OLDaily

Hacker Tools
Anish Athalye, Jon Gjengset, Jose Javier Gonzalez Ortiz, GitHub, 2019/02/05

This badly-named short course offers some insights into the use of the command line for programmers and developers. It's pretty basic, pretty useful, and does address the need for documentation of the shared and mostly unwritten methodology used in these fields (read the self-help stuff out there and they all take this background for granted, scarce realizing that it creates an inpenetrable wall between the writers and their intended audience).

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Past the Point of No Return: The Not-So-Shadow Education Sector
Sasha Thackaberry, WCET Frontiers, 2019/02/05

This came up on Bryan Alexander's podcast, it came up in a post I wrote yesterday, and it keeps coming up as people talk about the "future of education" and "the future of colleges" as though they're one and the same thing. They're not. That's why Sasha Thackaberry writes, "The point-of-no-return has been reached in higher education; most institutions just don’t know it." What we're seeing is a constant increase in the range and volume of alternatives. "Into this landscape comes the 'Shadow Education Sector,' which is increasingly less shadowy," writes Thackaberry. "This category encompasses Boot Camps and a variety of micro-credentials from the providers formerly known as MOOCs." The question isn't whether universities will disappear; it really doesn't matter. The question is, what will the rest of the world do?

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Has Social Learning Been Forgotten?
Mark Britz, The Simple Shift, 2019/02/05

This article is pretty light and at times awkwardly written, but it does raise the interesting question, "has social learning been forgotten?" It's a good question. "Social learning isn’t seen first as learning but rather the emphasis is on the 'social' which to many still means chit-chat, Facebook friends and cats on a Roomba GIFs." And "Social learning, unlike its counterpart, formal learning, is a messy many-to-many rather than the neat one-to-many model of training." So it's hard to measure, and so it doesn't show up in a lot of management plans.

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Using Artificial Intelligence to Generate Alt Text on Images
Nino Ross Rodriguez, CSS Tricks, 2019/02/05

The title of this post makes it irresistable, but the content doesn't really match the title. The idea is that we can use Microsoft's AI service to automatically generate captions for images. I've tested it and it's actually pretty good, but it's not especially easy to see how easy this is. Yes, there's Take Sarah Drasner’s generator, which show you in a CodePen, but it's pretty complex. And yes, the sample in the article works, if you know what you're doing. And the Microsoft page is really heavy. So what I did is create a really simple version of it. Here it is. You will have to get a subscription key from Microsoft (there's a link on the page), but it's free and easy. You can save my sample page and it will work right off your desktop.

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“The Linux of social media”—How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging
Steven T. Wright, Ars Technica, 2019/02/05

I was never really a LiveJournal person but I might have been. It was a coin toss when I opted for Blogger instead. LiveJournal competed well with blogs but weren't able to match social media. It wasn't lack of features; it was usability. "We had basically all the major features you see today, like a friends page. But we didn’t quite figure out how to tell the story or keep people interested. We had every option, but nobody could get it to work." Eventually the site was sold to Russian investors. My LiveJournal page has long since been deleted, but I sorta miss it.

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