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Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

openstreetmap.us

21–30 of 35 posts

Re: Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

#21
post #13
post #2

I wish AI leaders would fund more data archival projects, instead of hoarding it themselves. They could build a lot of goodwill, but the current state of the art is destroying old books and denying anyone access to them. These archival projects have an enormous impact, though they are chronically underfunded. I wish there were a strong economic incentive to support them.

Anthropic just learned to the tune of a 1.5 billion dollar settlement that making available for human consumption, even internally, instead of hoarding for AI training exclusively is a fraught exercise.

Can you elaborate? I checked the news and couldn't find what you're referencing myself.

Re: Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

#22

I started this project and couldn't be happier about this partnership with OSM US! Also here's a past HN thread with some more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788588

Awesome project! Would definitely love to see more overlap with Allmaps. It’s pretty trivial to utilize centralized gcps for both server and client applications and maintain single sources of truth. I’ve been meaning to dive a bit deeper on an old project anyway, good excuse.

Re: Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

#23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic just learned to the tune of a 1.5 billion dollar settlement that making available for human consumption, even internally, instead of hoarding for AI training exclusively is a fraught exercise.

Can you elaborate? I checked the news and couldn't find what you're referencing myself.

Two events: Anthropic did end up paying a $1.5B settlement for a case involving the use of pirated books. See Bartz v. Anthropic.

Second, apparently archiving content and providing it to others is risky business. It is often ruled as piracy, see Hachette v. Internet Archive. It went badly for Internet Archive, against common sense.

Re: Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

#24

I started this project and couldn't be happier about this partnership with OSM US! Also here's a past HN thread with some more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788588

Awesome project! Would definitely love to see more overlap with Allmaps. It’s pretty trivial to utilize centralized gcps for both server and client applications and maintain single sources of truth. I’ve been meaning to dive a bit deeper on an old project anyway, good excuse.

This is something we need to add to the FAQ. There is some cross-compatibility already, in that OIM has endpoints to spit out Allmaps-compatible annotations from the database, e.g. https://oldinsurancemaps.net/iiif/resource/88127/. You can paste that right into Allmaps, which will in turn pull tiles from the Library of Congress IIIF server and warp them based on the annotation information. That's just the beginning though, more to come...

Re: Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

#25
post #17

Would be great to non-destructively scan the lower layers and date code them at some point, if/when possible.

Absolutely, this would be incredibly cool, and if they can do it with burnt ancient scrolls it should be a cakewalk with these... Even just shining very strong light behind the pages you can see all the old layers. However, most of the LoC collection is original copyright deposits, so much of what's on OIM doesn't have pasted-on slips.

Re: Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

#26

Seems like a very interesting challenge for automation of raster to vector scanning/software, and QC/checking that the raster-to-vector pipeline hasn't hallucinated something or joined two shapes together that should be discrete objects. I would presume they're starting with very high res lossless raster scans and storing those in some sort of index, then making them available for different pipelines of processing?

That's basically what's going on, but it's all a manual process so far. The goal is scoped really just to the actual georeferencing and mosaic creation, no post-processing or OCR is performed on the maps within this platform (people are certainly downloading the final rasters and doing that with them though).

Re: Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

#27
post #2

I wish AI leaders would fund more data archival projects, instead of hoarding it themselves. They could build a lot of goodwill, but the current state of the art is destroying old books and denying anyone access to them. These archival projects have an enormous impact, though they are chronically underfunded. I wish there were a strong economic incentive to support them.

How does wasting money on public goods deliver value to shareholders or help you build a doomsday machine?

Re: Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

#28

I started this project and couldn't be happier about this partnership with OSM US! Also here's a past HN thread with some more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788588

I was very excited to see this project. I went to the site and requested processing of the maps for my small town. It also inspired me to make a donation to OSM.

Email sent, and thank you!

I should have mentioned this earlier, but folks can make direct tax-deductible donations to OldInsuranceMaps.net, which is now affiliated with OSM US's 501(c)(3) status.

https://openstreetmap.app.neoncrm.com/forms/donate-oim

Re: Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

#29
If you like OldInsuranceMaps, check out another OSM charter project, Yesterdays! Originally created by a team in Richmond, Virginia [0], with one more deployment covering the Inland Empire [1]. They plan to merge soon. Yesterdays imports Sanborn maps to help place historical photos as accurately as possible.

0: https://yesterdays.maprva.org/

1: https://yesterdays.inlandempire.place/

Re: Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

#30
post #2

I wish AI leaders would fund more data archival projects, instead of hoarding it themselves. They could build a lot of goodwill, but the current state of the art is destroying old books and denying anyone access to them. These archival projects have an enormous impact, though they are chronically underfunded. I wish there were a strong economic incentive to support them.

Everything is "chronically underfunded". There has never been a thing in the world that was "well funded" because people's objectives increase with the amount of money they have. No one has ever said "Wikipedia has enough now" or "The Internet Archive doesn't really need any more money" or "Firefox has collected enough money from Google that it can now operate independently forever".

Besides, this so-called goodwill is an illusion. Opposition to AI in the PR space is entirely dominated by motivated reasoning. Attempting to satisfy people with random things is simply going to shift complaints to "take the commons, chop it up, and give it back to us"; "Should AI companies be the arbiters of what is worth preserving?"; and other such things. These kind of public-relation gains are entirely fictive and neither the supposed beneficiary nor the supposed benefactor is fooled by the theory.

"Oh so they suck up all our water and burn our planet down and we're supposed to be happy that they chop up people's books (that humans spent years creating) just so they can give us digested slop back?". Everyone knows that this sentence is waiting in the wings, and that the entire effort is clearly bait so that someone is foolish enough to pull a Google Books and get sued into oblivion for it.

And that's saying nothing about this so-called "hoarding" of things in a world where we pulp tons of these hoarded things every day and no one cares to scan them.

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