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• Post #4488403

  When looking for the phone number for my dialysis unit, I came across job ads for the band 5 nurses who administer haemodialysis on the ward. Needling patients w/ enormous needles; life/death alarm situations; complex patients. You are saving lives every day. £29k per year. Our world is so wrong.

• Post #4146414

  One of my sisters-in-law is currently at the Margate "Kate Bush Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever" event and it looks hilarious 😂 I couldn't attend due to dialysis but I regret this! Haha!

• Post #3982576

  Wow. Final judgement in the Anthropic class action is approved. Anthropic will pay $1.5 billion to authors whose works it pirated. The lawyers get $101.56 million (6.8%); a third of what they initially requested. There is a 30-day notice-of-appeal period. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.680.0_1.pdf

• Post #3704744

  I will be giving a keynote at the ACM Hypertext 2026 conference, hopefully in person, though this is dependent on health. But I love these countdown banners. As though there is an urgency to get tickets to see me (and others) speak. Ha! https://ht.acm.org/ht2026/

• Post #2313015

  In her 143-page ruling, Judge McMahon ordered the agency to rescind the cuts while saying the plaintiffs had suffered “irreparable injury.” “The injury is not limited to the loss of money,” Judge McMahon said. Gift article. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/arts/neh-grants-lawsuit-doge.html?unlocked_article_code=1.g1A.g48z.IlK8B2KtTcYs

• Post #1876169

  Zotero 9 is out! https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-9/

• Post #1757020

  Today, I am revisiting Packer, Abel L., ‘The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of SciELO’, in Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, ed. by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray (The MIT Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11885.003.0030. The significant history of SciELO should be in every scholarly account of the development of open access.

• Post #1757018

  Happy 60th birthday to The Crying of Lot 49, published April 27th, 1966. A strange, hypnotic novel that fascinated me as an undergraduate.

• Post #1757014

  I find it very frustrating when people announce new versions of software they have produced, with no information on what the software is or does. Assuming people already know. "Pleased to announce v0.1.2 of Darkwing. This version brings Capybara integration and Dingbat rollback support!"

• Post #1757013

  I spoke today with the hospital. They told me that I require IV nutritional support. This, though, will be the slightly lesser version, administered during my dialysis, rather than through a new line. This means I must now go to hospital 3x per week for haemodialysis instead of doing it at home. This is logistically terrible. So much of my life will be spent doing dialysis. But I feel awful and need to be able to fight this norovirus. Putting on weight is the key to this. So I must go along wit...

• Post #1652020

  Digital Preservation in a Time of Disorder A grant proposal that we have submitted at Knowledge Commons to build an independent and dedicated, not-for-profit, politically and geographically distributed, digital preservation system @kfitz.info https://about.hcommons.org/2025/03/19/digital-preservation-in-a-time-of-disorder/

• Post #1545761

  Death merchants move to insider trading on wars https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-ethics-concerns

• Post #1545759

  With reference to my last post: I just remembered that Reclaim Hosting, with whom I used to have an account and who are excellent, offer the option to pay triannually. This would mean that my blog would be available until the end of the three-year period, which is a darn sight better than AWS. Unsure what CDL/CDN they have...

• Post #1545755

  Not sure what I think of this proposal to completely overhaul the governance contract between English HE and the state. All I *do* think is that it is unlikely to happen under this government. https://post18.co.uk/blood-debt-toil-and-arrears/

• Post #1545753

  Complete nonsense list. Just the placements of The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest are enough to discredit it. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ng-interactive/2026/apr/22/every-shakespeare-play-ranked-lear-antony-cleopatra-hamlet

• Post #1545752

  I've been diagnosed with chronic norovirus. This usually clears in days, but I've had it for 4 months due to immunodeficiency. So, I am travelling to hospital in London for an immunology appt, bloods, and a PET-CT. This scan will show whether I can still absorb food or whether I need IV feeding. In people with a healthy immune system, norovirus isn't a problem. It's unpleasant, but clearable. In immunodeficient people, like me, it's life threatening.

• Post #1476420

  Been reflecting on the challenges of maintaining a blog that's preserved long-term. Balancing the cumbersome process of digital preservation with the ease of instant publishing is tricky, but it's worth ensuring my work persists. Exploring tools and networks like Rogue Scholar for this task while automating wherever possible to reduce the effort. https://eve.gd/2026/04/19/the-necessary-pain-involved-in-blogging-if-you-want-your-work-to-be-preserved-beyond-your-lifespan/

• Post #1450549

  It's going to become increasingly challenging to identify when, in the authorship and publishing process, AI hallucinations were introduced. Mass-scale publishing leaders are as keen for the technology as other CEOs and it means that reference parsing, for instance, could go through an LLM. Rigorous versioning is, of course, the answer so that we can do the equivalent of the software engineering "blame" command, to find out where. But most industrial publishing manuscr...

• Post #1376248

  Some thoughts on how Claude can still read your .env files even if it's told not to, which could compromise secrets. My colleague had this issue despite using specific instructions. I'm experimenting with 1Password environments to protect sensitive data. I think Claude's current mechanisms need strengthening for better security. https://eve.gd/2026/04/19/claude-code-can-consume-transmit-and-compromise-your-env-files-even-if-you-tell-it-not-to/

• Post #1347539

  Amusing. I have been sent an invitation to an event promising to take one on a tour of London's lost hospitals I guarantee you, I have seen enough of London's hospitals. Practically done whatever the equivalent is of a pub/hospital crawl.

• Post #1347538

  I'm interested in reading Gothic-ey/creepy texts about the creation of artificial life (in whatever form that takes), beyond Frankenstein. Do you have a favourite or other suggestions? Got the contemporary Frankenstein in Baghdad already, too...

• Post #1347535

  I thought I would write with another health update. Thanks to everyone who has wished me well recently. It has been a difficult time. The real challenge that I face is handling an acute problem like this serious dog bite on top of chronic conditions, specifically end-stage renal failure with dialysis and rheumatoid arthritis. As just an example, this has forced my dialysis to come off overnight and into three hour sessions, which means that some days I work all day, then just have ... 🧵1/8

• Post #1347534

  My recent threaded post was made possible by the app I whipped up that handles all the social media platforms I am on and will auto-thread a post, with thread counts etc. Shouts: IT'S ALIVE!!! etc. 😂

• Post #1347533

  I am trying Typeless keyboard on Android, and I must say the dictation is absolutely incredible quality. It is annoying that SwiftKey did not keep up, and its voice input is very bad. The one annoying thing about Typeless is that it does not have a full keyboard for spelling corrections, etc. Otherwise, I am pretty much sold on it. Will try it out for a couple of weeks to see how it goes.

• Post #1330527

  How much does it cost to peer review grants? Ie how much does selection cost? This paper has the numbers. https://f1000research.com/articles/15-534

• Post #1249695

  A good read on the thorny difficulties faced by OA publishers in the face of the current lack of regulation of AI https://www.openlibhums.org/news/934/

• Post #1138894

  I am getting excited about the fact that we are drawing close to the launch of the new Profiles system at Knowledge Commons. Just one of the features is this nifty chart of KCWorks deposits over time! (Do not ask how long it took me to get that drawing programmatically.)

• Post #1138891

  It is great to see these principles on open monograph acquisition from RLUK. My only criticism is of "there should be evidence that the initiative is financially viable (or established for at least two years)". So how are new models supposed to start? https://www.rluk.ac.uk/shared-principles-open-access-monograph-models/ It seems everything must have at least a two-year grant from a funder. But it's still tricky. I had to sell the benefits of the @openlibhums model...

• Post #1004630

  I believe that the term for such a reply, used by "the kids", is "spicy". (Core to this, I think, is the ongoing battle for how we actually define "diamond") https://thd.hypotheses.org/560

• Post #1004629

  I disagree with the polemic opening - stating that something has "failed" at some random point in time because of its lack of scale is not necessarily failure - but enjoy Jo's thoughtful provocations. (And she very kindly let me stay with her when I was speaking in the USA) https://computationalhistory.substack.com/p/the-lost-promise-of-digital-history