Field notes from the commons.
29 posts across 4 categories. Reading ahead of the conference — research, whitepapers, case studies, editorials, and long-form interviews.
How Live Dealer Casino Technology Works
Live dealer games sit at a fascinating intersection between a real casino and a digital one. A human dealer at a real table is streamed live to players' screen…
Quantum Computing Explained Without the Usual Hype
Few technologies attract as much breathless coverage, and as much genuine confusion, as quantum computing. It is variously described as the machine that will b…
The Data Centers Quietly Straining the World's Power Grids
Every time someone asks an AI a question, streams a film, or stores a photo in the cloud, the work happens somewhere physical: in a data center, a warehouse-si…
How Passkeys Are Replacing Passwords
The password has had a remarkably long run. For more than sixty years, the basic idea — prove who you are by knowing a secret — has underpinned nearly every lo…
How On-Device AI Is Quietly Reinventing Your Gadgets in 2026
For the past few years, artificial intelligence has lived mostly in the cloud. You typed a question, it traveled to a distant data center, and an answer came b…
How On-Device AI Is Quietly Reinventing Your Gadgets in 2026
For the past few years, artificial intelligence has lived mostly in the cloud. You typed a question, it traveled to a distant data center, and an answer came b…
When the House Goes Dark: Online Gambling and the Preservation Problem No One Is Funding
Online casinos and betting platforms are among the most data-rich environments on the internet — and among the most fragile. A look at the born-digital records…
Model Collapse and What Happens When AI Starts Learning From Itself
The large language models that have reshaped how we write, search, and learn were built on a single irreplaceable resource: the vast accumulation of text that…
Bit Rot: The Quiet Catastrophe Threatening Everything We've Digitised
There is a comforting assumption underneath the whole project of digitisation: that once we convert something into bits, we have saved it for good. Paper burns…
The Experiment That Cannot Be Repeated — Biomedicine's Reproducibility Crisis and the Data We Fail to Keep
Science is supposed to be self-correcting, and the mechanism of that correction is repetition. A finding earns its place in the body of knowledge not because i…
How RAG and LLMs Are Transforming Library Discovery
For two centuries, the front door to a library's knowledge was a list. You asked a question, and the system handed back a set of candidates — catalogue cards,…
AlphaFold Filled the Shelves — and Left the Protein Database With a Curation Problem
For half a century, structural biology had a supply problem so severe it shaped the entire discipline. Determining the three-dimensional shape of a single prot…
The Oldest Dice Ever Found and What They Reveal About Human Civilization
The oldest objects archaeologists are willing to call dice were excavated in the 1970s from a Bronze Age burial at Shahr-i Sokhta, in what is now southeastern…
Vector Embeddings Are Not Meaning — What Semantic Search Actually Does to a Digital Library
For most of the field's history, a library catalog was honest about its limitations. You typed words, and it found records containing those words. When it fail…
The Cataloguer's Problem Is Not Going Away — It Is Going Deeper
There is a conversation happening in digital library circles that frequently gets framed as a question about tools: should we use large language models to auto…