I took a walk to Ballagan yesterday. always a fascinating place. Ravens & crows swooping and rushing at each other. Quite a few signs of spring.
Notes, photos on the walkmap
Bookmarked What I Mean When I Say Critical AI Literacy by .
Readings/videos on inequality/oppression created, exacerbated, or reproduced by AI/algorithms:
Interesting thoughts & a collection of links to look through. Holiday reading.
In reply to So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish by .
Well, it’s come to this. Twitter is burning, a billionaire owes money, an API will soon get lobotomized, so Bridgy‘s Twitter support will die within the month.
A lot of the reactions on my blog come from Twitter thanks to Bridgy. A marvellous service. I really disliked it when Twitter swallowed comments, then Bridgy came to the rescue. Thanks so much for all of Bridgy.
Likes IndieBlocks 0.6.2 Released by .
I’ve been keeping half an eye on this. I’m not fully onboard with blocks yet and don’t really know how this will fit with the post kinds plug-in I usually use.
The Blackthorn at the Kilpatrick muir id a little behind others I’ve seen recently from the road.
We did see out first tortoiseshell butterfly and quite a few bees today. A couple of larks singing on the muir too.
Purple Mountain Saxifrage, first time I’ve seen this, flowering just above 2000ft in the shelter of a bolder. Hardy wee flower.
speedwell in the evening sunlight, fells like spring.
evidence-led innovation
Ollie Brae’s tweet, leads to Game Over for Maths A-level — Conrad Wolfram
The combination of ChatGPT with its Wolfram plug-in just scored 96% in a UK Maths A-level paper, the exam taken at the end of school, as a crucial metric for university entrance. (That compares to 43% for ChatGPT alone).
Wrong conclusion: ban it. Right conclusion: change what humans are learning so they step up a level, and don’t compete with what AIs do well.
Wolfram goes on to explain that an overhaul of the math curriculum is long overdue, and quotes himself from 3 years ago:
Today’s ecosystem of education doesn’t easily support such subject change. From assessments tied to today’s subjects, to too short a time horizon, to evidence-led innovation rather than innovation-led evidence, there’s everything to prevent core subject change and seemingly nothing to promote it. Except, eventually, after much disarray, cold, hard failure.
My hi-light. Seeing “evidence-led innovation” as part of the problem was interesting.
Listened: 246 – Building your own social network with the Friends plugin
So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love… You get the idea! If you’re anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you’ve spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they’ve been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we’re even able to escape from it all. On the podcast today we’ve got Alex Kirk, and he certainly has been thinking about all of this. So much so in fact that he’s built a social network plugin for WordPress. Listen to the podcast to find out all about it…
Really interesting podcast discussing the Friends WordPress plugin with its author Alex Kirk. A lot of interesting features, including a built in RSS reader and a WordPress to WordPress social network.
I had a couple of thoughts, I wonder if this would work on a WordPress multi-site like Glow Blogs?
I also wondered if importing all these posts you were reading would bloat your own blog? This was answered in the podcast, you can set the number of posts kept or the length of time to keep them.
Alex did mention the IndieWeb, so I am wondering if there is much integration, with webmentions or bookmarking for example.
Obviously to use the social part you need friends using the plugin, but I think I’ll install it somewhere to see how it works as an RSS reader when i have a mo.
Good Call Flickr: the original announcement threw me, I’d no idea how to implement a user agent in my amateur use of the Flickr API or if I’d need to. As a tinker I’ve really enjoyed using the Flickr API over the years. The fact it has never changed has been great for me.