Stephen Downes

ChatGPT launched a 'study mode' feature in July which they say is a set of "custom system instructions we've written in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts to reflect a core set of behaviors that support deeper learning including." In this post, Simon Willison reveals the (surprisingly short) prompt.

Some time in August some companies (read: Google) proposed the removal of the XML stylesheet language, or XSLT, from the HTML specification. There was a slightly delayed reaction (it was, after all, August) but then people began to push back. This post in the HTML 'issues' section (now 'closed') raises some of them, and lists a variety of places where XSLT is used. Of particular note: "There's no public record for the decision. The only publicly available discussion you linked to clearly states that the numbers are not low enough, people will object to this decision, and that the discussion should be postponed. There's no investigation into the long tail of web sites, of how many exactly would be broken etc."

This is a long and detailed overview of Bluesky's ATmosphere Protocol (ATProto) including the types of servers involved and how they interoperate. Many of the individual bits have already been discussed in OLDaily before, including several of the documents listed at the end of the article, but it's worth seeing it all put together. I've commented before that ATProto is impressive in its ambition, and in theory a distributed fediverse is supported. But it might be like so much of the technology we've seen over the years: overbuilt for its intended purpose, and ultimately undermined by the voracious appetites of its VC backers. Still, in many ways it's a work of art and I invite readers to admire it.

I had an interesting conversation with Ian O'Byrne after he posted this item on using an AI to analyze all his notes on Obsidian. "Instead of generic advice, I got a systematic analysis of my actual knowledge system, complete with specific examples, quantified insights, and actionable recommendations." What I thought might be interesting would be to see the AI compare and contrast two separate sets of notes from different people. "Imagine what an AI would reveal if it analysed yours and Will Richardson's notes side-by-side."

This item, via Alan Levine, is mostly for myself, as it offers a nice base to allow me to add a calendar function to CList (I really need a new name for the application - any suggestions?). What's attractive is that there's a plain vanilla Javascript version, which allows me to continue my approach of now requiring any large framework in the application code.

If you have been wondering where the newsletter is, well, I am on hiatuis until August 25 for a long-planned bikepacking adventure in Iceland. As I type, I am in Selfoss, five days into the trip, and everything has been as difficult as you could imgine. This link is to my video playlist, which you can check from time to time; I've recorded a fair amount of video and uploaded almost none. But I will, I promise. In the meantime, I don't promise that there will be no OLDaily posts, but definitely don't count on hering from me for a month.,