OLDaily

Computer Files Are Going Extinct
Simon Pitt, OneZero, 2019/10/15

This is part of the wider trend away from document-based resources and toward data, graph and algorithm. "Files are skeuomorphic," writes Simon Pitt. "That’s a fancy word that just means they’re a digital concept that mirrors a physical item." But there's no need for the digital concept to continue mirroring the physical item, especially when it means mirroring all the limitations of the format. This article is a nostalgic look back at files. "The file has been replaced with the platform, the service, the ecosystem. This is not to say that I’m proposing we lead an uprising against services. You can’t halt progress by clogging the internet pipes. I say this to mourn the loss of the innocence we had before capitalism inevitably invaded the internet.

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7 Major Learning Styles and the 1 Big Mistake Everyone Makes
Laura Lynch, LearnDash, 2019/10/15

Laura Lynch walks a fine line with this discussion of learning styles. "While the learning style theory—that individual students might have a style that helps them learn better—may be complete bunk," she writes, "presenting material in a variety of ways does have a lot of merit." Why? Well for one thing, it may assist people who have learning disabilities - though we should not, she says, confuse these with learning styles. Also, "most of us process information best when we encounter it in a variety of ways—social and solitary and physical and logical."

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Why Technologists Fail to Think of Moderation as a Virtue and Other Stories About AI
Evan Selinger, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019/10/15

This is a review of Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, a collection of 25 contributions edited by John Brockman. Evan Selinger writes that while the contributors "have lots of smart, multidisciplinary things to say about software and society, they mostly underplay or quickly move past the supersized consequences of supersized corporate ambitions." The answer is prehaps suggested by one of the contributors, Ted Chiang. “Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals,” Chiang declares, “because that’s the attitude they adopted.”

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