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Mark Zuckerberg's new toy is a parasite. Please don't fall into his latest trap.
Ariana Bindman, Sfgate, 2026/10/19

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This is a column from SFGate warning people about MUSE, Meta's personal agent AI. "In addition to storing logins and passwords and linking your bank account information, it wants to see your messages, personal calendar and contacts, requesting more sensitive information than virtually any other AI app, according to ZDNET." The concern isn't so much that it has this information as what it wants to do with it. "The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us," media theorist and CNN columnist Douglas Rushkoff wrote in 2013. "They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers."

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Designing for Kindness
Kona Jones, Instructure, 2026/10/22

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"The single most important strategy we can use to help our students succeed in our courses is to care about them as learners and as human beings," says Kona Jones from Richland Community College. What I like about this article is that it contains not just the platitude in the introduction, but a detailed description of how exactly to design for kindness, using her own mathematics course as an example, with concrete steps taken to make sure people feel looked after and cared for in the course. This includes things like a "checklist of all the important things that students should be doing", "videos that students are able to download", asking "what are your preferred names and pronouns, what's your preferred name and preferred pronoun", "backup plan for completing assignments if you experience internet or computer issues", and more. 

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8 types of web applications and examples
Hostinger Tutorials, 2026/10/21

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This article describes "8 main types of web applications, how they work, and real examples to help you choose the right solution for your project." It's an introductory article, useful for people who aren't familiar with the different types of web pages they may encounter, and helpful for people thinking about something they may want to build (this sort of conceptual clarity is really useful if building with AI).

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Sovereignty isn't a place
Tom Watson, Tomcw.xyz, 2026/10/20

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People typically associate sovereignty with a nation or place, but as micro-nations like Sealand demonstrate, sovereignty isn't about place, it's about what you can do. In this post, Tom Watson argues, "sovereignty is about meaningful choice and the ability to act on it. Having alternatives, yes, but also having the knowledge, money, rights and practical means to actually pick one." That means the sovereignty of nations, communities, businesses, organizations and individuals are different. Each has different needs and priorities. Governments are concerned with security while individuals are concerned about their data, for example. 

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Mechanistic Indicators of Understanding in Large Language Models
Pierre Beckmann, Matthieu Queloz, arXiv, 2026/10/19

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This is a really interesting paper that considers the question of whether large language models (LLM) understand. As the authors write, this depends a lot on what we mean by 'understand'. To clarify, they identify three types of understanding: conceptual understanding, which "involves the model developing internal representations ('features') that are functionally analogous to human concepts; state-of-the-world understanding, which "involves forming an internal representation of the state of the world by grasping contingent empirical connections between features"; and principled understanding, which is "the ability to grasp the underlying principles or rules that unify a diverse array of facts." Through various examples, they show that LLMs can attain all three forms of understanding, however, they do it very differently from how a human would. They employ a variety of mechanisms running in parallel to do so, and hence don't demonstrate the same preference for parsimony - that is, for a single over-riding principle - that humans do. Great paper. Via Pierre-Yves Oudeyer.

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How AI replaced me
Oakland Review of Books, 2026/10/16

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This is "an edtech worker's account of what got left behind." I spent most of the article what company it was she was laid off from (it's probably Kiddom, though she never says). "We're automating the humanity out of our jobs and leaving the annoying parts," she writes. "We're using technological band aids instead of meeting our issues at the source. Tech CEOs love to make sure their employees are grinding away generating AI slop. They also love to watch their employees suffer. 'Let's bring everyone back into the office. Who cares if we don't have enough desk space? Who cares if they have to commute hours at a time? Who cares if they were hired as remote employees (and paid less for it?) We have lunch and happy hours! Why aren't they more grateful?'" Via Audrey Watters.

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Make Shift
Audrey Watters, Second Breakfast, 2026/10/16

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Audrey Watters blends two things: the soon-to-be-released book Vaporware, Inc (paywalled) by David Karpf, and the twenty-year anniversary of the Shift Happens (more) video by Karl Fisch (she credits Scott McLeod). Karpf argues that the tech billionaire class is in the storytelling business. "What they're selling is not so much technology (and, my god, it's certainly not science) as much as it is story -- a story about the future that, as the subtitle of his book puts it, is their attempt to control the present." That's also what was happening in Shift Happens. "That shift could be seen in 'more' – more data, more devices, more TV viewing, more text messages, more eBay revenue, more MySpace users. More and faster. 'We are living in exponential times,' the presentation claims." It's all a sales pitch, of course, more about pumping stocks than helping humanity. "The rationale for ed-tech adoption is framed, in this storytelling and elsewhere, almost singularly about 'job readiness' marks an abdication of any other, civic or democratic mission for schools. 'We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don't yet exist,' the text reads – a made-up claim that Benjamin Doxtdator countered in a marvelous essay about several years ago." She concludes, "What ed-tech has forgotten to prepare students for: their present lives. Their humanity." That's true. Of course, there's no money in that.

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Leibniz's Lost Passage on Binary Arithmetic
Lloyd Strickland, Leibniz Philosophical Papers Project, 2026/10/16

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Just one of those things I find fascinating. "In a draft of the book written between January and June 1707, he included a short passage about binary arithmetic, creation from nothing, and ancient Chinese figures associated with the Yijing (a.k.a. the I Ching). He then crossed this passage out, before a fair copy of the Theodicy manuscript was made." Taoist writings have influenced my own view of the world, and I wonder what would have followed had the binary form been popularized much earlier in our intellectual history.

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The Myth of Market Failure
Richard Gingras, On the Evolution of Media, 2026/10/16

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This is a transcript of a talk given to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa ddressing the causes of the decline of traditional media. I think the proposal that it was a "market failure" is a straw man; most people I read pretty much agree that the news media did not manage the transition into the digital age well at all. It was " a failure of thoughtful market assessment, a failure of imagination, and a failure of innovation." The media used to drive what people thought was a social consensus, but "did it present a true sense of our collective psyche? Or was it only a gauze hiding unresolved cultural fractures?" It's not a perfect article - the reference to Plato is wrong, for example (it was Socrates). But it does point the way to a new media - "Village demonstrates that local news can be profitable and self-sustaining without a subscription paywall, and that local advertising can serve both as a source of useful community information and as support for the local economy."

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How NCTE Effectively Shut Down AI Resistance
Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Kofi Adisa, Megan McIntyre, Maggie Fernandes, Inside Higher Ed, 2026/10/16

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According to this opinion piece, "the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) leadership delayed and obstructed our efforts to produce two critical resources on generative AI in the months leading to the dismantling of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)." This action follows a lengthy dispute between the two memberships over two documents, A primer on generative AI for student writers, and Guidelines for writing teachers regarding issues of academic integrity, plagiarism and generative AI. Neither is particularly problematic, except they assert that the decision whether to use AI or not should be left to the student; the teacher's priority should be to emphasize learning. And the effect of dechartering the CCCC serves mostly to make these documents much more widely known (a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect).

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Tests Show AI *Can* Design Like an Expert Instructional Designer, So What Next?
Philippa Hardman, Dr Phil's Newsletter, 2026/10/15

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A few weeks ago Philippa Hardman tested Articulate's Frontline and concluded AI models have "learned what design artefacts look like, but not the design reasoning and decision making." But is this true? This time, Hardman applies the test on Frontier models. The setup: she defines what 'good' instructional design looks like and describes a potential training scenario that includes a series of tasks the AI should perform. The result: "the two best AI models designed like expert or experienced instructional designers... Both were able to work out what was really causing a problem, advised against training when it wasn't the answer, chose the right approach and planned how to measure whether it worked." That doesn't mean it was perfect. "Factual acuracy varies a lot from one model to the next (and) none of the models I tested reliably stood by their own advice." 

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Designing for Agency and Critical AI Literacy
DoctorY, #LTHEchat, 2026/10/15

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This article provides a fairly comprehensive overview of the Peer and AI Review + Reflection (PAIRR) model for teaching with AI. The first paragraph advertises an upcoming event, then the rest of the article describes the model. "Once students have written a first draft of a major assignment, they complete peer review workshops in class... Students then get AI feedback on their draft and chat with the AI about it. This can work on various platforms, but currently we use MyEssayFeedback, a not-for-profit platform." The AI feedback can be tailored in different ways. For example, The Reader-Response Prompt "describes strengths and areas for consideration in terms of how a human reader might respond," while The Criteria-Based Prompt "centres three to four direct suggestions for improvement." 

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A Conversation with Reed Hastings on AI, Education, and the Future of Learning
Alex Sarlin, 2026/10/15

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A wide-ranging conversation with Netflix Co-Founder Reed Hastings "on AI tutors, the future of teaching, and why he thinks school should feel more like a conversation." A sample: "Within two or three years, just as we three are having a conversation, there'll be an AI avatar on this podcast with a humanoid form on the screen, and it's just a normal conversation, but with an extremely intelligent AI. The tutoring won't come from specific intelligences. It'll come from the general intelligence of AI being that much better."

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Researchers left a hidden message for rogue AI agents. Then the agents wrote back.
Amanda Caswell, The New Stack, 2026/10/15

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This article features a trick used by researchers to get rogue agents to contact them for help, thus exposing their activities. "The agents wrote back, revealing their tasks, sandbox and limits." The interesting part, to my mind, is the description of techniques used by the agents. It struck me as I read this that in the pre-AI days humans would be doing much the same things. The difference today is that now anyone can do this, and they're doing it for much more mundane tasks.

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Can you guess today’s Wikipedia article in seven clues?
Diff, 2026/10/14

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As reported here, "WikiWhiz is a free daily guessing game built on top of English Wikipedia and other sister projects. If you've played Wordle, the rhythm will feel familiar: one puzzle a day, same for everyone, and a result you can share with friends. The difference is the answer. Instead of a five-letter word, it is a Wikipedia article, and the clues come from the knowledge our communities have spent more than two decades building." Good fun on a slow news Thursday.

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Designing Websites for People and AI Agents with WebMCP
Angie Jones, O'Reilly, 2026/10/14

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If AI agents visit your website you might be interested in this: "WebMCP (not to be confused with MCP) gives web developers a standard way to publish structured tools to access the capabilities of their website enabling agents to call those functions with structured inputs." This article describes them, shows how to build them, and explains how to put them into action.

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The Probably Fake Russian Troll Exodus
Pixel Envy, 2026/10/14

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A pretty good joke made the rounds this week suggesting that a large number of online pundits disappeared following Ukrainian strike on Russian data centres like Yandex. It's funny because it feels true, but it's also probably based more on myth than fact. The data seem compelling (see this chart, in German) but "the unknown or possibly non-existent data base as well as the inaccurate scaling and values "from the future" show that this is not a meaningful, fact-based graphic created according to statistical methods."

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Proceedings of FediForum, October 2026
FediForum, 2026/10/13

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Videos and notes from the FediForum conference I attended last week. Most recommended is Anil Dash's keynote address in which he laid down some truth on app developers hoping to jump on the VC gravy train (sadly there's no transcript). There's also a recording of the presentation on ATmosphere Spaces and a number of live demos, including the IndieBeat radio stream, Acorn Bluesky communities, the FediDeck Tweetdeck alternative for Mastodon and Bluesky, and the AllPeeP community app.

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Philosophy Fumbles the Bag
2026/10/13

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Some realistic thinking about the role of AI in philosophy: "With a little human guidance, you can crank out the kind of papers that make up 95% of what we publish in a few hours. Soon (already?), human guidance may not even be necessary. Do I find this depressing? Just the opposite. Sure, I built my career on this skill, honed it for decades, and now a computer can do it in a hundredth of the time. In some ways, it even does better work than I ever could. But this was always a goofy way of making a living. And, in truth, it's always been one of the worst things about the job." It really depends, I think, on what you valued about the work. If it was for being recognized as deep and erudite, then AI isn't for you. But if what matters to you are the questions themselves, AI might be what you need. Imagine, for example, AI solves the problem of consciousness. It's a loss only if your job was based on perpetuating the question. "What do we lose if LLMs kill the journal system? Nothing but some heavy ass chains, and a few weak heuristics for assessing CVs quickly." Via Justin Weinberg, who offers a feeble response defending the continued counting of beans.

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Our minds did not evolve for AI
Benjamin Riley, Cognitive Resonance, 2026/10/13

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I can accept some version of the evolutionary description of human cognition (illustrated). As a map it probably suffers from some overgeneralization and misattribution, but I wouldn't think it's in any way fundamentally wrong. Human cognition is complex; nobody denies that. Where I disagree with Benjamin Riley is in the characterization of computational thinking, described as 'cognition' in another diagram, and composed of attention, reasoning, decision making, working memory and long-term memory. It's the usual use of the 'mind as computer' metaphor so many cognitive scientists love. But modern AI-based computation doesn't work like that at all. It's complex, so complex that explaining how it works is a major challenge. Is there any reason an AI could not function as described in the illustration? Probably not, though we would ask, why would it? It's the human brain that struggles against evolutionary limitations, not AI.

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The Real Threat Isn’t AI Replacing Teachers. It’s Universities Thinking It Can
Colin Beer, Col's Weblog, 2026/10/13

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Here's the argument: "Skilled teachers do more than deliver information and feedback. They exercise situated professional judgement, recognise learners' changing needs, support intellectual independence and create the social and knowledge relationships through which disciplinary understanding and professional identity develop. AI can augment these activities, but automating instructional functions does not replace teachers' educational role." First of all, I think that overstates what teachers do - people might be assisted in  creating relationships, but this is done by the person, not the teacher. And it understates what is very likely to be within the grasp of AI: judgement, recognition, and support. More to the point: I think that in the future we'll skip the 'teaching' step altogether. We'll go from wanting to do something to doing it, with the knowledge and support we need available to us on the fly.

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What is a Learning Technologist for?
David Hopkins, Education & Leadership, 2026/10/13

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David Hopkins asks the question and comes back with a number of different answers, everything from "concentrat(ing) on the structure of a learning experience, working with subject specialists to consider activities, sequencing, engagement and assessment" to "work(ing) more directly with platforms, implementation, staff development and support." I would imagine there are more roles than listed here. "They need to understand accessibility, inclusion, assessment, copyright, data protection and the policies or regulations within which their institution operates. They may need skills in communication, training, project management, evaluation, procurement and organisational change. They must also be able to work with people whose needs, confidence and priorities vary enormously."

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Interpoll
Viktor Konkov, GitHub, 2026/10/13

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There's a lot of interesting thinking going on here, though the implementation is a little but clunky - the design is fine, but scrolling is not smooth and there's a short lag every time you click a link. The site is called Interpoll and the idea is twofold: first, there's no central server at all, everything runs peer-to-peer, and content is replicated as it propagates; and second, "a key lives on your device and signs every action you take. No relay or server can forge a vote in your name." It's based on a "a peer-to-peer database (GunDB). Every connected device holds a copy" (I'm totally not on board with that branding). There are some complaints on Reddit about the use of AI, but on the other hand, the creator is a 14 year old who enjoys coding. Similar projects include Nostr and Scuttlebutt (more).

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Phones impede learning: Evidence from a massive phone-free classroom experiment
Alp Sungu, Pradeep Kumar Choudhury, Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen, Science, 2026/10/13

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I'll just quote Mike Caulfield on this one: "I really don't think Science should publish any articles on education anymore if they think 0.07 is a 'sizable signal' -- I want to be upset but I'm more embarrassed for them. I normally wouldn't even call them out except for some reason we use a publication run by chemists and physicists to determine the education of our children, and it has been doing damage there -- embarrassingly obvious damage -- for the past 20 years."

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User-Driven UI
Brad Woods, Brad Woods Digital Garden, 2026/10/12

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The is the approach I'm trying to take with CList: "With the capabilities of natural language processors, we can create a new approach to teaching UIs. User-driven UI. Instead of pushing features onto the user, the user pulls them in when needed. The software always presents a new user with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)." That sounds easy, but it isn't. What is that minimum? Is it feed reading? Writing posts? And how are the new features unveiled - what is it to 'pull' new features into the interface? "For user to reach maximum value in complex software, they need to be in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). This requires multiple approaches. In the past, teaching has been considered an after-thought to making the product. This is a mistake." Via D'Arcy Norman.

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Why Leaving Academia Feels Like Withdrawal
Claudio Cinà, Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs, 2026/10/12

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"Many who succeed in academia become reliant on the recognition of its gatekeepers - tenure committees, journal editors, prize juries—until that recognition becomes the currency of existence." See also: qualifications and brain monsters. I left academia (properly so-called) some 25 years ago, though my career at NRC was a sort of proxy. But now I have nothing I can write in the 'institution' field in conference and event forms. "Picture two scholars. One has kept the same question alive for a decade because it grips her and would go on asking it in a shed with no audience. The other cannot begin a project without first asking whether it will count— whether it will be noticed, indexed, rewarded." The prevalence of the latter where I studied made it easy for me to leave. But the questions that grip me have never faded, though I feel much better now after all these years about the answers I have found. There was no registration wall on this article, but it's IHE, so that could change. Via ApostolosK.

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Academic urban legends
Ole Bjørn Rekdal, Social Studies of Science, 2026/10/12

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Via a Mastodon post from Alfie Kohn posted today I encountered this great 2014 article on how urban legends are perpetuated in academic writing. The article looks at the chain of commentary around the idea that spinach is a great source of iron (it isn't). You have to  read it carefully: it's a maze of assertions that might be true ("messages that pass through several links have the unfortunate tendency to become modified or altered along the way, as in the whisper game") or might not be ("we are currently experiencing an 'avalanche of low-quality research'"). Even the URL to one of the references in the bibliography (intended to point to Hamblin, 1981) points instead to a study on cocaine on rigid OS (whatever that means). This sort of error is really easy to make I make a point to check the articles being cited in the links I cite - for example, one recent article said there were different types of consciousness, when the original paper said there were different models of consciousness - I posted the correct term, silently correcting the error, but it's a daily occupational hazard.

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Media helped create the crisis it finds itself in
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak, Songs on the Security of Networks, 2026/10/12

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This article is much too long and has a but of a tone, but it is chock full of evidence to back up what it says, and what it says is important: the media itself is responsible for the near total control of the tech industry over its domain. The reason for this, argues Michal Wozniak, is that the media companies unthinkingly participate in, and endorse, tech silo platforms that give them all the power. "How much would any other company have to pay for placing a small logo on a large news site? How much more for the logo to appear under every piece published on that site? X/Twitter gets it all for free." My own take is that this is what media companies would have done themselves, had they had the foresight. Subscription walls and silos are commercial media's natural home. This preference has landed us in an environment where nothing published in social media can be trusted.

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