News and opinions related to online learning and new media.
Aug 14, 2026 I agree with the argument made in favour of open source AI offered here by Tim O'Reilly. "I believe that the big labs are making the same strategic mistake that Netscape and Microsoft made in the mid 90s. Yes, make the models more reliable for ordinary users. But don't shut down the options for developers who don't work for you to push the state of the art forward. As Bill Joy put it…
Aug 14, 2026 What I like about this article is that it makes it clear that there is no single way to support what they call education for the poor. As the diagram says, "no single layer solves it alone". And it offers an effective counter to single-minded programs (such as the religious and charter schools recommended in Deseret News, via the always negative Joanne Jacobs ). My view: There's a lot…
Aug 14, 2026 It's important, I think, to understand that this article is focused specifically on recall of facts, and not cognition generally (though there are people out there who will no doubt conflate the two). It's interesting because of the way it describes five sources of failure of factual recall based on "one of five knowledge profiles: (1) encoding failure, (2) recall failure, (3) direct…
Aug 14, 2026 This interview ( 25 page PDF ) is accurately described by the abstract, which frankly I would not recommend reading beyond (why link it here? for the record). "Tracing GenAI's origins from an Epstein-funded symposium and the Pentagon's chequebook to the eugenic roots of Silicon Valley's culture, Popenici contends that AI is the political project of 'technofascist' billionaires rather…
Aug 14, 2026 This article describes the practice of sharding databases in order to serve more requests across larger data sources than a single database could handle. In sharding, each of several (or several hundred ) databases contains a certain segment of the data. This division of data is defined by a simple function (for example, each database might handle only certain record numbers - the…