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Richard Littauer

@richlitt@mastodon.social

mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06

#OpenSource #OpenScience #OpenAccess, #birds and #birding, #inaturalist #ebird #Latin, #languages, travel and politics.

- Co-Organizer of CURIOSS @curioss@fosstodon.org, SustainOSS @sustainoss@hachyderm.io, and OpenSustain.tech
- PhD student at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in Pōneke Wellington, Aotearoa NZ
- Professional conlanger
- Linguist, Latinist, and taxonomist
- eBird reviewer

He/him.

Grew up on unceded Abenaki land.

0 Followers

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11 Posts

Joined April 03, 2017

Website:

https://burntfen.com

Socials:

http://richard.social

Podcast:

https://podcast.sustainoss.org

Richard Littauer @richlitt@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@joncounts@mastodon.nz I've been noticing this in Silver Gulls and wondering if there's a paper looking at the necessary wind and tide conditions to make this profitable. They only do it on calm days. There's also got to be something in the viscosity of the sand that allows it to surface inverts correctly.

Richard Littauer @richlitt@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@joncounts@mastodon.nz Of course, gulls in Edinburgh regularly do this on grass in the Meadows. Foot stomping is a known thing on grass; but I feel like it's limited in its use .... huh, has anyone looked at whether foot stompers prefer grass or beach during calm wet periods?

Richard Littauer @richlitt@mastodon.social

· 7mo ago

Lost the day to US taxes. Was a beautiful day.

Ahhh, the mountains I could have seen...

Richard Littauer @richlitt@mastodon.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

@mattblaze@federate.social Thanks for sharing your story. I see a lot of similarities to an issue I face in some of my work. I am curious: If you had known about the coming backlash, is there anything you would have done differently?

Richard Littauer @richlitt@mastodon.social

· 7mo ago

Ran an AGM today, and finished my six months of service on the exec committee for my postgrad student association. Happy to be just a member again. 🖖

https://www.burntfen.com/2026-03-16/te-herenga-waka-postgraduate-student-association

Burnt Fen

Te Herenga Waka PostGraduate Student Association

Rolling off another board

Richard Littauer @richlitt@mastodon.social

· 7mo ago

My add:

"Another wrinkle:

> [I] explicitly instructed Claude not to base anything on LGPL/GPL-licensed code

I don't know how much Claude can be trusted to have followed this instruction.

Further, many dependencies that may not have LGPL/GPL may have dependencies that do. Many code packages are not legally compliant all the way down their stack. I don't know of any LLMs or large open source stacks that have solved this issue."

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

GitHub

No right to relicense this project · Issue #327 · chardet/chardet

Hi, I'm Mark Pilgrim. You may remember me from such classics as "Dive Into Python" and "Universal Character Encoding Detector." I am the original author of chardet. First off, I would like to thank...