Stephen Downes

I spent yesterday working with Claude to transfer my newsletter functions to Amazon SES, something that would have taken a week in the past, if it were possible at all (there were some very tricky bits involving signature validation and depreciated Perl crypto modules). For the record, it was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot (though Amazon's user interface is still an impenetrable wall of confusion to me). So when Ethan Mollick talks about how much AI models have improved over the last few weeks, I believe him. He outlines AI's performance on various tests and standards and describes The Software Factory, a system that takes human specifications and outputs functioning code, no human code review required. "AI companies are telling us, fairly explicitly, what comes next: recursive self-improvement, or RSI. This is the idea that AI systems are increasingly being used to build better AI systems."

This is really neat: a version of WordPress that runs entirely in your browser on your computer. See also Planet WordPress on this. "There's no sign-up, no hosting plan, and no domain decision standing between you and getting started... This isn't a temporary environment meant to be discarded. It's a WordPress that stays with you... sites on my.WordPress.net are private by default and not accessible from the public internet... This turns WordPress into a personal workspace." I've tried it and it works. It uses local storage for files and an SQLite database. My CList app is built the same way, but this is much more sophisticated. "Thanks to incredible advances in WebAssembly (WASM), we can spin up a web server, a database (SQLite or MariaDB), and a full WordPress installation inside your browser in about 30 seconds. Instantly. No server needed." Via Alan Levine.

A second edition of the Internet Phone Book is being prepared and if like me you have an independent personal website then you can submit your listing. The phone book is "an annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators."

Some truth from Julian Stodd: "Our desire to keep people at the centre of our organisations is noble, understandable, but ultimately not borne out by history or experience." We have always been happy to outsource labour - to machines, to overseas workers, to whatever. "Once labour becomes substitutable, the market will substitute it. Just ask anyone who owns a wheelbarrow." And few outside labour unions have complained; the people who opine and write and make decisions about such things have been insulated from the consequences and haven't really cared. Until now. Now it's the organization itself that can be replaced. Most service organizations exist because there is an information assymetry, writes Stodd. We pay for their services not because we want to but because we have to, and if AI redresses that assymetry, then we can and will stop paying them. Even if the people in question are the people who opine and write and make decisions.

Doug Belshaw captures here some core questions about learning and memory. "In Borges' story Funes the Memorious, the protagonist falls from a horse and acquires a perfect memory... As Borges writes: "To think is to forget a difference, to generalise, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details.'" But what Borges calls 'forgetting' others might call 'filtering', and what's interesting to me is that it's the opposite of what most people think of as abstraction, where generalization is a process of inductive inference reaching (ideally) to universal principles and the essences of things. That's where my thinking usually lingers, but Belshaw also takes this in the direction of organizational memory, AI, and dashboard design. "There is a useful distinction to be drawn between legibility and significance: Legibility means that something is capturable as data... Significance means who important that data is in terms of actually mattering." The details are legible. The generalizations are significant. But they're not (contra the universalists) simple. "They're difficult to quantify not because they're 'vague' but because they're complex. It's difficult to put a single number on complexity." A rich post.

The question being posed here is whether there is, "in certain forms of sharing, a more or less well-disguised colonialism?" The three authors each offer their own view. My own view aligns most closely with that expressed by Darrion Letendre, who says "colonialism is a problem because its very foundations inherently contradict what open education strives to be: inclusive, communal, accessible, openly licensed, and easily adaptable." The other two authors each raise the issue of reciprocity, but from different directions: one where we take without giving back, and the other where we give without taking back. These are, if you will, two aspects of openness: sharing of your own stuff with others, and being open to receiving what other people have to share. I think both are important, but I don't think it should be thought of as transactional. Anyhow, do take the time to have a look at this. See also SSIR, Autonomy, Culture and the Voice of Silence.