Likes I Do Not Remember My Life and It’s Fine by .
Intriguing
via Steven Splinter
This is a fascinating read! I had a shallow understanding of what aphantasia is before reading this account of trying to remember without access to mental imagery.
Where the comments are interesting too.
I feel I’ve more than a touch of this, I don’t really visualise, have a less than perfect memory, and my facial recognition is poor. I am quite good with knowing where I am and navigation.
Interesting take on the morality of using AI
But I have a hard time parsing out what is moral or amoral about how this stuff is being used, or how the information’s been gleaned, or whatever it’s been sucked up from.
-✂️ snip-
00:03:25 ◼ ► I don’t use any of the photo generation crap or whatever.
00:03:28 ◼ ► What I do think is profound, and I feel like it’s way more morally defensible, is the code generation stuff, just because of all the open source stuff, yada, yada
The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 421, With Craig Mod
▶︎ The Sea | Francisco del Pino/Charlotte Mundy | Notice Recordings
From the famous Knapp estate via Joe
we have installed a solar-powered, quadrophonic live audio feed just north of the dam: A pair of hydrophones brings us closer to the sounds of the water itself and reveals the tiny sounds of fresh-water organisms. A pair of microphones in a fallen willow tree let us get to know the birds and mammals that live near and visit the water and hear the play of weather in the trees.
wilding.radio
I’ve installed this on my phone with the intention of giving it a shot for recording walks.
Organic Maps is a privacy-focused offline maps & GPS app for hiking, cycling, biking, and driving. Absolutely free. No ads. No tracking. Developed with love by the open-source community. Powered by OpenStreetMap data.
Organic Maps is one of the few applications nowadays that supports 100% of features without an active Internet connection. Install Organic Maps, download maps, throw away your SIM card, and go for a weeklong trip on a single battery charge without any byte sent to the network.
Organic Maps: Offline Hike, Bike, Trails and Navigation
Quite delightful raspberry pi project.
a vintage phone brought to life with Raspberry Pi
Poetry on the line: a vintage phone brought to life with Raspberry Pi – Raspberry Pi
Looks like a good classroom activity.I’ve done similar occasionally but the prompt is much better than mine.
You tell the children/students that they are going to be poem or story ‘detectives’ and their job is find the ‘secret strings’ in a poem or story – or play or any ‘text’.
Secret strings run within texts linking words, phrases, sentences and pictures or ‘images’. The students’ job is to find them.
Sometimes the link is to do with sound – eg alliteration, assonance, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, long phrases, short phrases.
Michael Rosen: My ‘secret strings’ game to unlock ‘texts’ (stories, poems, plays, non-fiction etc)
Irresponsible AI companies are already imposing huge loads on Wikimedia infrastructure, which is costly both from a pure bandwidth perspective, but also because it requires dedicated engineers to maintain and improve systems to handle the massive automated traffic. And AI companies that do not attribute their responses or otherwise provide any pointers back to Wikipedia prevent users from knowing where that material came from, and do not encourage those users to go visit Wikipedia, where they might then sign up as an editor, or donate after seeing a request for support. (This is most AI companies, by the way. Many AI “visionaries” seem perfectly content to promise that artificial superintelligence is just around the corner, but claim that attribution is somehow a permanently unsolvable problem.)
A good post to read or listen to at the beginning of Scottish AI in Schools week . The article does not want the stable door closed.
Bookmarked for future reading. AI in education is becoming increasingly confusing.
Education Scotland are running a week #ScotAI25: Scottish AI in Schools 2025 with live lessons for pupils & some cpd for staff. I might try to make some of those.
I might have used ChatGPT a couple more times in school. Although it is accessible the login options didn’t seem to be so I’ve no history to check.
Quite a few teachers I know use it in some of these ways in a, like me, fairly causal way. This is a lot easier than thinking about any ethical and moral implication.
I am still posting using WordLand from time to time. Dave Winer opened the service to everyone, on Friday. I’m reading round it as much as I can:
Aziz Poonawalla wrote a review to which Dave responded.
Andy Sylvester gave it a try, posting a video of his first use. Andy is thinking aloud, a process I always enjoy watching others do.
Manton noted:
its own RSS feeds outside of WordPress. The feeds have both HTML and Markdown. So you could build platforms (like Micro.blog!) that aggregate user feeds.
Manton Reece
Which points to the idea your blog could be, without the WordPress bit, an RSS feed that can be piped everywhere. For example: It could go to micro.blog and then be pushed on to lots of other places.
It has surprised me that WordPress does not have a bigger range of ways to post. I hope WordLand will start a trend. Personally I do not use one particular editor, depending on the type of post I am making.
Here are few really interesting posts I’ve found on Mastodon.
The Really Dark Truth About Bots – YouTube via rg4w (@FourthWorld@mastodon.online) – Mastodon is a tangled web indeed. Worth a listen unless you are overwhelmed by recent news.
Apple is removing iCloud end-to-encryption features from the UK after government compelled it to add backdoors – 9to5Mac from Ian Betteridge (@ianb@well.com) – Mastodon who wrote on his own blog:
And it’s worth saying again: what Apple is offering is still as good as Google, Microsoft, etc, none of which offer zero-access encryption for file storage. There are remarkably few companies that do: the only one I’ve come across is Proton, whose Proton Drive is hosted in Switzerland, subject to Swiss privacy laws, and zero-access encrypted by default. If you’re currently using Advanced Data Protection for file storage, they are worth a look.
from: Apple’s Advanced Data Protection: what’s going on in the UK?
I am not a user of Apple Advanced Data Protection myself. But this is interesting from the tech/politics pov. And we don’t know when we might need a bit more encryption & privacy.
FastScripts 3.3.5: Live Script Progress and Other Fixes – from the horses mouth: Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass@mastodon.social) – Mastodon. FastScript is one of my very favourite mac application. It allows me to do lots of things fast. Limited only by my own lack of skills with AppleScript & shell.
Talk about the thing itself – annie’s blog via bradenslen (@bradenslen@indieweb.social) – Indieweb.Social
Lots of very smart stuff about introducing technology to people.
When I introduce you to my friend, I don’t say: “This is Angela. She’s made of bones that connect to each other with cool joints so she can bend her skeleton. On top of the bones, she’s got muscles! And then there’s skin, which is the part_ _you see now! The skin is important because it holds everything together and lets you interact with Angela without being all grossed out.”
I say something like: “This is Angela. I know her from college. She’s into geology, like you.”
I’ve spent a fair bit of life introducing technology to pupils & teachers. Especially with the latter I’ve made the mistake of wanting folk to understand and love something the way I do. (RSS for example).
Things that cheered me up today.
bradenslen pointed me to this:
England, like most countries, is more of an imagined place than anything objectively real. Its ordinanced borders are merely state stories. We who live here know its true thresholds are the salted shore, ends of lanes where magic lives. We all make it up as walk its ways. – #CLNolan
— hookland.bsky.social (@hookland.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 5:02 PM
[image or embed]
But Environment Minister Emma Hardy decided not to grant the authorisation for emergency use of Cruiser SB, which contains the butterfly-killing neonicotinoid thiamethoxam prohibited since 2018 – the first time in five years the application has been turned down.
Likes why post, what to post, and how to post by .
Here are a few specific reasons why you should post:
* Search everything you write. Do you post long comments or issues on GitHub? Do you post on public mailing lists? Post such things to your own site, so you can more easily search everything you’ve written on a topic. Then post a copy to those external destinations.
Lots of other ideas. Including Use a local text editor, I do sometimes. I used to use TextMate pretty exclusively, but drifted away because of post kinds, then blocks. Thinking about it a good bit more since testing WordLand, which I am enjoying.
Likes I support the mad king by .
@manton‘s take on the #WordPress drama, is as expected very wise.
Listened to: Better Diets for all
And yet, the vast majority of people do not eat within dietary guidelines. If anything, diets — and with them health — are getting worse in many places. What’s the problem? Maybe, it is that the people who devise the policies are too far away from the lives of the people they’re trying to help.
This explanation for why people allow their children to eat poorly resonated. It could also apply to other parenting behaviour, eg. mobile phone use. I’ve sometimes wondered at the food & sweets parents provide. The podcast nails why it is not so simple.
