Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 15mThe 11 AM test, on the first Wednesday of each month, of Berkeley's civil defense / air-raid system never ceases to freak me out. 010
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026Been 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.orgTerry Pratchett - Wikipedia 250
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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 001
Reposted by Eric KansaZack Batist @zackbatist.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026Please 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.socialOriginal post on archaeo.social 004
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026I 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. 030
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026I'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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 013
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026Chis 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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 021
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026Ugh. 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. 010
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026#Fuck_AI mailchi.mp/osf/osf_announcement-615… #openScience #opendata #openaccessmailchi.mpOSF Emergency Maintenance — Sept. 15, 2026 020
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026Just 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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 053
Reposted by Eric KansaMisha @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.nlOriginal post on social.edu.nl 0112
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026Does 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 051
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026If 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. 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026I'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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026So 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] 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026David 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 010
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026Oh 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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 043
Reposted by Eric KansaJoe Roe @joeroe.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026We 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.socialOriginal post on archaeo.social 023
Reposted by Eric KansaJoe Roe @joeroe.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026I 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… 010
Reposted by Eric KansaMartin 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… 105
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026Well 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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 014
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026This 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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 155
Reposted by Eric KansaDan Gillmor @dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026Ed 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.comLarry 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. 1219
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026Playing 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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 022
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2026I 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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 012
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/07/2026We'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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 033
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026I'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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026If the people forcing LLMs into everything think the rest of humanity is disposable, that feeling will inevitably get reciprocated. 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2026Yay! 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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 2118
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/06/2026A morning where I got calendar invites to be on 3 calls at the same time, but the rest of the day is open? 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026The SpaceX IPO demonstrates that something is fundamentally broken with markets. This is insanity that will impoverish us all. 000
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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026RE: sfba.social/@eniatitova/11673328897… Another bit of disturbing #LLM news that gives strong vibes of (wink): "totally not an #AI bubble"sfba.social 001
Reposted by Eric KansaJoe Roe @joeroe.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026In 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.socialOriginal post on archaeo.social 115
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026Ugh #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] 068
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/06/2026RE: flipboard.com/@rollingstone/tv-movi… Oh no! This is very sad!flipboard.com 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/05/2026I'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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 024
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2026RE: scicomm.xyz/@HelenBranswell/1165350… Great. Just great. With the orange guy in charge again, I'm sure this is fine.scicomm.xyz 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/04/2026RE: wandering.shop/@annaleen/1164893849… Same.wandering.shop 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/04/2026I'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? 001
Reposted by Eric KansaCAA International @caa-int.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/04/2026OUT 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… 089
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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 000
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/04/2026Something 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 010
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/04/2026The 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.socialOriginal post on scholar.social 001
Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/04/2026I'm enjoying the Artemis moon fly by. A little reminder that things don't have to be terrible. 000