Stephen Downes

Jon Udell introduces Bram, an integrated development environment (IDE) for writing software with the assistance of Claude Code or Codex. Udell points - correctly - to how well the AI works with the underlying terminal technology - Linus shell commands, git, perl, and the rest. It makes previously complex tasks a lot easier. I have a similar experience using VS Code, another IDE, with the Claude Code plugin (don't use Claude via Copilot, that gets very expensive). The point here is that the IDE isn't replacing my learning; instead, it's doing things I was never going to learn.

According to this article, "A biology journal that paid peer reviewers found that the approach cut the time to a first editorial decision by 85% and maintained high-quality reviews." This shows the danger of depending (or even reporting) on a single study. I have no doubt quality would decline over time as people got used to being paid. Turn-around time, meanwhile, would drop as reviewers tried to maximize income. The review process itself needs rethinking, not how it's paid for.

I agree with this, and with much of the argumentation that leads to it: "We find ourselves in a crisis that brings clarity. AI has made visible the deep tensions in how we organize intellectual production, tensions that the IP regime has papered over for decades. If we respond only by trying to shore up that regime, we will miss the opportunity to build something better."

I think this article accurately describes the state of affairs around language learning and language acquisition. "I went to Brazil without a word of Portuguese and came out speaking it. I studied French in a classroom for years and cannot hold a conversation in French today. This is not an unusual experience. It is the expected outcome, and it has been the expected outcome for as long as we have had formal language education." The issue, according to Shrey Shah, is that language learning asks, first, what can be measured, and teaches for that, and as a result, ultimately fails to support actual language acquisition. "Before reaching for what can be measured, it is worth asking what the user actually needs to do, and what stopped them from doing it before." The answer is almost never 'better test scores'. But how can we imagine a system of education without them? Can we imagine a learning application that doesn't work like that?

I saw a comment from someone on the socials today referring to Canada Day - which is today - as a "slightly-problematic-holiday". It has bothered me all day. For while I get the point of the comment, and indeed am sympathetic with it, I think the commenter in turn isn't getting the point of Canada Day. And so while I haven't trotted out this post for a while, it's still pretty foundational to me and to what it is I think that we're all up to here in Canada. If you haven't read it, please do.

I think what Creative Commons has done over the last 25 years has been remarkable, both as an alternative approach to copyright licensing, and as an interesting exercise in viral marketing. But it's important to keep the lines of causality straight. This article suggests that Creative Commons induced millions of people (at one point it suggests billions, which is... no) to share their content. But from where I sit (and I was there back then) Creative Commons was responding to a need already present in the community where people did want to share their content, but without some content farm slurping it up and calling it theirs. There were already millions of pieces of open content online., and various licenses already existed and any of them would have done the job, but Creative Commons always approached this as a lobbying and marketing exercise, and when they teamed up with (eg.) MIT OpenCourseWare they became unstoppable (I've documented this in the past).