Stephen Downes

Definitely the AI-sceptics will enjoy this takedown of an OpenAI-inspired conferences that seems to be all talk and no intelligence. Those sceptical of academia in all its forms and pretenses will also find reasons to enjoy the article. I don't know whether any of what was described really took place, but that seems to be irrelevant. And I can't help but feel how familiar all this feels to me. We are playing a superficial game in which we criticize our own superficiality, yearning for depth, but not aware that we have been misled about what depth really is for all these years (p.s. I read this while listening to Jean-Michel Jarre, which probably didn't help with my objectivity at all).

I literally made this comment in a prompt in a recent ChatGPT interaction: "You have got to be kidding me, I have a rule that stated that I never wanted you to do that, and you just ignored it?" And I think the core point of this article - that vibe-coding using an AI isn't the cure-all it's made out to be - is a good one. Part of this is because AI can be stubbornly mule-headed. But just as often, it's because the problem or project isn't as clearly formulated in your mind as you thought it was. The unexpected use case, the one-in-a-million exception, the forgotten data type: humans often forget them, and AI will definitely forget them. We need to keep this in mind because a lot of these errors are the sort of thing that will impact only one in a hundred or one in a thousand people - and in institutions, we're not really good at listening to so small a demographic. 

This is a fascinating discussion for anyone who creates or uses content management systems. Here's the setup: Lee Robinson migrated cursor.com (a website supporting the Cursor AI engine) from Sanity (a content management system) to an AI-authored melange of cloud services including GitHub, documenting the whole process. "What I previously thought would take weeks and maybe an agency to help with the slog work was done in $260 of tokens (or one $200/mo Cursor plan)," wrote Robinson. This article was written by Knut Melvær, an executive at Sanity, who observes, "when a high-profile customer moves off your product and the story resonates with builders you respect, you pay attention." And while he agrees with a lot of what Robinson, the gist of this response is that while a non-CMS solution might work in the short term, you will eventually run into the sort of problem a CMS was intended to solve. "Markdown files are the content equivalent of denormalized strings everywhere. It works for small datasets. It becomes a maintenance nightmare at scale."

I don't know whether the offices at IBM are as employee-friendly as they seem to be based on this article, but I definitely endorse the argument that 'return to office' requires much more intentional design of how we work in offices at all. "Today's leaders mandating return-to-office (RTO) policies are solving the wrong problem. They're focusing on attendance rather than engagement. If your people don't want to be in your space, that's not their failure - it's yours. The spaces you've created aren't compelling enough. Full stop."

"It's clear a new cultural moment is opening," writes Marjorie Kelly, "a moment when worker ownership might take on a new sheen of possibility and promise." Might that work to reorganize learning? The article suggests, "nonprofits, churches, and universities can incorporate employee ownership programming and advocacy into their work on issues like community stability, wealth inequality, and the racial wealth gap." It's hard to say, though - the logistics are so different for young children as compared to professional certification. And education isn't just a workplace - it's also a place where a society or organization invests in its future goals and objectives (which may range from developing a workforce to developing a social conscience) by hiring people to put these into practice. I'm not ruling it out - and in general, I'm a great proponent of worker ownership - but it's complex.

I'm not a fan of this at all, but it doesn't surprise me at all that someone created it. The idea is that you sign up for an account using your Mastodon ID (other services to be supported later) and then ask people for money, which they pay you through CrowdBucks.