Stephen Downes

It might not be possible to own Wikipedia, but it can surely be wrecked, and people have started targeting it to insert alternative facts. So this may be an opportune time to create a backup on your own media nobody can disrupt. "I am self-hosting Wikipedia offline using KIWIX," writes Jean Dinco. "KIWIX is a free software that allows users to access digital content offline." More on Kiwix.

From the website: "Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API." This is something I want to work with. Here's a post linking to descriptions and videos of six projects that have integrated with Datasette (including an LLM that helps build LLM plugins).

I followed up on a link from Ash Barber and eventually landed on this, the Open Practice Library, a set of dozens and dozens of helpful practices people can undertake to help yourself or your group get moving on something open. "The Open Practice Library is an open source, community-driven inspired library of best practices and tools. It helps individuals, teams and entire businesses figure out the optimal ways to get to the best outcome." Examples? 6 dimensions of discovery, abstraction laddering, affinity mapping, experiment canvas, and many more.

Here's the argument: "Much of the power of work such as counselling lies in a relationship where we properly see each other," says sociology professor Allison Pugh "We need to impose a 'connection criterion' to help us decide which AI to encourage – the kind that creates new antibiotics, for instance, or decodes sperm whale language – and which to put the brakes on, that is, the kind that intervenes in human relationships." Sounds great, but key questions remain: who are the 'we' who make the decisions, and who pays the cost for ensuring these very human services reach everyone? Via Sheila MacNeill.

StackOverflow is a website that used to be the developer's best friend. Got a problem or an error code? Search Google, and the answer would come up on StackOverflow. If it didn't, then ask the question yourself, and experienced developers would answer. Answers were rated and discussed and the best usually rose to the top. But what happened? Activity peaked between 2014-17, with another peak in 2020, but have dropped off the charts. Was ChatGPT to blame? Well, despite what this article suggests, the answer is 'no'. It was bad management. It became harder and harder to ask a question, and it just wasn't user-friendly. It was acquired by private equity in 2021, which means users were now wary of being monetized. Also, some time around then Google de-priorized StackOverflow results and began pushing Reddit. Now this may have had something to do with AI. But in general, in the coming months, a lot of bad management is going to blame its failures on AI. Don't always believe them.

Some fun. "For the last six months," writes Dave Rupert, "I've been incrementally changing the color scheme on my website every single day. I boiled you like a frog! Mu-wa-ha-ha. Don't believe me? Try for yourself..." He then offers a colour wheel that demonstrates the change right away, instead of over days. It's simple and elegant and I want to steal the colour wheel. Via Piccalilli.