OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Did an LLM help write Trump’s trade plan?
Gary Marcus, Marcus on AI, 2025/04/03

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This is a textbook example of an 'inference to the best explanation', also known as abductive reasoning. Explanations are evaluated by their coverage (do they explain every case?) and by their simplicity(do they involve the fewest parameters possible). Good explanations are also testable. This meets all three criteria: all the tariff rates are explained, it's a very simple explanation (trade divided by trade deficit equals percentage), and it can be tested by putting the same question to AI engines. Sure, the explanation means that the American calculations are completely made up, but that's actually more plausible than any alternative. Kudos to James Surowiecki for working this out (though to be fair, the crowd probably helped him).

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MCP Security Notification: Tool Poisoning Attacks
InvariantLabs, 2025/04/03

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It took this long to find a problem in model context protocol (MCP) servers. "A Tool Poisoning Attack occurs when malicious instructions are embedded within MCP tool descriptions that are invisible to users but visible to AI models." The page shows how a local MCP server could be prompted to extract private keys and send them to an attacker's email address.

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NaNoWriMo shut down after AI, content moderation scandals
Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch, 2025/04/03

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National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) was a fun idea that started as a Yahoo discussion lost. Somewhere along the line it commercialized, forming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (you might argue that this is non-commercial, but I struggle to understand why it needed financial organization at all). Anyhow, the inevitable happened: NaNoWriMo "announced on Monday evening that it is shutting down." The causes of the commercial failure included "longstanding financial issues that have made it difficult to operate", board member resignations over its stance on AI, and "controversies over content moderation." My suggestion: create and follow a #nanowrimo hashtag on Mastodon, write what you want this November, and share your stories using the hashtag. No commercial organization needed.

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Watch Global & Local Live TV Online for Free
2025/04/03

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Remember I Crave TV? This is the same. I have no idea how legal it is, so enjoy free Angolan TV while you can. "Watch Free Live TV from Around the World on tv.garden! Stream live news, sports, and entertainment—no subscription needed. Start watching now!" Via Alan Levine.

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Protect authors’ livelihoods from the unlicensed use of their work in AI training
Anna Ganley, Change.org, 2025/04/03

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Referencing an article in the Atlantic that is, naturally, behind a paywall, this petition launched by The Society of Authors demands "that Meta is held to account by the UK government following allegations in the U.S. that authors' works have been used without permission or remuneration to train its AI model." It would not surprise me at all that Meta would simply disregard copyright law in pursuit of the AI genie, just as it would not surprise me at all to see the same company vigorously prosecute third party scraping of its websites to collect data for their own purposes. Via Sheila MacNeill.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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