@rdicosmo

Scientist professor hacker writer citizen. Committed to building a better world through science technology and community. Director @swheritage. Follow ≠ endorse

 Paris
dicosmo.org
Joined June 2009
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335Media
Yes, source code is special: it's executable knowledge that is meant to be human readable, by design. It's an all time new in human history.
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"This way of collecting data is very wasteful." An Akamai specialist, on how AI crawlers gather material from the web. September 2024.
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Measure what survives without an archive: after five years, 8.5% of one software distribution's sources are gone, and another 1% still download perfectly — but they are no longer the same bytes. 👉 dicosmo.org/good-enough/ #GoodEnoughIsNotGoodEnough #DigitalPreservation
96.4% of one distribution's source code was still retrievable from its original addresses after one year, and 91.5% after five years.

ALT 96.4% of one distribution's source code was still retrievable from its original addresses after one year, and 91.5% after five years.

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A distinction I took from Robin Milner in 2007: engineering makes things that work, more or less; science tries to do things right. Thirty years of "more or less" brought us back to the same problem, now at AI-crawler scale. 👉 dicosmo.org/good-enough/ #GoodEnoughIsNotGoodEnough
Two definitions in large type on a pale ground. Engineering: making things that work, more or less. Science: doing things right. The line beneath gives them as the author's later paraphrase of a distinction he remembers Robin Milner drawing at Inria's fortieth anniversary in Lille in December 2007.

ALT Two definitions in large type on a pale ground. Engineering: making things that work, more or less. Science: doing things right. The line beneath gives them as the author's later paraphrase of a distinction he remembers Robin Milner drawing at Inria's fortieth anniversary in Lille in December 2007.

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Roberto Di Cosmo retweeted
Roberto Di Cosmo@rdicosmoAug 4
The destination, from the outset: I direct Software Heritage, a non-profit organisation that collects public source code once so that others need not collect it again. This is my latest effort at a long-standing problem. Follow the full saga on 👉 dicosmo.org/good-enough/

Good enough is not good enough

A series on why the open web is collected so badly, what it is costing, and what it would take to do things right. With sources.

dicosmo.org
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The destination, from the outset: I direct Software Heritage, a non-profit organisation that collects public source code once so that others need not collect it again. This is my latest effort at a long-standing problem. Follow the full saga on 👉 dicosmo.org/good-enough/

Good enough is not good enough

A series on why the open web is collected so badly, what it is costing, and what it would take to do things right. With sources.

dicosmo.org
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@Akamai @github @BusinessInsider @Inria @SWHeritage @DG_Connect @MistralAI @GoogleDeepMind @Meta @Microsoft @OpenAI @deepseek_ai
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