OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

AGI (disambiguation)
Jasmine Sun, 2025/04/17

---

This article gets at some of my own frustrations with the educriticoblogosphere. Jasmine Sun writes, "analysis around how AI will fit into our human world remains rudimentary... many of the strongest thinkers about society and politics - the people I want most guiding diffusion - continue to believe that LLMs are buggy auto-complete." It's not that, of course. As Sun comments, "AI discovered wholly new proteins before it could count the 'r's in 'strawberry', which makes it neither vaporware nor a demigod but a secret third thing." See the illustration. But "Many tech critics have become so terrified of 'critihype' that they've abdicated their actual job, which is to anticipate and examine how frontier tech may change society in ways good and bad. And yes, that requires some speculation about things that haven't happened yet. Hype-busting is useful but cannot be the whole game!"

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

What MCP's Rise Really Shows: A Tale of Two Ecosystems
Jon Turow, 2025/04/17

---

Good post making the following point and then expanding on it: "Don't let anyone tell you different: there is no such thing as a separate 'infrastructure phase' in technology. The tech industry loves our neat narratives - first comes infrastructure, then applications follow. It's tidy, linear, and completely wrong." I would add: what we are learning today - not just in tech, but across the board - is becoming tomorrow's infrastructure. We'll still need a few experts to build that infrastructure, but mostly we don't need that sort of work any more. My first job in tech was 'computer operator' - imagine! We needed people specifically to operate computers. Elevator operators, typists, switchboard operators - gone. No, now we need people to do the new applications - but they're evolving as fast as the infrastructure, alongside it. Translators, copy editors, illustrators - no longer needed. Even my current job - programmer, researcher, journalist, educator - is being replaced. Becoming part of the infrastructure

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Why Do Policy Languages Feel So Hard?
Phil Windley
, Technometria, 2025/04/17

---

My limited experience with policy language (and here I assume it's the same thing) was with Amazon's S3 cloud access provisions; to make an S3 'bucket' publicly available (as I do for my images on OLDaily) you have to express this in (what I assume is) an Amazon-specific policy language. In any case, this is certainly my experience: "Policy languages can feel intimidating due to unfamiliar syntax, poor tooling, and the high stakes of getting access control wrong. But once understood, they simplify application logic and make security more reliable and maintainable." I never did hit the 'simplify' part. They just made something that should have been simple unreasonably hard. Anyhow, here is Phil Windley's explanation of why this is so.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Mastodon Exit Interview
Rob Shearer, Rob's Posts, 2025/04/17

---

This is an exceptionally interesting criticism of Mastodon and (implicitly) how ActivityPub handles social networking generally. It is at once a criticism of the concept of federation and also of decentralization. It is, in my view, half right and half wrong. On my reading, at the core of the objection is the problem of discoverability - for example, the posts from mas.to/@obsidian are available on mastodon.social only once someone on mastodon.social has begin following the account. There are other objections to smaller points - things like account migration (which is a fair point) and direct messaging. But the objection is mostly that people couldn't find a couple of bot accounts (announcing sunrise and sunset). But this is - to me - the whole point of decentralization and federation. I don't want random bot accounts popping up in my feed. Sure, this is what made Twitter (in the early days) "fun", but this only works if you have a small elite group of users; once 'discovery' is enabled worldwide, you get the cesspool that Twitter eventually became. Via Apostolos K.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed