crank.report

Libraries and democracy. Both good ideas.

  1. It isn't search. Search should give you sources. The excellent elicit.org is a great application of AI to search.

  2. That we are using it as search shows us how broken search is. At least the model that is monetized by ads. I use DEVONagent as an antidote to search in the way that presents on the world's most popular search engine.

  3. It has limitations. “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.” (source)

  4. It can be an equalizer. We can use ChatGPT and similar applications built on helping us write to get unstuck. I use tools like these to break away from a blank page.

  5. English teachers (my wife is one!) need to start teaching people a different kind of writing literacy based on prompts, editing, and bringing voice into our writing.

  6. There is a quote I remember being from the Eames documentary: You can't outsource curiosity. What is it we can't outsource to ChatGPT? Curiosity and its close cousin engagement. We have to interact in a way that demonstrates we, as humans, are delivering those two things.

#Areas #AI

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Added a section on how to ask for help, starting with asking questions. Also added how to email a stranger to the how to email section.

The repo and website are linked on the projects page.

#TurningPro #projects

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The Magic of Small Databases

We’ve built many tools for publishing to the web – but I want to make the claim that we have underdeveloped the tools and platforms for publishing collections, indexes and small databases. It’s too hard to build these kinds of experiences, too hard to maintain them and a lack of collaborative tools.

This is a very interesting problem. And relevant to civil society organizations as well as hobbyists and collectors. How does a local nonprofit keep up a list of resources relevant to their community? How do we know what services are available in our communities? How do we discover all the forms we have to fill out and keep up to date if we need assistance getting food. How do humans find and reuse this data.

At the database of resources level, this is a problem 211 tries to solve. Open referral takes it a step further and provides an indie web like structure for marking up the resources, making it easier to remix and use them. Libraries bring it to their communities.

The now-defunct H2O from Harvard is a good starting place for thinking about this. It was made for collaboratively managing course syllabi. You could make a syllabus, clone a syllabus, fork a syllabus and rework it. It carried attribution with it. It preserved the contributors to the syllabus. I used to organize post-talk or workshop handouts.

It feels like their is a community project here to define a standards based approach that allows people to contribute resources, create lists with ability to create sections, order items, and annotate at the list, section, and item level, and publish to the web. It can borrow from the collaborative aspect of H2O so that you can remix other lists, preserving attribution.

#CivilSociety

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A wet street is in the foreground, a gas station across, a motel sign, a sky that is cloudy and full of rain..

#photos #berkeley #california

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CS182: Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change

Our goal is to explore the ethical and social dimensions of technological innovation. Stanford has a special responsibility to address these topics in light of its role as a seedbed of Silicon Valley. By integrating perspectives from computer science, philosophy, and social science, the course will provide learning experiences that robustly and holistically examine the impact of technology on humans and societies.

What Is Pleroma? | Lainblog

Pleroma is a microblogging server software that can federate (= exchange messages with) other servers that support the same federation standards (OStatus and ActivityPub). What that means is that you can host a server for yourself or your friends and stay in control of your online identity, but still exchange messages with people on larger servers. Pleroma will federate with all servers that implement either OStatus or ActivityPub, like GNU Social, Friendica, Hubzilla and Mastodon.

Comment by nicbou on I prefer semi-automation | Hacker News

Automation is not just about saving time. It’s also about saving a “recipe” for a task, about avoiding human error, and about staying in the flow.

It’s our industry’s equivalent to mise en place. Deal with the drudgery in advance to focus on your work when it matters.

Things they didn’t teach you about Software Engineering by Vadim Kravcenko via Hacker News

Although it may sound surprising, the primary focus of a software engineer’s job is not writing code but rather creating value through the use of software that was written. Code is simply a tool to achieve this end goal. Code -> Software -> Value.

How They Must Write: Saving the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Contingencies by Thomas Basbøll

The five-paragraph essay forces students to be both knowledgeable and articulate about an assigned topic “on the spot” and therefore gives them a straighforward opportunity demonstrate to us whether they have learned what we have tried to teach them. If they know they actually have to a write a good one to a prompt they don’t know in advance ((but of course on a topic that is relevant to the class they are taking) they have a reason, not just to learn the material, but to keep their thinking and prose in good shape.

Why cassettes? by Dominique Cyprès via Hacker News

The way I relate to a recording when I carry it around physically in my pocket—not just my phone, which can provide access to that recording and many others, but a tape dedicated to containing just that recording and no other—just feels different. The tape becomes a little talisman that turns an intangible recording into a very tangible object, something I can see and turn over in my hands and physically give to another person.

GitHub is Sued, and We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing by Roy Kaufman

Plaintiffs allege that OpenAI and GitHub assembled and distributed a commercial product called Copilot to create generative code using publicly accessible code originally made available under various “open source”-style licenses, many of which include an attribution requirement. As GitHub states, “…[t]rained on billions of lines of code, GitHub Copilot turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions across dozens of languages.” The resulting product allegedly omitted any credit to the original creators.

#AI #copyright #ethics #automation #writing #links

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A leather sofa under a window with a blue heeler cuddling a pillow and a red heeler mix on a striped blanket

#photos #thesedogs

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Sections of book covers representing books read in 2022

In 2022, I read about about 54 books. I started the year wanted to write a post about each book.

I only made it through the first 12. Here's to getting more of them up as posts in 2023.

Here are the six books that have really stuck with me:

  1. Purple Hibiscus – Fiction.
  2. Lost Children Archive – Fiction.
  3. The Pragmatic Programmer – Nonfiction.
  4. Bloodlands – Nonfiction.
  5. Lost Radio City – Fiction.
  6. The Kite Runner – Fiction.

This post contains affiliate links.

#Read2022

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User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

For people hosting instances, however, it can also mean some legal risk. Fortunately, there are some relatively easy ways to mitigate that risk – if you plan ahead. To help people do that, this guide offers an introduction to some common legal issues, along with a few practical considerations.

Embracing My Butch Identity Was a Challenge, Here’s Why by Ro White

On one of many occasions when I was stopped by the TSA, an agent demanded to know what was “strapped to my chest.” “My boobs,” I said. “I’m wearing a bra.” Strangers regularly ask me what my gender is or ask leading questions to reveal my “true” identity. My life is a never-ending “It’s Pat!” sketch, and it’s only funny sometimes.

HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons by Zanin Andrea

Any activity you do on the Internet (reading this article, buying stuff on Amazon, uploading cat pictures) comes down to sending and receiving messages to and from a server.

This can be a bit abstract so let’s imagine that those messages were delivered by carrier pigeons.

Tokyo’s Urban Planning Secrets Revealed in New Book by Max Zimmerman

It’s based on the idea that systems and phenomena, through local interactions of their parts, can create orders. The classic example would be the flocking behavior of birds, in which you can see clearly the formations but there is no bird leading it.

#links #fediverse #gender #explainer #urbanplanning

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I like to think about the year ahead, imagine ways to be better, and then figure out how to incorporate activities to get there. In other words: I make New Year’s resolutions.

I’ve got two this year:

Be a better communicator, professionally and personally.

That includes: – Active listening – Asking better questions – Sharing learning

Personally, that means I want to spend more time with friends, hear about their lives and families, and ask for help when I need it. That last one is a particular struggle. My tendency is to share personal struggles and learning after I am through them. Not while I am in the midst of them.

I’m going to set a dinner party goal (12!), a walk with friends goal (also 12), a talk on the phone with siblings and cousins goal (once every three months, each), and a reminder to talk with my family when I’m struggling.

To get there, I need to rebuild the habit of checking in and organizing my thoughts so I even know that I am struggling. For me, that means recommitting to morning pages. I’ve signed up 750 words to help juice that.

Professionally, it means really working on meeting facilitation and managerial 1:1s skills. I need to make them both a place where people can express themselves, stretch, and get the things that help them move their own project and careers forward. I feel like I have put some structure in place over the last year to help with that. I need to keep using and improving it.

It also means working with the garage door open more often. There are different levels for sure. I want to try again to share a weekly update email with the teams I am closest too. I didn’t get very far with that last year and then I had enough misses in a row that I just let it stop. I’m going to restart.

I also want to do more long form writing. This will be internal white papers, operational plans, and external position papers.

It also means structuring more of our work as open source with a strong governance policy. This is another place where my real goal needs to be about learning.

Sweat more.

Literally, not figuratively. I walk a lot but in the last year or two I’ve started sweating less. I need to push myself to sweat more. To do this, I’m going to recommit to running, bike more on around town errands, and do strength training. All of these are easy to set up with specific goals.

——-

#ThisLife

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Anti-marketing by Andy Matuschak

If you make anti-marketing the goal, then interesting challenges become a positive thing: fodder for public conversation, not something to be swept under the rug.

My Information Operating System Part 1: Reading by Kyle Stratis

My goal when reading is to generate knowledge and insights that can be connected with knowledge and insights derived from other sources. That is a mouthful to say that I want to integrate information from something I read and connect it to my existing knowledge.

Why are there so many minor scales by Ethan Hein

The minor-key world is more complicated than the major-key world. But that also makes for a lot of musical variety. Let’s dig in!

Levels of Racism: Systemic vs Individual – Anti-racism Resources – Research Help at Fitchburg State University via D. Elisabeth Glassco on Mastodon

We pledge to provide access to information, resources, and programming that works towards dismantling the racist systems on which our country has been built, as well as the many other insidious forms of inequality that persist in our society.

#links #marketing #pkms #music #anti-racism #libraries

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