses were a bad idea, or would not be used, or would be ignored, or would otherwise not work as intended. They were wrong.
If I were a lawyer I would fork those existing licenses and produce such “CC-NT” (for “no-training”) variants (though likely prefix them with something else since "CC" means Creative Commons) just to show it could be done, a proof of concept as it were that creators could use.
Or perhaps a few of us could collect funds to pay an intellectual property lawyer to do so, and of course donate all the work produced to the commons, so that Creative Commons (or someone else) could take it, re-use it, build upon it.
Someone needs to take such a bold step, just as Creative Commons itself took a bold step when they dared to create portable re-usable content licenses that any creator could use (a huge innovation at the time, for content, inspired in no doubt by portable re-usable open source licenses⁵).
References:
¹ https://tantek.com/2024/263/t1/20-years-undohtml-css-resets
² https://flickr.com/search/?user_id=tantek&tags=press&view_all=1
³ https://tantek.com/github/cassis
⁴ Creative Commons Position Paper on Preference Signals, https://www.ietf.org/slides/slides-aicontrolws-creative-commons-position-paper-on-preference-signals-00.pdf
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses
20 years and two weeks ago, I came up with undohtml.css and unknowingly invented the mechanism of CSS Resets (AKA reboot or reset style sheets¹) which spawned numerous variants, many still in broad use on the web today.
https://tantek.com/log/2004/09.html#d06t2354
A one sentence problem description, and a short paragraph describing my problem-solving, actions, license, link to less than 300 bytes of code (not counting comments), and a few future thoughts.
The rest of that blog post was about “debug scaffolding”, the part I thought was more interesting at the time.
Eric Meyer (@meyerweb.com @meyerweb@mastodon.social) followed up ~10 days afterwards with his thinking and improvements:
* https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/09/15/emreallyem-undoing-htmlcss/
where he mentioned “resetting” in passing, but not actually calling it a "reset".
~2.5 years later Eric published “Reset Styles” with further reasoning and improvements:
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/12/reset-styles/
describing them as: “reset” or “baseline” set of styles.
Subsequently he iterated in several more blog posts:
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/14/reworked-reset/
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/18/reset-reasoning/ — this is Eric’s first post where he explicitly calls them “reset styles”, which I believe is the origin of the eventual phrase “CSS Reset” and “reset style sheets”
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/ (yes a Matrix: Reloaded reference)
~6 months later Eric published his evergreen resource “CSS Tools: Reset CSS”
* https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
which, as you see within the URL: “css/reset”, is perhaps where the phrase “CSS Reset” comes from, and it’s also the label (link text) he gives that page in his UI about-page² and the first content link in his 404 page³.
My technology invention takeaways from all this:
1. if you find yourself repeatedly solving the same (especially annoying) problem, create a re-usable solution that works for you
2. write up your problem statement / use-case in only one sentence
3. publish your solution (on your personal site⁴), name it something short, with only a short paragraph description, and re-use/remix friendly license (like Creative Commons)
And things not to worry about (that may get in your way to publishing):
1. perfecting or making your solution “big enough” or “the right size”. does it solve your problem? then it’s already the right size.
2. coming up with the perfect name. instead, name it what it does. someone might come up with a better name weeks, months, or years later. let them run with it!
3. waiting to blog multiple things. I could have blogged undohtml.css by itself, probably should have, and instead lumped it into a blog post with another CSS thing I came up with.
Further reading and resources for CSS Resets:
* More history: https://css-tricks.com/reboot-resets-reasoning/
* Large collection: https://perishablepress.com/a-killer-collection-of-global-css-reset-styles/
References:
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reset_style_sheet
² https://meyerweb.com/ui/about.html
³ https://meyerweb.com/404
⁴ https://indieweb.org/
#undoHTML #undoHTMLCSS #reset #CSSreset #resetstyles #webdesign #technology #invention #indieweb
https://tantek.com/log/2004/09.html#d06t2354
A one sentence problem description, and a short paragraph describing my problem-solving, actions, license, link to less than 300 bytes of code (not counting comments), and a few future thoughts.
The rest of that blog post was about “debug scaffolding”, the part I thought was more interesting at the time.
Eric Meyer (@meyerweb.com @meyerweb@mastodon.social) followed up ~10 days afterwards with his thinking and improvements:
* https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/09/15/emreallyem-undoing-htmlcss/
where he mentioned “resetting” in passing, but not actually calling it a "reset".
~2.5 years later Eric published “Reset Styles” with further reasoning and improvements:
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/12/reset-styles/
describing them as: “reset” or “baseline” set of styles.
Subsequently he iterated in several more blog posts:
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/14/reworked-reset/
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/18/reset-reasoning/ — this is Eric’s first post where he explicitly calls them “reset styles”, which I believe is the origin of the eventual phrase “CSS Reset” and “reset style sheets”
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/ (yes a Matrix: Reloaded reference)
~6 months later Eric published his evergreen resource “CSS Tools: Reset CSS”
* https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
which, as you see within the URL: “css/reset”, is perhaps where the phrase “CSS Reset” comes from, and it’s also the label (link text) he gives that page in his UI about-page² and the first content link in his 404 page³.
My technology invention takeaways from all this:
1. if you find yourself repeatedly solving the same (especially annoying) problem, create a re-usable solution that works for you
2. write up your problem statement / use-case in only one sentence
3. publish your solution (on your personal site⁴), name it something short, with only a short paragraph description, and re-use/remix friendly license (like Creative Commons)
And things not to worry about (that may get in your way to publishing):
1. perfecting or making your solution “big enough” or “the right size”. does it solve your problem? then it’s already the right size.
2. coming up with the perfect name. instead, name it what it does. someone might come up with a better name weeks, months, or years later. let them run with it!
3. waiting to blog multiple things. I could have blogged undohtml.css by itself, probably should have, and instead lumped it into a blog post with another CSS thing I came up with.
Further reading and resources for CSS Resets:
* More history: https://css-tricks.com/reboot-resets-reasoning/
* Large collection: https://perishablepress.com/a-killer-collection-of-global-css-reset-styles/
References:
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reset_style_sheet
² https://meyerweb.com/ui/about.html
³ https://meyerweb.com/404
⁴ https://indieweb.org/
#undoHTML #undoHTMLCSS #reset #CSSreset #resetstyles #webdesign #technology #invention #indieweb
I'm home alone for the week so I made a giant stack of oat+tofu waffles and giant batch of baked ziti with roasted vegetables so that I have instant breakfast and dinner every day
