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Eric Kansa

@ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy
64 followers 4 following 174 posts

Directs Technology for OpenContext.org Tries to work for anti-authoritarian, public good goals, especially with appropriately scoped open data and open science […] [bridged from scholar.social/@ekansa on the fediverse by fed.brid.gy ]

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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 15m
The 11 AM test, on the first Wednesday of each month, of Berkeley's civil defense / air-raid system never ceases to freak me out.
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026
Been rereading Terry Pratchett (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratche…) because of various reminders and references made by @electricarchaeo Totally worth anyone's time.
en.wikipedia.org
Terry Pratchett - Wikipedia
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026
#AI agents / #bots that do "read only" scraping are already damaging enough, but now #OpenAI seems to be experimenting with (how can it not be criminal) hacking at scale. Not just HuggingFace and various government websites around the world, but also the Wikipedia […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Reposted by Eric Kansa
Zack Batist @zackbatist.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026
Please get in touch with me or respond here if you would like to share any ideas or feedback for improving the next iteration of the Digital Archaeology Maintainathon! - Do you want certain kinds of resources or guides added to the website? - Any ideas for community engagement? - Constructive […]
archaeo.social
Original post on archaeo.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026
I will soon be canned in an aluminum tube, packed in with my fellow primates for several hours, and hurtled through the air by a profit maximizing algorithm.
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026
I'm trying to improve the usefulness of a small, locally hosted, GPU-free language model for Open Context search. All very interesting. At the same time, Open Context is getting renewed unwanted attention of Javascript executing bots from random IP addresses. I think I need more network […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026
Chis Nicholson (Executive Director of Digital Antiquity / tDAR) and I wrote an article about the Advisory Council on #AI for #culturalHeritage conservation policy. See: mydigitalpublication.com/publicatio… Instead of inscrutable black-box systems with […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026
Ugh. It's getting to that time of year with Trader Joe's is all in on seasonal pumpkin spice everything. I mean it's fine. Just some moderation please.
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026
#Fuck_AI mailchi.mp/osf/osf_announcement-615… #openScience #opendata #openaccess
mailchi.mp
OSF Emergency Maintenance — Sept. 15, 2026
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026
Just had to block IP addresses from Brunei, Morocco, and Brazil, in addition to Singapore, because of bots getting past the Anubis checks. Again, the bots burned through Open Context's map API credits. To stop the bleeding, I've blocked some 300 million (?) people from accessing #opendata in […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026
Google never ceases to disappoint.
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Reposted by Eric Kansa
Misha @mishavelthuis.social.edu.nl.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026
"The best time to have made Canada digitally sovereign would have been before an American president announced his intention to annex Canada and began explicitly deploying America's tech companies to attack his geopolitical adversaries. The second-best time is now." […]
social.edu.nl
Original post on social.edu.nl
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026
Does anyone have good examples of click-through terms-of-service agreements that attempt to regulate web scraping? Things are so bad, I need to have some sort of (even vaguely credible) legal teeth. #openaccess #opendata #scholarlycoms
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026
If you're in Singapore and want to access data in Open Context, I'm so sorry. But some sort of botnet using IP addresses from Singapore was just too much for us. So I had to severely throttle (effectively block) the entire region. Send complaints to those financing this dumb "AI" bubble.
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026
I'm guessing every damn network connected refrigerator and microwave oven in Singapore decided to simultaneously develop obsessive interests in sheep/goat bone data. Day 2 of an overwhelming bot swarm hitting Open Context, when I don't have the time to dedicate to investigate and deploy new […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026
So many javascript executing bots are hitting Open Context right now. We're seeing 15 times more traffic than "normal" (if there is such a thing any more) on Open Context. They burned through the use limits on our map APIs. Now maps our don't render properly […] [Original post on scholar.social]
Open Context's current usage, showing a spike of bot traffic on August 14, 2026
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026
David Hasselhoff, and he's riding a bus at night. Which makes him something of a "night rider", no? www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKdKU6p78TQ #coversong #thePassenger #dadJoke
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026
Oh wow! Chris Webster and colleagues at the "Archaeology Podcast Network" chatted about my recent AI / Large Language Model paper (doi.org/10.11141/ia.71.15). That's a first for me! Here's the podcast link: www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/a… (I'm not sure they're on […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Reposted by Eric Kansa
Joe Roe @joeroe.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026
We are advertising two PhD positions in the Southwest Asia Palaeoarchaeology Lab at the University of Copenhagen. As part of a new project 'Networks Before Agriculture: Social Interaction in Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic Jordan', the successful candidates will work together to map prehistoric […]
archaeo.social
Original post on archaeo.social
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Reposted by Eric Kansa
Joe Roe @joeroe.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026
I finally got round to adding classic single radiocarbon calibration plots to my #Rstats package {c14}. I think they turned out pretty nice! c14.joeroe.io/reference/plot.c14_ca…
A base R graphics plot showing the probability distribution of a calibrated radiocarbon age, with annotations showing the calibration curve, the probability distribution of the uncalibrated age, and three highest density regions at 68.2%, 95.4% and 99.7% probability.
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Reposted by Eric Kansa
Martin Paul Eve @mpe.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026
"Researchers may cite an infrastructure as a necessary part of their work in a grant proposal, but funding flows only to the researcher and research project, not the repository." issues.org/open-data-research-%20in…
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026
Well shoot. Google Scholar isn't indexing my paper about #AI in #Archaeology -- more than one 1 month since publication (doi.org/10.11141/ia.71.15). If I was a paranoid, I'd wonder if Google was trying to inhibit the discoverability and circulation of a paper very critical of #LLMs. I […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026
This visualizes diagnostic pottery sherds from Poggio Civitate, an Etruscan site south of Siena, Italy. More similar sherds group together. You can adjust the weights of different attributes to change groupings of the sherds. The "Embedding" slider is for similarity based on a small language […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Reposted by Eric Kansa
Dan Gillmor @dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026
Ed Zitron has been on this for a long time, but good to see that the NY Times finally is digging into Silicon Valley OG Larry Ellison's sleazeball ways -- and his prop-up-Oracle-stock-until-it-crashes bets on AI. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine…
nytimes.com
Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?
Inside the 81-year-old billionaire’s risky, debt-fueled scramble to transform his data empire into an A.I. juggernaut.
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026
Playing with some #datavisualization of #Etruscan frieze plaque fragments from Poggio Civitate. storage.googleapis.com/opencontext-… This is a force directed graph with edge (connection) strength between […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2026
I fixed a stupid CSS bug and now Open Context is properly falling back to a "noto" font for use with ancient scripts. Here's a nice example of Etruscan, with the unicode getting rendered correctly. It reads (something like): 𐌀𐌙𐌉𐌓 (or less likely) 𐌀𐌙𐌐𐌓 It's interesting because it's written on […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/07/2026
We're celebrating 60 years of continual archaeological research at Poggio Civitate (Murlo) in Italy. The excavation and field school, led by Prof. Anthony Tuck (University of Mass. Amherst), has trained generations of students. It's a wonderful project encouraging learning, collaboration, and […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/07/2026
Hello jet lag my old friend...
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026
I'm experimenting with a generic off-the-shelf small language model to make embeddings of data from Open Context to support vector "vibe" searches. I'm trying to do something sustainable. No GPU, CPU use only. The results are sorta "meh" right now. Archaeologists use terms like "fabric" to […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026
If the people forcing LLMs into everything think the rest of humanity is disposable, that feeling will inevitably get reciprocated.
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2026
Yay! My essay on the impacts of Large Language Model (#LLM) #AI in #archaeology was just published: doi.org/10.11141/ia.71.15 It looks at #bots and mass scraping on the infrastructure supporting #opendata and #openaccess. It also looks at the incentives that encourage the […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/06/2026
A morning where I got calendar invites to be on 3 calls at the same time, but the rest of the day is open?
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026
The SpaceX IPO demonstrates that something is fundamentally broken with markets. This is insanity that will impoverish us all.
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026
[USpol] It's delicious watching Trump's name come off the Kennedy Center. I know it's a small thing considering all the other ongoing evils, but this matters so much to his narcissism. Normally this kind of thing happens AFTER a dictator dies or gets overthrown. Live stream is here […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026
RE: sfba.social/@eniatitova/11673328897… Another bit of disturbing #LLM news that gives strong vibes of (wink): "totally not an #AI bubble"
sfba.social
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Reposted by Eric Kansa
Joe Roe @joeroe.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026
In the end, we managed to avoid feature degradation in the latest #XRONOS release, aimed at mitigating abuse from bots and AI crawlers: xronos.ch/news/xronos-v121-stabilit… We'll see if these performance improvements will be enough. So […]
archaeo.social
Original post on archaeo.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026
Ugh #Bots The #AI_bubble fuels annoying and costly extraction of #openaccess resources, including #opendata in #archaeology research. Open Context (opencontext.org) is now getting slammed with 3x more traffic than normal. The financial fallout of […] [Original post on scholar.social]
Graph of an ongoing spike in Open Context's traffic, likely driven by "AI" related bots
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/06/2026
RE: flipboard.com/@rollingstone/tv-movi… Oh no! This is very sad!
flipboard.com
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/05/2026
I'm not in the habit of reading Papal encyclicals, but this one seems like a must read: www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/e… I'm still early in wading through this, but I appreciate its emphasis on the socio-politcal dangers of power […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2026
RE: scicomm.xyz/@HelenBranswell/1165350… Great. Just great. With the orange guy in charge again, I'm sure this is fine.
scicomm.xyz
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/04/2026
RE: wandering.shop/@annaleen/1164893849… Same.
wandering.shop
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/04/2026
I'm looking to publish a longish (8000 word) essay that's heavily referenced but more conversational in tone. It's about #archaeology and #ai (of the LLM variety, I know, #barf). Any suggestions?
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Reposted by Eric Kansa
CAA International @caa-int.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/04/2026
OUT NOW! Advances in Digital Archaeology: Proceedings of the 2023 conference Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology – 50 years of synergy 📚 Read online for free or purchase a printed copy at www.sidestone.com/books/advances-in…
Cover of the CAA2023 Proceedings. A blue cover with a 3D digital model of stone structure superimposed on a background showing a stylised blue network map. The text reads "Advances in Digital Archaeology. Proceedings of rhe 2023 conference Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology - 50 years of synergy. Edited by J.W.H.P. Verhagen, J. Waagen, A. Brandsen, A. Queffelec, R.M. Visser & D. Taelman."
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/04/2026
[USPol] I sent some panicked messages to my representative and senators to demand Trump's removal. He's a rapist and a maniac eager for genocide, and he's surrounded himself with bootlickers and fools. If our institutions cannot correct this madness, our institutions do not deserve to […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/04/2026
Something beautiful just happened. Trump had a call with #Artemis crew. The astronauts just floated in silence in response to Trump's inane babble. So deliciously awkward. Some #resistance in #space
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/04/2026
The US BLM is considering revoking the 10-mile buffer preventing mining/drilling around Chaco Canyon, a place of huge significance for Indigenous peoples and for #archaeology The public comment period ends tomorrow. Here's the link to submit a comment, please share with others too! […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/04/2026
I'm enjoying the Artemis moon fly by. A little reminder that things don't have to be terrible.
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