Money is great, and they're also looking for volunteers all the time to help out with Open Library. The website is constantly under attack from DDoS, and we're always improving, but it's a long road. I'm just a volunteer, but a very active one.
I'm a very active volunteer and can always use the help of folks that have tech experience already. We get lots of student volunteers that require a lot of work to shepherd. As such, issues tend to be claimed pretty fast but also medium sized ones don't always get through the finish line.
Anyway, if you're seriously willing to commit some time you can tag me on their slack/github (@raybb). I'm currently doing a lot of performance related work (primarily migrating their codebase to fastapi) and I could use help but don't always open issues for it because sometimes guiding a non-experienced person is more work than just doing it.
There's also quite some design work going on to move things into the modern age and more reliable. One small thing that comes to mind is getting rid of jquery where it's used casually (not where a library depends on it). We have a few files like that.
Happy to chat more with anyone who is seriously willing to spend time to tackle medium sized issues with a few rounds of feedback!
I will speculate the DDOS attacks are funded by companies and governments that benefit from not being held accountable for their past deeds. I suspect X, Google, China, PRNK, Hungary, etc
This is pretty because Grist can react to changes in your data automatically, sending emails or firing webhooks. I only recently learned about grist and have been playing with it a bit in the hosted version. Thinking of adding it to my list of applications to run soon. Do people prefer something else?
Seems like something DOGE should have tackled early if they actually cared about making the government effecient. I guess making the lives of the disabled easier isn't flashy enough.
A paper came out about this recently: The City as an Anti-
Growth Machine.
> Logan and Molotch's “urban growth machine” remains foundational in urban theory, describing how coalitions of landowners, developers, and politicians promote urban growth to raise land values. This paper argues that under financialized capitalism, the dynamics have inverted: asset appreciation now outweighs productive investment, and urban land is increasingly treated as a speculative asset.
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time transitioning from tech into urbanism and working on a few projects I care deeply about.
- Urbanism Now - I run https://urbanismnow.com, a weekly newsletter highlighting positive urbanism stories from around the world. It’s been exciting to see it grow and build an audience. I'm thinking of adding a jobs board soon that'll be built in astro.
- Open Library - I’ve been helping the Internet Archive migrate Open Library from web.py to FastAPI, improving performance and making the codebase easier for new contributors to work with.
- Publishing project - I’m also working on a book with Lab of Thought as the publisher, which has been a great opportunity to spend more time working with Typst.
These projects sit at the intersection of technology, cities, and knowledge sharing, exactly where I’m hoping to focus more of my time going forward.
Kinda related, does anyone have a favorite obsidian plugin for AI editing on mobile?
I wanna be able to talk to a document and iterate on it just like chatgpt with canvas but inside obsidian.
I've been digging around and haven't quite found anything to do that.
One potential challenge is I'm not sure how easy it would be to let it do tool calling to edit the document rather than spitting out the whole document each time (with risk of minor changes).
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