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Feature Article
Collective Learning
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2026/10/30

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We don't need to judge people to help them learn. True, we are vested almost to obsession in weighing, measuring and judging individual students. It's hard to imagine an education system without tests, assignments and individual grades. But let's try.

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The Pulse: Time to rethink software security because of AI?
Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic Engineer, 2026/10/30

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This is a good comprehensive article reviewing the security breaches there have been recently (and there have been a lot) and discussing what we should expect, and do, in the light of AI-assisted service compromises. If you're wondering why everyone was making '4' jokes recently, it's this: "eMudhra broke this trust in the most blatant way: its private keys turned out to be single-digit numbers. A private key is a 384-bit key, which means that it would be a number between 0 and 2^384, (a number with 116 digits!) Except, the key turned out to be the number '4.'" Author Gergely Orosz expects the security problems to get worse before they get better, not the least because of security handled the eMudhra way. But here's my own take: for the most part, what we're seeing are not new compromises (the PHP issue, for example, was known for quite a while beforehand), but rather, compromises by new players. Before now, you had to be a government or large company to breach security like this; now many more people can do it. As we repair these breaches (and they are being repaired, because they have to be) we reduce the ability of everyone to breach our systems, including especially the governments and companies that have been doing it all along.

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CSS-Tricks has a new owner!
Geoff Graham, CSS-Tricks, 2026/10/30

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It's like the internet publishing world took a deep breath and then said, "let's get on with this then." Human-authored content, it turns out, is still valuable. Geoff Graham announces via this post that he has acquired CSS-Tricks back from Digital Ocean, so it's now an independent site again. Jeffrey Zeldman of A List Apart reflects on this and mentions Smashing as a great place to get similar content as well. Piccalilli adds, "Let's buck up our ideas and get cracking, everyone. There's lots to teach and I know we've got plenty of fight left in us." All of these are among my regular reads and I like this new energy.

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Countermove: the business strategy game
Countermove, 2026/10/30

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This was fun to play. "A business strategy game for consumer brands. Take the CEO, CMO, CFO or Chief Customer Officer seat, with AI colleagues in the others, rivals that answer back and real-world shocks on your plan. Free, no account." It moves along at a good pace, presents what I assume are real scenarios, and charts your progress against rivals and board expectations. The idea is to use it with teams or in a full class session. There's probably a business model behind it, but it seems pretty open for now.

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Twelve years of distributed SQLite
Philip O'Toole, 2026/10/30

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Sometimes we don't even notice the history of technology as it passes by. Case in point: rqlite. "The idea was simple: take SQLite, put a Raft log in front of it, and replicate every write to a cluster so that the loss of a node did not mean the loss of the data." A few years later: "SQLite as a storage engine, with replication added on the outside, has been reinvented by at least eight teams with different needs and different protocols. Nobody has found a reason to stop doing it." But the upshot: "The money went to the platforms. rqlite, dqlite, and Litestream are open source and free. The projects that raised the capital or got acquired are the ones that turned replicated SQLite into a service with a bill."

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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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