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Zero Books Read
Steven D. Krause, 2026/07/17

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CBC Radio ran a bit yesterday or the day before lamenting the fact that people no longer go to movies, and it reminds me of this item lamenting the lack of people reading books. Why would we support these bad old commercial models? My reaction is similar to Steven Krause's: who cares? "In my view," he writes "the best movies and streaming media today are every bit as 'literary' as texts that happen to be printed on paper. And our postliterate world (which I think we entered long ago) has not resulted in the 'end of reading' at all." I read tons, most of it for fun. But books on paper? No.

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Is our intelligence rooted in how living organisms are organized?
Paul Middlebrooks, The Transmitter, 2026/07/17

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This is an excellent video (though tbh I read the transcript) suggesting "that the free energy principle falls short as a unifying framework for living systems and cognition, and instead finds promise in recent concepts in philosophy and theoretical biology—how living systems must be organized in order to survive." It's not clear what question this even answers ( i's something like, what's the difference between living and non-living things?) and they don't get to it until about half way through but it's worth the journey.

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A History of Large Language Models
Gregory Gunderson, 2026/07/17

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Take your time and give this paper a nice slow read. As the author says, "No single idea is beyond the abilities of a smart teenager to understand. But what is beautiful and surprising and remarkable is that the phenomena we observe in LLMs is not magic but simply the emergence of a complex system from simple rules." Yes, it seems hard to imagine that these language models can really work. But clearly they do, and this paper describes the step-by-step process over the years as researchers discovered how the could. Via Data Science Weekly 660.

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Going Beyond Access to Democratizing Knowledge
Kisha G. Tracy, OEGlobal, 2026/07/17

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The argument here is that "There is more to democratizing knowledge, however, than just access. OER is an opportunity to redress marginalization and erasure, and open pedagogy has a responsibility to confront social justice issues." I don't agree. The form is basically, "you've done a good thing but you haven't done enough." The problem is, it's never enough, and it means that no good deed ever goes uncriticized. I'll take the open access, thank you; you can keep on with your math or physics or whatever. Sharing your biochemical research does not create an obligation to address social justice issues.

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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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