Stephen Downes

Some people may appreciate this defense of traditional reading in print books, including especially science fiction. As someone who read thousands of science fiction books before the digital age arrived in force, I can attest to their value - but can I say that without reading print novels I wouldn't have arrived at 'interiority'? "I read novels to indulge in a concentrated and directed inner activity that parallels - and thereby tunes up, accentuates - my own inner life," writes Ed Simon. Novels do work - but, I think, so do the rich content experiences I have in a digital world. And I am very wary of denying that others have the sort of inner life I do, as it seems to me to be a way of dehumanizing them.

According to this article, "Uniplay's AI engine analyzes existing training content and matches it with game templates like quizzes, challenges, or timed scenarios. In the backend, AI then customizes each game for users based on data, learning goals, and past interactions." It doesn't really sound like any of the games I play; I think there should be a requirement that game-based LMSs be designed by actual game designers, or at least, gamers. Here's the original PR.

Here's the gist: "Google Gemini is getting an incredible new feature that will allow it to create mini clones of itself and send them off around the web to find information for you based on a prompt. It can then come back and create a complex, detailed report with links to the information it found." We're just a hop, skip and a jump from having it draft the literature review, then design an experiment for 45 midwest students, recruit them, run the survey, and send the results for publication.

This is a really interesting engineering challenge: how do you count when the people doing the counting are scattered around the world? For Netflix, it's a practical problem: each time someone views a Netflix video, Netflix wants to increment the 'views' counter by one. But how do you do that without the many flaws that might make the actual count inaccurate? This article describes their recently published "deep dive into their Distributed Counter Abstraction." Idempotency - the idea that the same REST request should return the same result - plays a key role. It allows remote sites to retry failed requests, for example, without double counting. This may seem to some like a pretty trivial problem, but as we enter the era of distributed computing, answering questions like this will be crucial.

The news here is Google's fault-tolerance milestone in its Willow quantum computing chip, the publication stamp (paywalled on Nature) having been placed on the preprint on arXiv from August. "Scientifically," writes Scott Aaronson, "the headline result is that, as they increase the size of their surface code, from 3×3 to 5×5 to 7×7, Google finds that their encoded logical qubit stays alive for longer rather than shorter." But the most interesting bit to me is this: "it would also take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to directly verify the quantum computer's results" Hence, "all validation of Google's new supremacy experiment is indirect." 

There are many places where I disagree with Alex Usher, but I think we're on the same page on this one. First, "we've spent 80 years building a system of higher education that is simply more expensive to run than the public is willing to support."Second, "Think about the consequences of reducing those cross-subsidies within universities at the exact moment when advances in technology are opening up huge potential advances in energy, materials science, and health." The cost of not supporting the system is huge. Usher argues that government is not coming to save the system. probably true. But I counter with the obvious: industry isn't going to save the system either. And so we agree that the higher education sector "is going to have to work out solutions on its own." I've spent a lifetime working on digital technologies for learning to try to help make that happen. But like a light bulb, the sector is going to have to want to change.