How I Use AI
It’s popular in some circles to argue that we are unleashing AI as a completely untested technology with possibly dangerous implications on society. My own experience is different. Ever since…
Stephen Downes
The Future of Human Agency
My response to the Pew/Elon University Survey. By 2035, will smart machines, bots and systems powered by artificial intelligence be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of…
No Man’s Sky: Advice for New Players
This is what I posted on a Reddit thread: With a bunch of new people coming into the game, and old players returning, what is a helpful tip that you…
The Four Horsemen of the Edocalypse
In a lengthy and well-thought-out post on Stratechery Ben Thompson describes the The Four Horsemen of the Tech Recession. Following Thompson’s lead Maria Anderson offers a corresponding Four Horsemen of…
Best and Worst of 2035
Image: Pew By 2035 two trends will be evident, which we can characterize as the best and worst of digital life. Neither, though, is unadulterated. The best will contain elements…
Setting Up a Node.js Application in Reclaim Cloud (1)
1. Create a new environment in reclaim cloud Resource: https://support.reclaimhosting.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404919752215-Creating-New-Environments-in-Reclaim-Cloud I selected node.js as my application and Maria DB as my MySQL database. 2. Set up an end point for…
Participatory Governance and the Fediverse
Image: Heise Magazine Today Alex Tarkowski launched a 24-part Twitter thread into the digisphere expanding on his views about participatory governance and fediverse. It builds on his article Priorities to…
The Conference Board’s 0-4 on Innovation Policy
The Conference Board of Canada makes four recommendations for innovation in Canada. It’s based on a self-styled ‘report card’ that ranks Canada as a ‘C’ on innovation (the U.S. and…
Introduction to the Duty of Care
Here is a section from my book-in-progress (which may never be completed, but I continue to toil away). Please read it keeping the following in mind: – It should be…
Mastodon Reflections
These are some posts collected from my Mastodon postings which together sort of form a coherent picture of the fediverse. Sort of. So much fun watching tech people pour in…
The Socialist Case for Blockchain
Doug Belshaw points to a recent article in the Jacoban in the form of a review of Vitalik Buterin’s Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of…
Camping and Biking Anticosti Island – A Guide
Anticosti Island is a large but mostly uninhabited island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Covered with subarctic pine and spruce forest, inhabited by hundreds of thousands of deer, and…
Top Tools for Learning 2022
It’s that time of the year again when educators and developers send their list of top tools to Jane Hart. You can see my full list of web-based tools and…
Future of the Metaverse
My contribution to a report by Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center and Pew Research, The Future of the Metaverse. Opportunities for fraud and scams will abound. As well, there…
Running Mojolicious in a Docker Container
Mojolicious is a real-time Perl-based web framework that can be used for writing modern web applications. Today in an episode of Stephen Follows Instructions I took it out for a…
Install Perlbrew in Ubuntu Image in Docker Desktop
Documenting this because the instructions on the Perlbrew website completely failed for me. I got various errors, including an error 5888 when I tried to run perlbrew. I started with…
Vincens Vives Interview
I was recently interviewed for the Vincens Vives blog (in Spanish). Below is the full-length set of answers I sent, in English, to the questions I was posed. In recent…
Language is a Physical Construct
Capturing a short tweet threat for posterity, because it will just disappear in Twitter. Language is a physical construct; it exists in the world, not the mind. We contribute to…
AISEO Paraphraser Result
I wrote an article yesterday. It was a political article, but what I said isn’t the point here. This post reports on my use of the article to test the…
Keys to a Professional Learning Community: My Own List
I said on a recent post that “Alexandra Minhai says successful professional learning communities depend on four factors: being a safe space, validation by peers, crowdsourcing ideas, and accountability. If…