Simon Willison's Weblog: ibm

A computer can never be held accountable

2025-02-03T13:17:44+00:00

A computer can never be held accountable

This legendary page from an internal IBM training in 1979 could not be more appropriate for our new age of AI.

A computer can never be held accountable

Therefore a computer must never make a management decision

Back in June 2024 I asked on Twitter if anyone had more information on the original source.

Jonty Wareing replied:

It was found by someone going through their father's work documents, and subsequently destroyed in a flood.

I spent some time corresponding with the IBM archives but they can't locate it. Apparently it was common for branch offices to produce things that were not archived.

Here's the reply Jonty got back from IBM:

I believe the image was first shared online in this tweet by @bumblebike in February 2017. Here's where they confirm it was from 1979 internal training.

Here's another tweet from @bumblebike from December 2021 about the flood:

Unfortunately destroyed by flood in 2019 with most of my things. Inquired at the retirees club zoom last week, but there’s almost no one the right age left. Not sure where else to ask.

Tags: computer-history, ethics, history, ibm, ai, ai-agents, ai-ethics

Docling

2024-11-03T04:57:56+00:00

Docling

MIT licensed document extraction Python library from the Deep Search team at IBM, who released Docling v2 on October 16th.

Here's the Docling Technical Report paper from August, which provides details of two custom models: a layout analysis model for figuring out the structure of the document (sections, figures, text, tables etc) and a TableFormer model specifically for extracting structured data from tables.

Those models are available on Hugging Face.

Here's how to try out the Docling CLI interface using uvx (avoiding the need to install it first - though since it downloads models it will take a while to run the first time):

uvx docling mydoc.pdf --to json --to md

This will output a mydoc.json file with complex layout information and a mydoc.md Markdown file which includes Markdown tables where appropriate.

The Python API is a lot more comprehensive. It can even extract tables as Pandas DataFrames:

from docling.document_converter import DocumentConverter
converter = DocumentConverter()
result = converter.convert("document.pdf")
for table in result.document.tables:
    df = table.export_to_dataframe()
    print(df)

I ran that inside uv run --with docling python. It took a little while to run, but it demonstrated that the library works.

Tags: cli, ibm, ocr, pdf, python, ai, hugging-face, uv

Scaling Django web apps on Apache

2009-04-10T09:23:21+00:00

Scaling Django web apps on Apache

Cool to see this kind of article cropping up on IBM developerWorks, but it’s a shame they don’t mention mod_wsgi.

Tags: apache, django, ibm, modwsgi, python

DB2 support for Django is coming

2009-02-18T22:58:50+00:00

DB2 support for Django is coming

From IBM, under the Apache 2.0 License. I’m not sure if this makes it hard to bundle it with the rest of Django, which uses the BSD license.

Tags: antonio-cangiano, bsd, databases, db2, django, ibm, licensing, open-source, orm, python

Damien Katz: New Gig

2008-01-02T20:35:24+00:00

Damien Katz: New Gig

IBM have employed Damien Katz to work full time on CouchDB. The work will be under the Apache license with the ASF owning the copyright.

Tags: apache, asf, couchdb, damien-katz, ibm

Introducing Operator

2006-12-18T16:36:37+00:00

Introducing Operator

New microformat detecting Firefox extension, developed at IBM and released by Mozilla Labs. Examples are from Yahoo! Local, Upcoming and Flickr.

Tags: extension, firefox, flickr, ibm, microformats, mozilla, mozillalabs, upcoming, yahoo

IBM poop heads say LAMP users need to "grow up"

2005-05-30T09:34:47+00:00

IBM poop heads say LAMP users need to "grow up"

Ryan blows away a ton of the myths surrounding LAMP.

Nope. We call bullshit. After wasting years of our lives trying to implement physical three tier architectures that "scale" and failing miserably time after time, we're going with something that actually works.

Tags: ibm, lamp, ryan-tomayko

IBM: 'LAMP' users need to grow up

2005-05-26T23:41:03+00:00

IBM: 'LAMP' users need to grow up

Which is why Friendster switched from JSP to PHP. Pfft.

Via Linux Today

Tags: ibm, lamp

IBM to Free Java - Next Week?

2005-01-19T16:54:05+00:00

IBM to Free Java - Next Week?

The question mark means it’s a rumour.

Tags: ibm, java

Linux on the desktop at IBM

2003-11-16T00:41:08+00:00

Spotted on Slashdot, IBM's Open Source Desktop - Directions for today... and Tomorrow presentation includes one slide that really caught my attention:

To continue our own journey to becoming an on demand business, IBM expects to migrate our internal desktop environment, where appropriate, to open standards based on the Linux platform.

Of course, depending on how they define "appropriate" this could be a lot less exciting than it looks. Still, it's a pretty huge boost for the Linux desktop movement.

Tags: ibm, linux

IBM accessibility center

2002-07-22T23:42:28+00:00

IBM's Accessibility Center has a plethora of useful information and resources, including a free 30 day trial of their Home Page Reader text-to-speech browser software.

Tags: accessibility, ibm