The Bonfire of the Models
David M. Berry* Bernardino of Siena organising a vanities bonfire, Perugia, from the Oratory of San Bernardino, by Agostino di Duccio, built between 1457 and 1461 “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus”, Bernard of Cluny, De Contemptu Mundi (On Contempt for the World). As quoted by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose . "Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation" , Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression . On 2 November 2026 a contributor to Xinference, an open-source server for language models, opened a pull request against five entries in its catalogue. Each pointed to a repository on Hugging Face that seemed to have been removed, and for four of them the Hugging Face API returned a 401 failure, the response it gives for a repository that is missing or has been made private (David-Wu1119 2026). Nobody had announced ...