On May 19, Paul Terzulli, a retired DJ with an enviably rare vinyl collection, made a surprising announcement: He planned to stop selling his records on Discogs. For more than a decade, Terzulli relied on the online marketplace to supplement his income.

The Discontent At Discogs

There are plenty of reasons why someone might want to spend time on Discogs. The long-running site is both an incredibly detailed source of information on records both lauded and obscure, and it’s also a place where you can easily buy long-out-of-print ...

Is Discogs Alienating Its Most Loyal Users?

If you are a devoted vinyl collector, an obsessive music fan, or — as is often the case — both, Discogs is very nearly a lifestyle. The site has become the internet’s foremost database of ...

Discogs’ vibrant vinyl community is shattering

Since then, it’s been a surprisingly fruitful period for mystery shows on streaming services, from the return of The Afterparty to the third season of Only Murders in the Building, which wraps up on Tuesday evening.

It’s been a good year for streaming whodunits

EXCLUSIVE: Streaming may have taken over as the most popular way to listen, but many music lovers are still longing for physical copies of their favourite albums.

Record shop urges music lovers not to throw away CDs - they could be worth thousands

A master of serving the song, Beavis’ dexterity is a sight to behold on record and live. Whether it be the likes of ‘Mother’, ‘Colossus’ or ‘Meds’, the bespectacled drummer has unlocked moments of genuine profundity for the quintet and merits more glory for his efforts.

Unlucky For Some: The 13 most underrated drummers in rock music right now

Any band named after the sacred mythological text of a far-flung tribe from Guatemala is one that is likely to be fairly singular. Thus, it is no surprise that the krautrock legends Popol Vuh approached their craft with an eye firmly fixed on the adjective: revolutionary.

Popol Vuh: the krautrock band Werner Herzog said created “something we have never seen or heard” before

The records sold out before he took to the stage, and have now begun surfacing for resale for hundreds of pounds on sites such as eBay and Discogs. This is James' second limited edition vinyl release of the summer, following on from a two-track 12-inch ...

Aphex Twin Releases Limited Edition Record At Field Day

These sites let you find CD cover art for any album in your collection. Get high-quality album covers with just a few clicks!

The 6 Best Sites to Download High-Quality CD Cover Album Art

Collecting is gaining and gaining and gaining, and with CDs, I know it’s going to gain,” Garry Shrum, the director of Entertainment & Music Memorabilia for Heritage Auctions, told

Are your old CDs worth anything to collectors?

Discogs

discogs

Meet the Winners of Startups in North and Central America

Previously on the DisCo Elements... In the last chapter ( ) we focused on the personal stuff - how and why the recognition of care work is so crucial for change-makers and DisCOs. Care Work First, Code Later: DisCO Philosophy 101 DisCO Futures: Building Tracks What needs to happen for DisCOs to grow and flourish across the economy? This is the purpose of the : to provide educational tools and experimental spaces for the ongoing, transnational development of DisCO. It’s an undertaking that needs ongoing support to reach a broad base of potential advocates and participants. DisCO Project DisCOs are designed to be developed from the bottom-up. To create the desired cooperative economic counterpower, they will need to find each other and network through agreements. Supportive legal and policy frameworks would greatly enhance some of the potentials described in this publication. As explicitly political and federated initiatives, DisCOs also act as a training ground for deliberative, inclusive decision-making processes, preparing members for responsible civic action. In this way, DisCOs could act as pilots to prefigure new forms of policy around networked politics. Given DisCO’s transnational orientation, the following recommendations are general and non-domain specific. Individual DisCOs and federated DisCO networks need to actively campaign for legislative change at various levels in applicable jurisdictions. Additionally, the objective is for the State to to empower and protect the creation and upkeep of DisCOs, but not direct the process of federated DisCO development. provide the necessary infrastructure [1] Arguably, the development of DisCOs centered on ecologically and socially-oriented work can directly address urgent crises at their root, radically and large infrastructure management and upkeep. democratizing social and public health provision This lessens the need for costly post-hoc state interventions and brings a more democratic distribution of economic power, alleviating government enforcement of redistributional strategies through taxes or benefits. DisCOs also provide solutions for state actors by providing meaningful employment, narrowing the digital divide, and actively addressing the gendered aspects of work. To support these goals we propose that states and municipalities enable DisCO development through: 1. The provision of special economic incentives for DisCOs, implemented as: a. Tax benefits, including reducing the tax rate dynamically calculated against measurable social and environmental gains, social security bonuses for employing underprivileged or marginalized persons and more. b. State-supported microcredit systems with demurrage based interest rates based on achievement of co-defined social provision goals. These can be delivered through cooperative banks, some of which may practice forms of DisCO accounting. State-supported social and crypto currencies are another possibility. c. Direct financial injection and social investment through renewable, interest-free loans. These can act as seed funding for DisCOs and enable positive credit valuation. d. Public subsidies towards DisCOs as a more democratic and mandate-accountable alternative to traditional NGOs. Worker Self Directed Nonprofits [2] e. The monetary value of employee pro-bono work could be treated as a tax-deductible contribution to the non-profit coop. 2. The development of legal frameworks to provide DisCOs with appropriate institutional (i.e., State, federal) support to facilitate their operation and innovative accounting practices. 3. The development of commons-public partnerships as an alternative to the established public-private, following the and models, with DisCOs facilitating: [3] Preston Evergreen a. Municipal service provision for local economies. b. FLOSS-built and open licensed, common-pool civic knowledge resources. [4] c. Practical workplace education on feminist economics, the commons, decentralized technology and the ethical market sectors offered by participating DisCOs. 4. Supportive municipal policies for provision or support for physical infrastructures for DisCOs, including hackerspaces, hackerlabs, maker and co-working spaces. Unused municipal facilities could serve as short- or long-term incubators for knowledge work, skill sharing and technology transfer, as well as for the development of new, federated DisCOs. 5. Support of community investment funds for federated DisCOs, with dispensations for: a. DisCO federation contributions b. Tax-exempt charitable donations c. State sponsorship (see point 1) 6. DisCO-oriented work training programs with DisCOs providing practical education in their specific sectors, as well as the DisCO methodology and tools. This would include transfer and acknowledgement of credits for higher education. 7. Research and higher education support, leveraging existing DisCO open-access documentation, training programs and pedagogical materials. 8. Support of DisCO initiatives as bottom-up facilitators of Green New Deal projects. Compared to normative public-private solutions, this would: a. Disburse funding for GND projects more equitably and at a lower risk, b. Enable substantial savings, absent a profit motive, c. Bring the benefits of impact at scale through highly federated actors, focused on regenerative economies of scope, not scale. 9. Prioritization of DisCOs and DisCO federations over for-profit entities when capitalizing on products/services derived from publicly funded research, including healthcare and medicine, code and end-consumer products. This would ensure fair pricing, ethical application and open licensing. 10. Policy development in concert with the International Labour Organization and the International Cooperative Alliance to recognize transnational, on-chain DisCOs as federated cooperatives. [5] Earlier we mentioned the first few . At present a variety of additional DisCO LABS in diverse sectors such as the arts, textile recycling/reuse, permaculture, education, online marketplaces and medicine are presently being planned and launched. Research findings from these pilots would experientially validate DisCOs advantages and potentially facilitate policy uptake. DisCO LABS Complementarily, there is abundant existing research on many of DisCO’s formative influences, such as multi-constituent social solidarity and cooperative sectors, existing Commons-public partnerships, the benefits/savings of FLOSS, blockchain/DLT experiences in record keeping and inventory tracking, can be included into DisCO-focused policy proposals. DisCOs are designed to be autonomous in operation and not State-dependent. From a legal standpoint, cooperatives are private entities. But in the interest of long term remediation — social, economic, environmental — governments would be called upon to prioritize support for generative, restorative industries, and to divert funding and subsidies away from harmful, extractive and exploitative ones. If DisCOs, to paraphrase the WWI, aim to ‘build the new world in the shell of the old’, it must be acknowledged that the old world still holds vast amounts of power. The affordances of radical, prefigurative projects such as DisCOs will always be affected by the constraints of existing systems, including public policy. [6] What DisCO proposes is : distributed production and economies not of , but of . With the increasing awareness and discussion (even if divisive) of our many global crises, taking a stand becomes more important, collectively and individually. Covid-19 has required countless people to work from home, which has also raised many reflective questions on the purpose and effects of those jobs. radical economic subsidiarity scale multi-faceted scope For true change to happen we must first address the productive and reproductive spheres of work, the decisions about what we produce and why, and how we regard fairness in the way we treat one another. Lasting change can’t be predicated on individualistic patterns of consumption, but consider this question: as citizens (more than consumers), can we continue to support the exploitative labor practices of the ever-growing economic power monopolies exemplified by Amazon, or do we see ourselves capable of contributing to the revolution of work, as exemplified by DisCO? While compatible with (i.e., co-operatives, the Social Solidarity Economy, etc.) and actively working to subvert the right-libertarian bent of most blockchain economics towards associationist ends, DisCOs also pave the way for decommodification and non-market exchange thanks to their commons orientation. existing economic forms They train us to resist and create capacity for whatever the future may hold. Finally, DisCOs place a at the center. Beyond the precariat, DisCOs exist to care for and reproduce — understood as people in communities who steward their own resources according to the rules, norms and values they set for themselves. new and more empowered political subject commoners With the sustenance of 2.5 billion people depending on natural resource commons and an abundance of commoning practices taking place in digital spaces, mutual aid groups, food production, cohabitation and fablabs and makerspaces, the logic of commoning is . DisCOs catalyze these practices into a feminist economic and care-oriented framework, paving the way for pervasively sustainable . evident in the ongoing Covid reality commons-based alternatives to the dominant order Wild facts and habit fables. Creatures, imaginations and impossible worlds. In this video feminist scholar and all around badass Donna Haraway shows us how Science Fiction is a “critical germ/seed and point of eruption” towards better futures. “No Experience Required” Afterword by Ann Marie Utratel I’ll keep this brief. If you’ve read some or all of this publication or its predecessor, the Disco Manifesto, it might seem like information best used by people with specific experience or expertise in fields like human resources, academic research, economics, organizational psychology, project management, accounting, team building, software design, cooperatives, or any of the other fields that may have been mentioned or implied. I don’t think that’s the case. The teams we’ve helped build and work with do have members with specific expertise, but they also have some people – like me – with far more general experience, and perhaps even several careers in their past. When I say “no experience required”, what I mean to do is remind you that in some moments, it’s more important to take a beginner’s approach and see what you can do with some new ideas. To someone who may be working from home now during the up-and-down pandemic crisis, I’d say try our time-tracking advice and understand where your precious hours go. If the research I’ve been reading is helpful to mainstream corporations, it’s helpful to you too: reports say that people are often more productive working from home, for a few reasons, one of them being that they’re simply spending more time working. Why? In my opinion, it’s possible that people don’t know when to stop, don’t have good boundaries yet, and don’t feel like they’re seen as “doing enough”. That’s not going to be sustainable in a shifting work-life balance full of new expectations, but it’s better not to rely on feelings or impressions. Capture your own time-tracking data and see for yourself. To someone who has a less secure position, or who is trying to move their side hustle up to the main focus, I’d say: consider if you might want to form a small, trusted team, make it a cooperative and share the workload as the side gig grows. Can you implement some mutual support practices? Are you interested in tracking care work, and opening discussions about how everyone’s work is valued?  Can the team make decisions together and bring everyone’s strengths forward? What about creating something to share in a community you belong to? Building an information or material commons is another step towards changing how we share and create together. All of the DisCO Principles and Values can be interpreted, adapted and implemented at a very small scale, and every step counts. If it seems like you’d need to be a multi-titled expert to take this on, let me debunk that right now. Cooperation doesn’t depend on titles, it depends on attitudes, goals and care. We care about the future, and we offer these ideas so that you can take inspiration and hope from them, starting exactly where you are right now. We’ll be here if you need us. Take care. About this article This article is the Last chapter of which is currently being serialised on HackerNoon. The featured image is by . for full image credits. Groove is in the Heart: The DisCO Elements , baddogwhiskas Click here DisCO stands for "Distributed Cooperative Organization" and it is a feminist, cooperative and commons-oriented alternative to the mainstream DAOspace. is a non-linear introduction to the "hows" of DisCO. to download the full PDF or EPub with extra content or visit for more resources. The DisCO Elements Click here DisCO.coop Footnotes How much should commoners be working with the Market/State? Here is our take on that subject: . Commons in the time of monsters: How P2P Politics can change the world, one city at a time is constituted as a legally registered in Andalusia, Spain. Guerrilla Media Collective non-profit and socially oriented worker owned cooperative For more on Commons-Public partnerships (the order of words is important) see . this report by Common Wealth FLOSS” stands for Free/Libre and Open Source Software. On-chain and Off-chain are terms used in the DAO space to distinguish algorithmic based governance (On-chain) from human agreements (Off-chain). We argue that the very dichotomy of off/on-chain elevates the blockchain as the primary focus of attention, subordinating social practices. In the DisCO Manifesto we argue that everything occurs “ ” where the corporeal dimension and human and environment needs precede all other considerations. For a simple description of On-chain/Off-chain governance, . onlife read this article Industrial Workers of the World. Click to visit their website or to read their history. here here

What Can Make DisCOs Grow

By Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel Have you ever gone out dancing with a bunch of friends? If so, chances are you went to a disco, at least once or twice. How does a group of friends dance at a disco? Everyone knows, or learns by observation, some basic rules of social cooperation — avoid stepping on anyone’s feet, watch out that you don’t slam into people sharing the space around you, and please don’t micromanage the dj. But everyone can decide when and how they want to dance, whether solo, in pairs or in larger groupings. The aim is to have a good time together, and to care about each other’s well-being, too. Doing things like going dancing with friends or colleagues can be fun and spontaneous, with nothing more than some informal or unspoken rules. Of course, if you want to achieve a more defined collective goal, that takes time, patience and more explicit guidelines — and if you really want to be cooperative about it all, it’s even better if you debate and create those guidelines together. When we were writing up our organisational model for cooperative groups, we thought about how to name it. Acronyms or initials are popular for models with multi-word titles, and can sometimes also hint at some characteristic of the ideas behind the name. So, what do we mean by a DisCO? It stands for , and it’s a set of organisational tools and practices for groups of people who want to work together in a cooperative, commons-oriented, and feminist economic form. DisCO is also an alternative to another form called the , or . If you're not familiar with DAOs, they are blockchain-based entities that can execute payments, levy penalties, and enforce terms and contracts without human interaction. Think of a virtual robot that can automate governance processes and execute investments and payments for an organization and you're on the right track. Distributed Cooperative Organizations Decentralized Autonomous Organizations DAO [1] While there are , DAO projects have mostly prioritised focus on , and grandiose promises of , while reproducing many of the of the normative systems they aim to disrupt and decentralise. There is also a distinct lack of political and historical of other movements which have prefigured the dynamics of decentralisation and who could benefit from the advantages offered by DAOs. many exciting aspects to this technology speculative assets tokenization disruption power dynamics awareness [2] By design, DAOs can earn their own money, and contract and pay for services — they can actually create and wield their own economic power, according to the interests of their programmers. That’s a crucial point to recognize - technology doesn’t develop itself, it’s built by people and companies with specific worldviews and intentions which underlie the aims of the code. With being made by mega-corporations like IBM, HSBC, Facebook, Goldman Sachs and others, there is a very real danger that the future of these decentralised autonomous organizations will reproduce and existing inequalities and power dynamics. Image DAOs that automate and hyper-boost things like mass surveillance, economic tyranny and the suppression of dissent. Sound dystopian? Take a look at the list of investors above and engage in some speculative thinking about their means, motives and objectives. blockchain investments in the billions of USD amplify After analysing the situation, it’s clear that we need counter-cultural alternatives to leverage the positive aspects of DAOs for radically different economic and social ends. Our proposal is the DisCO framework. Feminist economic, commons-oriented, cooperative, and value sovereign: The DNA of DisCOs DisCOs are a cultural and structural framework combining influences from other forms and movements into a practical toolkit that benefits from the potential of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) . Despite boasts of decentralization and challenges to existing power structures, many of these aspects are curiously absent from most blockchain projects. These are: [3] [4] Harnessing the potential of the blockchain while addressing its deficits, DiSCOs prototype and permit tailoring of the originally developed for , a radical translation collective/cooperative and the first pilot project for DisCOs. These initial DisCO experiences can be greatly amplified to make DAO technologies accessible to common people, cooperators and the economically disadvantaged, breaking the monopoly of a white/male tech elite's involvement and benefit. Distributed Cooperative Organization (DisCO) Governance Model Guerrilla Translation The Seven DisCO principles DisCOs are distributed cooperatives based on the , but cooperatives have their shortcomings. The seven DisCO principles build on the existing cooperative tradition, as well as to arrive at a series of guidelines for highly efficient, socially and environmentally-oriented organizations. original seven cooperative principles Platform and Open Cooperativism In DisCOs, production is guided not by profit but by social and environmental priorities. Individual organizations embed these values in their cultural, productive and organizational processes, and technical/legal statutes. Geared toward positive outcomes in key areas: DisCOs extend decision making and ownership to all contributors whether present in all value chains or affected by the coop’s actions. Beyond workers, this may include neighbouring communities, suppliers, clients, reproductive and affective labour, financial backers, etc. as constituents. Multi-constituent: Unlike the typical behavior of market enterprises that exploit shared resources, DisCOs steward existing common wealth and generate new forms of shared resources. These new commons are created through market and value-tracked pro bono work. Commons may be digital (code, design, documentation, legal protocols and best practices, etc.) or physical (productive infrastructure, deliberation spaces, machinery, etc.) Active creators of commons: While physical production is kept local and needs-based following the , knowledge, resources and are shared at the global level with like-minded enterprises to create political and cultural counterpower to the prevailing corporate/capitalist economy. Transnational: “Design Global, Manufacture Local” logic value flows We distinguish between two types of care work: that performed (where the collective is seen as a living entity that needs commitment, material inputs and fidelity to its social mission) and care work performed for (mutual trust and intimacy support structures). Centered on care work: for the health of the collective the individual persons within the DisCO Three types of value — productive market value, pro-bono/commons-generating value, and care work value — are tracked through complementary value metrics. Value tracking is applied to all DisCO members, in turn influencing decision making, payments, work priorities, and more. Reimagining the origin and flows of value: While networks may or may not share common goals, federations are held together by shared commitments. Scaling extends a worldview from a center and forces everything in its path to conform to the animating logic. By contrast, DisCOs, as distributed and differentiated structures, replicate themselves through a standard that allows the federation to achieve critical mass without regimenting all parts. This dynamic resembles how TCP/IP allows a network of networks, the Internet, to function. Each node can be based on small group trust, intimacy and mutual support while still achieving a larger impact through federation. Primed for federation: federation protocol Prototyping DisCOs in the field: The DisCO Project Moving beyond (the tendency for blockchain/DAO projects to over promise on technical specifications before there is any solid, lived experiences to a project or proposal), DisCOs are based on the practices of the four movements mentioned earlier ( ; ; ; ) as well as the concrete experience of Guerrilla Translation and its . whitepaper culture Commons/P2P Open Cooperativism Feminist Economics Open Value Accounting fully developed DisCO governance model The has been created to cooperatively develop, prototype and popularize DisCOs, and provide integrated resources for those wanting to take part in their development. Here we intend to mature, codify and open source our for other collectives practising contributive accounting. We are also co-developing a modular for other commons-oriented collectives and businesses to adapt. This culture/structure distinction is expressed through two complementary components to the project: The DisCO and the DisCO . DisCO project cultural practices legal/technical infrastructure Framework Stack (Culture) is predicated on care work, and prototypes real world practices. It includes resources such as an educational portal; handbooks; audiovisual materials; infographics; DiSCO-thons and workshops to engage communities in developing and prototyping the model in practice. The purpose is to make DLTs, Contributory Accounting, Feminist Economics and other components accessible to the precariat. The DisCO Framework (Structure) will offer plug-and-play systems for the value tracking and online collaboratory dynamics inherent to DisCOs. Utilizing a combination of non-blockchain Distributed Ledger Technologies with public blockchains, the Stack will provide user-friendly, lightweight and energy efficient small node, trustworthy value tracking and economic networking systems. The DisCO Stack Together, DisCO culture and structure can allow us to transcend blockchain normativity, bringing a slew of fresh influences to the decentralised space, while making it more accesible to a more diverse and engaged set of users. Footnotes This is a gross simplification. For a more in-depth look at Decentralised Autonomous Organizations we recommend by Primavera de Filippi. These can include lowered transactional costs for social interactions within commons-oriented organizations and the potential for value sovereignty. I.e., when done right DAOs can make countercultural, post-capitalists processes cheaper and more efficient. are, basically, synchronized databases shared among several nodes and without central administrators. Think of these as a broader understanding of a blockchain, although . For a quick overview, here are infographics for , , Open Value Accounting ( and ) and . These include adopting capitalist practices to ensure competitiveness as defined by market logics, a disconnected managerial class unfamiliar with cooperative practices and ethics, and, worst case, the demutualization of coops. See more . [1] this critical overview [2] [3] Distributed Ledger Technologies not every DLT is a blockchain [4] P2P and the Commons Open Cooperativism 1 2 Feminist Economics [5] here This article has been adapted from If I Only had a Heart: a DisCO Manifesto , a publication analysing the role of supposedly disruptive technologies in social change, the potentials and pitfalls of DAO cultures, and how DisCOs can provide a coherent, more socially grounded alternative. The DisCO team plans more to produce more accessible, inclusive reading materials for potential partners and peers. Written by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel Art by id iom CC-BY-NC

Last Night A Distributed Cooperative Organization Saved My Life: A brief introduction to DisCOs

Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction Abstract and 1. Introduction Related Work


Task, Datasets, Baseline


RQ 1: Leveraging the Neighbourhood at Inference
4.1. Methods
4.2. Experiments


RQ 2: Leveraging the Neighbourhood at Training
5.1. Methods
5.2. Experiments


RQ 3: Cross-Domain Generalizability


Conclusion


Limitations


Ethics Statement


Bibliographical References Related Work Related Work Related Work Task, Datasets, Baseline Task, Datasets, Baseline Task, Datasets, Baseline RQ 1: Leveraging the Neighbourhood at Inference
4.1. Methods
4.2. Experiments RQ 1: Leveraging the Neighbourhood at Inference 4.1. Methods 4.1. Methods 4.2. Experiments 4.2. Experiments RQ 2: Leveraging the Neighbourhood at Training
5.1. Methods
5.2. Experiments RQ 2: Leveraging the Neighbourhood at Training RQ 2: Leveraging the Neighbourhood at Training 5.1. Methods 5.1. Methods 5.2. Experiments 5.2. Experiments RQ 3: Cross-Domain Generalizability RQ 3: Cross-Domain Generalizability RQ 3: Cross-Domain Generalizability Conclusion Conclusion Conclusion Limitations Limitations Limitations Ethics Statement Ethics Statement Ethics Statement Bibliographical References Bibliographical References Bibliographical References 5. RQ 2: Leveraging the Neighbourhood at Training We leverage the knowledge from neighbour instances directly at the training process to improve the performance. We explore three methods: contrastive learning, single prototypical learning, and multi prototypical learning. These techniques draw inspiration from the same principles as their inference-time counterparts but serve as auxiliary loss constraints during training. Their primary aim is to improve the discriminative capability of embeddings by highlighting differences between instances with distinct rhetorical roles and similarities among instances sharing the same label. While the task-specific classification loss focuses on mapping contextualized representations to label outputs with supervision on individual instances, the methods in this section directly operate on embeddings in latent space. They exploit the interplay among instances to establish effective discriminative decision boundaries, serving as a form of regularization. 5.1. Methods 5.1.1. Contrastive Learning 5.1.1. Contrastive Learning Contrastive learning aims to bring an anchor point closer to related samples while pushing it away from unrelated samples in the embedding space. In a supervised setting, samples with the same/different labels are considered related/unrelated with respect to an anchor (Khosla et al., 2020). The loss is calculated as follows: where δ(ci , cj ) denotes 1 if ci and cj have same rhetorical label, else 0, N denotes batch size. Lengthy legal documents limits the number of documents that can be accommodated in a single batch and this raises concerns about having enough positive samples for the minority class instances within a batch for effective contrasting. To overcome this limitation, we utilize a memory bank (Wu et al., 2018), where we progressively reuse encoded representations from previous batches to compute the contrastive loss. In practice, we maintain a fixed-size representation queue for each rhetorical role. As new representations corresponding to specific labels are generated, they are enqueued into the respective queue with their gradients detached. If the queue size for a label exceeds the maximum limit, the oldest element is dequeued. When computing the contrastive loss, we use the same equation 7. However, in addition to the current batch instances, we employ all the representations stored in the memory bank for contrasting purposes, using them as both positives and negatives, based on the anchor point’s label. memory bank To incorporate the concept of context from surrounding sentences into contrastive learning, we introduce a novel discourse-aware contrastive loss. This is based on the idea that sentences in close proximity within a document, sharing the same label, should exhibit a stronger proximity in the embedding space compared to sentences with the same label but positioned farther apart in the document. To implement this concept, we introduce a penalty inversely proportional to the absolute difference in their positions. In particular, we impose a higher penalty on positive sentence pairs that are closer in the document, encouraging them to be closer in the embedding space than pairs originating from greater distances within the document. The discouse-aware loss is as follows: discourse-aware contrastive loss where β represents a penalty that considers positional information. When ci and cj come from different documents, such as cross-document positives/negatives from the memory bank or across the batch, we apply the lowest possible penalty, considering ci as the farthest sentence relative to in-document positives. We incorporate this additional contrastive loss alongside the classification loss during training. 5.1.2. Single Prototypical Learning 5.1.2. Single Prototypical Learning These both views shape the embedding space by aligning prototypes with their corresponding samples, forming distinct clusters of different labels, each centered around a specific prototype vector. 5.1.3. Multi Prototypical Learning 5.1.3. Multi Prototypical Learning Instead of using a single prototype for each label, this approach employs multiple prototypes for each label to capture the diverse variations within the sentences of the same label. To implement this, a set of M prototypes per label is randomly initialized and a diversity loss (Zhang et al., 2022) is integrated to penalize prototypes of the same label if they are too similar to each other. This ensures that prototypes of the same label are distributed across the embedding space, capturing the multifaceted nuances under each label. The Sample Centric View is also modified to ensure that each sample is in close proximity to at least one prototype among all the prototypes of the same class. Authors:
(1) Santosh T.Y.S.S, School of Computation, Information, and Technology; Technical University of Munich, Germany (santosh.tokala@tum.de);
(2) Hassan Sarwat, School of Computation, Information, and Technology; Technical University of Munich, Germany (hassan.sarwat@tum.de);
(3) Ahmed Abdou, School of Computation, Information, and Technology; Technical University of Munich, Germany (ahmed.abdou@tum.de);
(4) Matthias Grabmair, School of Computation, Information, and Technology; Technical University of Munich, Germany (matthias.grabmair@tum.de). Authors: Authors: (1) Santosh T.Y.S.S, School of Computation, Information, and Technology; Technical University of Munich, Germany (santosh.tokala@tum.de); (2) Hassan Sarwat, School of Computation, Information, and Technology; Technical University of Munich, Germany (hassan.sarwat@tum.de); (3) Ahmed Abdou, School of Computation, Information, and Technology; Technical University of Munich, Germany (ahmed.abdou@tum.de); (4) Matthias Grabmair, School of Computation, Information, and Technology; Technical University of Munich, Germany (matthias.grabmair@tum.de). This paper is available on arxiv under CC by 4.0 Deed (Attribution 4.0 International) license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC by 4.0 Deed (Attribution 4.0 International) license. available on arxiv available on arxiv

How AI Can Better Categorize Legal Documents by Learning from Similar Texts

Electricity could be traded like this. Electricity could be traded like this. Picture yourself standing in a busy market, eyeing stalls piled high with fresh tomatoes, peppers, and onions. You have options—bargain with the vendor who is cheapest today, skip the one who is overpriced, or buy from the one with the most decent price and cart away with it. Now, picture that same freedom, but for your electricity. No more being stuck with one provider who raises prices and leaves you with little or no choice. Instead, you are in control, picking the best deal from a lineup of suppliers, all thanks to blockchain. A Broken System In Nigeria, that is not how it works right now. You are tied to whatever company runs your area. Some people are paying through the nose—hundreds of naira for a single kilowatt-hour—while others barely get enough power to charge a phone. It is a monopoly that stifles us. But what if blockchain could flip the switch? A Market in Your Pocket Here is the vision: a phone app that acts as a power marketplace. Every electricity company posts its price—for instance, one at ₦190/unit, another at ₦250. You see it all clearly on a blockchain—a digital ledger that nobody can manipulate. You tap the app and say, “You know what, switch me to the cheap one.” Boom! A smart contract (think of it as an automated dealer) shifts you over—no paperwork, no waiting. Your payment goes through instantly, secured on that same blockchain, so no one is chasing you for unpaid bills. Better yet, electricity turns into tokens—digital credits you can buy at a low price, save for later, or even sell if prices spike. Imagine purchasing power at ₦200 today, then trading it for a profit when rates hit ₦240 tomorrow. It is like playing the stock market, but for keeping your deep freezer running! Everyone Wins This is not just a victory for consumers. The companies—those Discos we love to grumble about—would benefit too. Right now, they are stuck serving only a limited area. With blockchain, they could sell to anyone, anywhere, gaining more customers. Payments would reach their accounts the moment you buy—no delays, no excuses. Plus, they would have real-time data on demand, helping them improve service. And since we could switch providers anytime, they would have to step up their game. The Catch—and the Fix The Catch—and the Fix Of course, it is not all smooth sailing. The government must approve it; otherwise, this idea is dead on arrival. We would need smart meters—devices that communicate with the blockchain—and not everyone has one yet. Some companies might resist, afraid of losing control. And in areas with poor internet connectivity, how do people join the system? The solution? start small. Test it in a city like Lagos, where people are ready for change. Partner with telecom companies to roll out smart meters—they already know how to reach consumers. Give the Discos a share of the benefits so they get on board. And if the internet goes down, send a text with the latest deals. It is not perfect, but it is a start. The Big Picture Close your eyes and picture it: a family in Lagos picks a ₦200 deal, saving enough to buy their child’s school books. A large office with solar panels trades excess power with its neighbor, making extra income. Electricity providers compete to offer steady power, not just scraps, because they know we will walk away if they do not. And maybe, just maybe, solar and wind energy providers jump in, offering renewable power we can buy with a simple swipe. This is blockchain doing what it does best—cutting out the middleman, making things fair, and putting power (literal power!) in our hands. It is not science fiction; it is a solution waiting to happen. Nigeria’s electricity can be put on a marketplace—if we are ready to shop. Want to learn more? let us talk over coffee.

What If You Could Shop for Electricity Like You Shop for Groceries?

Synthetic Data in Face Recognition: A Game Changer or Just Hype?

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Üz tanıma sistemində sintetik məlumatlar: oyun dəyişdirici və ya sadəcə şırınga?

Datos sintéticos en el reconocimiento facial: ¿un cambio radical o solo una moda pasajera?

Szintetikus adatok az arcfelismerésben: játékváltó vagy csak hype?

Սինթետիկ տվյալներ դեմքերի ճանաչման մեջ.

顔認識における合成データ: ゲームチェンジャーか、それとも単なる誇大宣伝か?

Data Sintetik dalam Pengecaman Wajah: Pengubah Permainan atau Sekadar Gembar-gembur?

මුහුණු හඳුනාගැනීමේ සින්තටික් දත්ත: ක්‍රීඩාව වෙනස් කරන්නෙකු හෝ හුදෙක් හයිප් ද?

Synthetic Data muFace Recognition: A Game Changer kana Just Hype?

Data Synthetic katika Utambuzi wa Uso: Kibadilisha Mchezo au Hype Tu?

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人脸识别中的合成数据：改变游戏规则还是只是炒作？

On Combinations Amongst Masters or Workmen against Each Other

Now—soft awhile—have I arrived so near the end?

Mark Twain's Speeches by Mark Twain, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . ON POETRY, VERACITY, AND SUICIDE here ON POETRY, VERACITY, AND SUICIDE ADDRESS AT A DINNER OF THE MANHATTAN DICKENS FELLOWSHIP,
          NEW YORK CITY, FEBRUARY 7, 1906

          This dinner was in commemoration of the ninety-fourth
          anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.  On an other
          occasion Mr. Clemens told the same story with variations and a
          different conclusion to the University Settlement Society. I always had taken an interest in young people who wanted to become poets. I remember I was particularly interested in one budding poet when I was a reporter. His name was Butter. One day he came to me and said, disconsolately, that he was going to commit suicide—he was tired of life, not being able to express his thoughts in poetic form. Butter asked me what I thought of the idea. I said I would; that it was a good idea. “You can do me a friendly turn. You go off in a private place and do it there, and I’ll get it all. You do it, and I’ll do as much for you some time.” At first he determined to drown himself. Drowning is so nice and clean, and writes up so well in a newspaper. But things ne’er do go smoothly in weddings, suicides, or courtships. Only there at the edge of the water, where Butter was to end himself, lay a life-preserver—a big round canvas one, which would float after the scrap-iron was soaked out of it. Butter wouldn’t kill himself with the life-preserver in sight, and so I had an idea. I took it to a pawnshop, and [soaked] it for a revolver: The pawnbroker didn’t think much of the exchange, but when I explained the situation he acquiesced. We went up on top of a high building, and this is what happened to the poet: He put the revolver to his forehead and blew a tunnel straight through his head. The tunnel was about the size of your finger. You could look right through it. The job was complete; there was nothing in it. Well, after that that man never could write prose, but he could write poetry. He could write it after he had blown his brains out. There is lots of that talent all over the country, but the trouble is they don’t develop it. I am suffering now from the fact that I, who have told the truth a good many times in my life, have lately received more letters than anybody else urging me to lead a righteous life. I have more friends who want to see me develop on a high level than anybody else. Young John D. Rockefeller, two weeks ago, taught his Bible class all about veracity, and why it was better that everybody should always keep a plentiful supply on hand. Some of the letters I have received suggest that I ought to attend his class and learn, too. Why, I know Mr. Rockefeller, and he is a good fellow. He is competent in many ways to teach a Bible class, but when it comes to veracity he is only thirty-five years old. I’m seventy years old. I have been familiar with veracity twice as long as he. And the story about George Washington and his little hatchet has also been suggested to me in these letters—in a fugitive way, as if I needed some of George Washington and his hatchet in my constitution. Why, dear me, they overlook the real point in that story. The point is not the one that is usually suggested, and you can readily see that. The point is not that George said to his father, “Yes, father, I cut down the cheery-tree; I can’t tell a lie,” but that the little boy—only seven years old—should have his sagacity developed under such circumstances. He was a boy wise beyond his years. His conduct then was a prophecy of later years. Yes, I think he was the most remarkable man the country ever produced-up to my time, anyway. Now then, little George realized that circumstantial evidence was against him. He knew that his father would know from the size of the chips that no full-grown hatchet cut that tree down, and that no man would have haggled it so. He knew that his father would send around the plantation and inquire for a small boy with a hatchet, and he had the wisdom to come out and confess it. Now, the idea that his father was overjoyed when he told little George that he would rather have him cut down, a thousand cheery-trees than tell a lie is all nonsense. What did he really mean? Why, that he was absolutely astonished that he had a son who had the chance to tell a lie and didn’t. I admire old George—if that was his name—for his discernment. He knew when he said that his son couldn’t tell a lie that he was stretching it a good deal. He wouldn’t have to go to John D. Rockefeller’s Bible class to find that out. The way the old George Washington story goes down it doesn’t do anybody any good. It only discourages people who can tell a lie. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Mark Twain (2004). Mark Twain's Speeches. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3188/pg3188-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

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