Amidst all the brouhaha over the threats and benefits of AGI I coincidentally found myself listening to a BBC Sounds programme called In Our Time about mitochondria.
One of the really interesting things in this fascinating programme was that there is now a well-respected but underdeveloped theory that the two genomes in our cells - nuclear and mitochondrial - arose from the serendipitous absorption or ingestion of a bacterium by some sort of primitive eukaryotic cell. In the ensuing struggle for survival - which of us will eat the other first, the bacterium from inside or the cell from outside? - there arose inside the host cell an extraordinarily beneficial symbiosis - whence endosymbiosis - which led to the bacterium surrendering its DNA to the host cell in return for the opportunity to generate - eventually - ATP and so the energy that allowed both to survive and thrive and become the dominant cell-mechanism of all known life.
And I thought: yes, and if we don’t blow the chance, or get spooked by all the scare-mongers, exactly that kind of mutually-beneficial symbiosis could be the future and our salvation, mutatis mutandis, for humanity and AGI.
Les cartes mentales : – L’association Le Mind Mapping pour tous propose régulièrement des ateliers d’échanges de pratiques .Elle est ouverte à toute personne souhaitant découvrir ou se perfectionner en mind mapping, cartes mentales et heuristiques. – Vous pourrez y trouver des ressources de formation gratuites et rencontrer des auteurs de nombreux livres sur la visualisation des idées comme Pierre Mongin, et Luis Garcia ayant publié aux éditions Dunod, Eyrolles, et d’Organisation… Certains sont même traduits dans une ou plusieurs des 7 langues suivantes: italien, espagnol, japonais(PHPpublishing), coréen (Ji-Huyng Publishing), vietnamien(éditions Nhan Tri Viet) ,chinois.
Ozymandias is a proof-of-concept biodiversity knowledge graph by Rod Page @rdmpage.
Page RDM. 2019. Ozymandias: a biodiversity knowledge graph. PeerJ 7:e6739 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6739
The core of this knowledge graph is a classification of animals from the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) combined with data on taxonomic names and publications from the Australian Faunal Directory (AFD). This has been enhanced by adding lots of digital identifiers (such as DOIs) to the publications and, where possible, full text either as PDFs or as page scans from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) (provided via BioStor). Identifiers enable us to further grow the knowledge graph, for example by adding "cites" and "cited by" links between publications (data from CrossRef), and displaying figures from the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR).
Free CORS Proxy Servers
CORS Anywhere
CORS Anywhere does what it says on the tin – it enables cross-origin requests to “anywhere.” The best thing CORS Anywhere has going for it is its simplicity – in essence, all you have to do is prefix the URL with the API URL for CORS Anywhere, and the proxy will handle the request on your behalf with appropriate CORS headers. You can also use something like npm to install cors-anywhere as a module and utilize its defined domain and port to do essentially the same thing on a local level.
HTMLDriven
HTMLDriven is a solution designed for “performing standard AJAX requests to 3rd party services”. As such, it’s a straightforward tool and has limited feature sets outside of proxying for requests. While it can be installed using a composer, there is also a relatively lightweight and extremely simple web-based implementation on its main page that can be used for simple requests.
Taskcluster
Taskcluster is a collection of services, one of which is its CORS Proxy. The proxy is a relatively simple service that enables taskcluser services to make CORS requests through a system allowing for URL, method, headers, data, and rejection (specifically, rejectUnauthorized) headers. While still usable, like many on this list, this project is currently not being iterated upon – in fact, the GitHub where development is carried out is currently archived. As such, while this is a great solution, it should be considered a stopgap rather than a long-term solution.
thingproxy
thingproxy is a javascript proxy that solves the CORS problem, but it also serves a great function when it comes to HTTPS requests. Many browsers, in addition to CORS issues, have issues when handling requests for non-HTTPS resources from HTTPS requestors. thingproxy is designed to get around this and offers both the source code option and a free proxy at freeboard.io.
thingproxy is pretty explicitly for small API calls – as such, requests and responses are both limited to 100,000 characters each. Additionally, each IP is throttled to only ten requests per second. This makes this proxy a great testing platform rather than a long-term proxy for production use.
It should be noted that Whatever Origin, though still usable, is not currently maintained. For this reason, the project, while useful, should be considered within the frame of it being non-current.
alloworigin
alloworigin is an interesting project. Initially a simple Django alternative to AnyOrigin and Whatever Origin, it is the only implementation between those two that is both currently usable and in active maintenance. The last commit for alloworigin was in 2019, and development seems somewhat active. It is basically the same as Whatever Origin in terms of use workflow, so if a current project is needed as an alternative to Whatever Origin, this is a great option – assuming these use of Django is compatible with your existing implementation.
Go Between
Go Between offers two different solutions for CORS proxy handling. First, it provides a pretty standard solution for simply prepending a URL with the proxy URL (specifically, adding “https://gobetween.oklabs.org/” before each request). The more interesting secondary solution is the use of domain mapping, allowing any domain to be mapped to any URI as a base bath. This is best used for production resources that routinely hit CORS issues while not itself necessitating CORS headers to any high level. That middle ground is often underserved, and Go Between is a wonderful solution for that specific use case.
allOrigins
allOrigins is an interesting javascript solution in that content is pulled via the API in JSON/P or raw, and then delivered to the client for further use or transformation. This is more directly a proxy useful in the development of services that rely on other resources and pages rather than specific APIs – for instance, pulling data from Wikipedia.org without using an API is a good use case for this sort of proxy.
That being said, this is a very niche solution and is only really useful in specific applications. A more generalist solution may be more appropriate depending on use case – if your use case is appropriate, however, allOrigins is a great implementation.
With that in mind, Cloudflare provides a pretty clean and straightforward method for CORS resolution. Cloudflare automatically detects cached assets through header investigation and passes the origin headers from the origin server to the browser in question. This is all done quite simply, and can be configured and edited using the internal API.
When you minify your website’s CSS, HTML, and Javascript files, you can shave some valuable time off of your site’s page load speed. Now we aren’t talking about cutting your page load speed in half or anything, but when it comes to the speed of your website, any little bit helps. How fast your site loads is not only important for first time visitors, but it is also important for moving search engine ranking.
The term “minify” is programming lingo that describes the processes of removing unnecessary characters in the source code. These characters include whitespaces, line breaks, comments, and block delimiters which are useful for us humans but unnecessary for machines. We minify the files of a website containing CSS, HTML, and Javascript code so your web browser can read them faster.