Better Than Free

Better Than Free

In the analog world, it takes great effort to make a copy.

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The largest collection of free stuff on the internet!

An open letter to Grammarly and other plagiarists, thieves and slop merchants

To everyone at Grammarly, I am writing a book right now, a really challenging endeavor that no doubt someone in Silicon Valley will think it’s fine to steal the day it’s published. I’ve been a professional writer for decades, even though the number of ways to make

AI code and software craft - alex wennerberg

Much has been said about audio, video and text "slop": low-quality, AI-generated content that has proliferated on the internet since the release of publicly-accessible AI models. Garbage content has always existed online, but the novelty of AI is that it has made its generation orders of magnitude less labor-intensive. For anyone who lacks a discerning eye, or is doing some task where discernment simply does not matter, AI has become a sufficient replacement for human hands.

Book publishers sue Meta over AI’s ‘word-for-word’ copying

Meta is accused of ripping copyrighted works from piracy websites.

Notes from my Beginner Computer Literacy Class Part 1 - Alex’s Writing Journal

Helping the uninitiated navigate this brave new digital world

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here.

Readeck: Home

Save interesting articles, long read, pictures, videos. Read or revisit them later.

Margin - Open Collective

Write on the margins of the internet.

RSL: Really Simple Licensing

The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet

AI Suggestions Homogenize Writing Toward Western Styles and Diminish Cultural Nuances

As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.

Karpathy's LLM Knowledge Base Wiki for Enterprise | Vijoy Pandey posted on the topic | LinkedIn

There's a new kind of computer media in the enterprise: Write once, Read never. The docs are perpetually stale, constantly diverging from reality, and scattered across Confluence, SharePoint, GitHub, Webex (or Slack) threads, Notion, Obsidian - and in my personal life, add Apple Notes, Goodnotes, web clippings, and multiple Google Drives worth of docs and slides that nobody is ever going back to. Karpathy tweeted his LLM knowledge base wiki architecture which went viral last weekend and I decided to give it a run yesterday. Verdict: You *have* to try this out. Prediction: You won’t be able to live without it soon. There were a few mods and decisions I made to the base Karpathy provided. First, the vault / folder structure in Obsidian. I already use Obsidian as a human. Instead of creating separate vaults and dealing with the sync nightmare, I just have folders for Human and Agent, and a Raw folder. (1) The Human/ folder is where I write long form articles and notes independent of the knowledge base wiki. No LLM or agent touches this folder. (2) I do have Arnold Layne, my OpenClaw agent, doing background tasks for me. Raw/ is where both Arnold and I, dump raw snippets. Inclusive of diverse kinds of media. (3) The Agent/ folder is where the LLM (Claude in my case) synthesizes the wiki. No human touches this folder. Second, some customizations to CLAUDE.md for enterprise-like usage - (4) Domain extensions - the agent needs to know that quantum computing and agentic AI have different entity types and different provenance thresholds.  (5) Primary source protection, when I drop in my own original work, secondary sources can extend it or raise questions against it, but they cannot overwrite it. It sounds like a small thing but its’s not, especially at enterprise scale where provenance actually matters. Karpathy is upfront that what he’s built is working memory for a single agent, and it’s truly remarkable at that. The jump to Shared Context across teams, reconciling conflicting beliefs at org scale, ontologies that don’t collapse under the weight of a hundred contributors - those are much harder problems and what we are exploring with the Internet of Cognition. PS: The screenshot shows my Obsidian vault after just two runs: one with Karpathy’s original tweet and gist file itself (so meta!) and one with our Internet of Cognition paper. Claude (Sonnet) read it, compiled it into structured summaries, entity pages, concept pages, backlinks, merged all the information cohesively, and keeps it all maintained from there. You just read the Wiki. It’s simply magical.

Governable Stacks against Digital Colonialism

Critics have been converging around the logic of colonialism to describe the Internet economy. If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. Although acts of insurrection may attract more attention, one thing leaders and theorists of anticolonial resistance have stressed persistently is the centrality of self-governance in everyday life as both a means and end of their movements. But the dominant platforms for online communities are not well-suited for durable self-governing. Resistance often relies on the same colonial firms it opposes. What would community-governed technologies look like? This paper introduces the concept of “governable stacks”, a framework for self-governing as resistance to digital colonialism.

Toward a durable writing stack – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

I have benefited over the years from others who have documented their writing setups, and so I feel some obligation to pay the favor forward by doing so with my own. The stack I’ll describe here is one I’ve been iterating on for about twenty years, starting from when I began discovering the pleasures of plain-text writing. Every aspect of it has changed over that period, but the some basic goals and flows have been with me through the writing of my college thesis, five books, and hundreds of articles. I am quite happy with where I am, and others might benefit from what I’ve come up with.