OLWeekly

Bikepacking - Rimouski
Stephen Downes, YouTube, 2024/07/26

You my have noticed that the publishing schedule this week and next is a bit erratic. That's because I'm out on another cycling tour, this time from my home near Ottawa to Rimouski, Quebec, 800 km down the St. Lawrence River. At least, that's my objective. I'm currently writing from Magog, Quebec, but I'm about to get back on the bike. Anyhow, this link will take you to a YouTube playlist of daily videos from my tour, following in the footsteps of the many hiking and bikepacking vloggers who have gone before me (and whose work I am of course drawing upon).

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AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data
Ilia Shumailov, et al., Nature, 2024/07/26

I think this is well-known and well established, but here's an official source: "We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, in which tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as 'model collapse'." It's a bit like photocopying the same image over and over again - eventually you just end up with static.

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Flipboard Brings Local News to the Fediverse
Carl Sullivan, Flipboard, 2024/07/26

Flipbord hasn't been relevant in any to me for years, but if they're bringing local news to the fediverse, they are suddenly relevant again. They write, "As part of our commitment to local news, Flipboard is bringing 63 regional and community titles to the fediverse." More, please.

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Image resize and quality comparison
Simon Willison, 2024/07/26

What's neat isn't just the tool (which I could use to handle those awful webp images) but also that it was basically created by AI.

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The Five Stages Of AI Grief
Benjamin Bratton, NOEMA, 2024/07/23

I completely agree with this point and have even made it in the recent past: "What is today called 'artificial intelligence' should be counted as a Copernican Trauma in the making. It reveals that intelligence, cognition, even mind (definitions of these historical terms are clearly up for debate) are not what they seem to be, not what they feel like, and not unique to the human condition." Except, I didn't call it a "trauma", I called in (as it properly is) a "revolution". Via Bryan Alexander.

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Unpersoned
Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic, 2024/07/23

Cory Doctorow sounds the warning about being dependent on platforms. "The platforms have rigged things so that you must have an account with them in order to function, but they also want to have the unilateral right to kick people off their systems. The combination of these demands represents more power than any company should have, and Big Tech has repeatedly demonstrated its unfitness to wield this kind of power." Too true.

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How to use Perplexity in your daily workflow
Michael Spencer, Alex McFarland, AI Supremacy, 2024/07/23

Perplexity is an AI chat application that answers questions for you. What makes it really useful is that it finds and cites its sources. I haven't worked with it yet (I certainly will) so I can't say how well it works, but this article is a really good starting point, offering practical applications and a number of examples.

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Dispatches from the media apocalypse
Ben Werdmuller, Werd I/O, 2024/07/22

A long, detailed, and fascinating post from Ben Werdmuller on the future of online news. "There are two pivotal facts for every newsroom," he writes. "Their work must reach an audience, and someone must pay for it. The first is a prerequisite of the second: if nobody discovers the journalism, nobody will pay for it. So, reaching and growing an audience is crucial." The same is true for educational institutions, which lag news media by about 10-20 years. And what's crucial in the current environment is that the lock-down of social media and the sceptre of the 'dead internet' have made reaching an audience almost impossible.

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Things I was wrong about pt2: The Death of the VLE
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2024/07/22

Another of Msttin Weller's "I was wrong" series that I like so so much. Here again he was not alone. "I think during the late 00s we were all still caught up in web 2.0 fever, and let's face it, naive about the robustness of third party tools." Instead, those tools all died (or became their own sort of silo) snd the LMS - which by now is fully entrenched into administative systems - survived.

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Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI
Matilda Battersby, The Bookseller, 2024/07/22

All I can say is, what did you expect? "Authors claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment." I think it's good that academic papers are being used to train AI - it's far better than using Twitter posts. But deals like this are characteristic of what we will get if we continue to support a closed-access publication system. If we want open access to AI, we have to offer open access to our publications. If you don't like the idea of corporate AI running everything, then you have to be willing to contribute to training the alternative. Simply saying "there should be no AI" is not an alternative. Via Robin DeRosa.

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After Tesla and OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy’s startup aims to apply AI assistants to education
Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch, 2024/07/22

According to this story, "Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an 'AI native' education platform." While most pundits will criticize the AI component (including the three-handed student in the 'school of the future' image) my own concern is that while the vision of AI may be futuristic, the vision of education doesn't step at all beyond the traditional collegiate model. Why oh why if we had AI in our pockets would we build a cathedral-sized learning institution out of glass?

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