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OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
Jul 03, 2024

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

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ANZREG 2024
Hugh Rundle, 2024/07/03

I certainly agree with Scott Leslie's recommendation that this keynote address is worth a read. I gave it a nice slow thorough read while watching the baseball game after making a cycling video. Let me linger on three points:

"for Yunkaporta everything is about relationships and flows..." This is presented as traditional knowledge, but it's basically core knowledge for me too.
"classification, cataloguing, and ontological mapping... flattens reality into a list of predetermined categories and definitions."
"spam... exploit(s) existing aggregations of human attention... So every commercial website is mostly spam."

My response: Knowledge is about interactions and flows, but language distorts knowledge by flattening distinctions and creating focal points that attract power and influence. Artificial Intelligence (as we know it today) is based on language - they are literally 'large language models'. That's why is appears to reify colonial inequalities, when in fact if designed correctly could do the opposite, by transcending the limitations of language.

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Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative
Chris Wanstrath, Ladybird, 2024/07/03

This is how Firefox started, back before Firefox depended on Google for revenue and before Mozilla was buying digital advertising companies. Sure, maybe it'll be nothing. But maybe, it won't. "Unlike traditional business models that rely on monetizing the user, Ladybird is funded entirely by sponsorships and donations from companies and individuals who care about the open web."

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ChatGPT Now Has PhD-Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove It
Katie Burgess, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, 2024/07/03

It's funny because it's true. Via Mignon Fogarty. "Its predecessors already produce hundreds or even thousands of words almost instantaneously. Now GPT-5 brings PhD writing skills to the table, meaning it can generate text at a rate of about ten words per day.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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