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

Xiaohongshu, China's answer to Instagram, hits no. 1 on the App Store as TikTok faces US shutdown | TechCrunch
Lauren Forristal, TechCrunch, 2025/01/13

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I can't help but note the irony that "on the heels of TikTok's looming shut down on January 19 over its ownership in the U.S. (unless the Supreme Court intervenes), it looks like another Chinese app is catching some attention. American users are flocking Chinese short-form video app Xiaohongshu (known as RedNote in English)." 

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Can AI Models Show Us How People Learn? Impossible Languages Point a Way
Ben Brubaker, Quanta Magazine, 2025/01/13

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This probably doesn't have to be said, but there are co doubt many people still following the language of thought hypothesis. "The fact that language models work at all is proof that something resembling language learning can happen without any of the specialized machinery Chomsky proposed. Systems based on neural networks have been wildly successful at many tasks that are totally unrelated to language processing, and their training procedure ignores everything linguists have learned about the intricate structure of sentences." But that's still sommthing that needs to be tested - and this article explores whether it's harder (or even possible) for a large language model to learn a non-human 'impossible' language. "Kallini and her co-authors pinpointed a simple principle called "information locality (opens a new tab)" that explains why their models found some of the impossible languages harder than others. That principle might also be relevant to human language acquisition." Fascinating.

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The people should own the town square
Mastodon Blog, 2025/01/13

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Mastodon reports, "we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual." If you wonder whether this is a good idea, just look down the road to WordPress, where "WordPress co-creator (and Automattic CEO) Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members," reports TechCrunch, "some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project," via Slashdot, and via Ben Werdmuller and Evan Prodromou.

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Free Our Feeds
Ben Werdmuller, Werd I/O, 2025/01/13

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There's a bit of a land rush happening to be the 'voice of the fediverse', that is, the non-profit or volunteer group that represents what the fediverse things it should be. The latest is Free our Feeds: "Nabiha Syed is the ED of the Mozilla Foundation and is joined by Mark Surman, its President; Robin Berjon...; Eli Pariser ... who co-founded Avaaz and used to run MoveOn; Mallory Knodel is the ED of the ActivityPub-centric Social Web Foundation." Ben Werdmuller comments, "So the Social Web Foundation is ActivityPub-centric and Free Our Feeds is AT Protocol-centric. My (figurative) money is increasingly on A New Social, which posits that all these individual protocols." Let's not forget the actual ActivityPubs project, and the standard which was created by W3C, which took over from the old OpenSocial.

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The ABCs of Blogging: Always Be Commenting
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2025/01/13

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Jim Groom buries the lede in this post acount commenting. "Tim Klapdor's been way down in Adelaide blogging the hell out of the Southern hemisphere for some time now, and more recently he has figured out how to get his static site to ingest comments from Mastodon for specific posts—bridging the federated world and his blog." This - or something like this - is the way of the future.

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Content Policy on the Social Web
Social Web Foundation, 2025/01/13

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This is one of the major weaknesses of the federated social network: "Filtering on the receiving side requires orders of magnitude more effort. If a single sending service delivers bad content to users on one hundred or one thousand receiving services, each moderator on the receiving end has to clean up the mess locally." If a server becomes a problem, it's just blocked. But what if it's the size of Meta's Threads? Bad actors are not compatible with the fediverse. 

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How to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads
Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch, 2025/01/13

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Readers may find this article useful in the light of (to put it politely) "Meta's decision to remove its third-party fact-checking system and loosen content moderation policies." 

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VLC gets caught in AI hype, adds AI subtitles and translations
Thom Holwerda, OS News, 2025/01/13

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VLC media player is adding AI-generated translations and this author, who "was a translator for almost 15 years, with two university degrees on the subject to show for it", is deeply opposed. "Dumping the raw output of these tools onto people who rely on closed captions and subtitles to even be able to view videos is not only lazy, it's deeply irresponsible and demonstrates a complete lack of respect and understanding." The author seems not to realize that the alternative to AI translation for most people in most circumstance is no translation at all. Why should translations be available only to those who can afford to pay for professional translation? Via Apostolos K.

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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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