Category Archives: Micro

Posts that go to to micro.blogs/johnjohnston

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Mountainous landscape with Meall an Fhudair under a cloudy sky.

Meall an Fhudair, started bright, drizzle later. Cool breeze. The higher munroes had some snow. A few Cuckoos.Greenshank & Golden Plover on the higher ground. Frogs spawning in a pool in a burn, not in the hill pools yet. Little growth of heather or grass. Few flowers. Primrose lower down. Violets, wood anemones & purple mountain saxifrage (I think).

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Likes “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI by Molly White.

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.

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A montage of 4 webpage screenshots.

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.

  • This week I’ve used:
    ChatGPT to make some questions up about a passage of text for an individual in my class; Write an example text about levers; create a formula for a number spreadsheet and create a regular expression.
  • Claude to make a fractions matching game and a trivia quiz.
  • I am occasionally using lovable.dev to play around making an alternative way of posting to WordPress.

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.

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Montage of 4 webpages linked in post:

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

[image or embed]

— hookland.bsky.social (@hookland.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 5:02 PM

It’s a win for butterflies! Government refuses emergency use of banned butterfly-killing pesticide on sugar beet | Butterfly Conservation

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.

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