2024 Week 13

My theme song this week:

⚙️ Work

• Completed annual performance review discussions with all Learning Technologies Group staff. What an absolutely incredible team - and what an honour to have the opportunity to work with them all.
• Planning a potential on-site visit with our D2L representatives.
• Preparing a conference presentation about the architecture course from F2023.

📚 Reading

• Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron (newly typset by John Gruber). “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” A short story from 1961.

🔗 Links

Miscellaneous

• Jeff Wetzler @ HBR: How to Get the Honest Input You Need from Your Employees. Via Rob Crooks. I’m not super fond of calling team members “my employees”, but some good ideas for asking better questions…
• Ian Semple @ The Guardian: Two nights of broken sleep can make people feel years older, finds study. I’ve had insomnia for years now, and can attest to this¹. I finally had a decent night’s sleep this week - the first in months - and felt like a completely different (and younger) person the next day. Insomnia is like playing life in Hard Mode.
• A new mechanical keyboard inspired by the C64? Tempting…
• Evan Boehs: Everything I know about the Xz Backdoor. An apparently malicious developer gained trust in the open source XZ (data compression) libraries (and others). Then they inserted a backdoor into the code, which was then automatically deployed across the internet via package managers - apparently mostly affecting Red Hat users. Yikes! (via Will Dormann)
• Orion Reed: 3D DOM Viewer. Paste his code into your browser’s developer console, and it renders the current web page in 3D, with layers and z-order visible. Amazing. (via @ResearchBuzz) (and, if you paste the code into Bookmarklet Maker, you can have a handy-dandy “3D” bookmarklet ready to click for any web page…) (or just drag that “3D” link into your bookmarks bar…)

AI Is Awesome™

• Tamar Satov @ Maclean’s: ChatGPT is everywhere. What’s fair use for students trying to get into university?. Featuring the work of Sarah Elaine Eaton.

• Baldur Bjarnason: The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con.

  Well, the tech industry just isn’t that good at software. This illusion is, honestly, too clever to have been created intentionally by those making it.

  and

  “Our university students can’t make heads nor tails of our website. Let’s add a psychic hotline!”

• Cory Dransfeldt: We have a content quality problem, not a content quantity problem. Cory’s mostly talking about journalism and music and media, but this goes for anything that relies on ad-supported monetization of content, which relentlessly and inevitably pushes toward flooding the internet with as much cheap crap as physically possible. Anything/anyone that promises that they can produce MORE content, FASTER, EASIER, CHEAPER, is working toward this race to the bottom. (via Nick Heer)

The Alberta Advantage™

• Brendan Coulter & Karina Zapata @ CBC News: Albertans still not sold on provincial pension plan, new poll suggests. Yeah. No shit. Most UCP members still support the cruel “student pronouns policy”, but are shockingly opposed to something that will blow a hole in their retirement funds.
• Tim Rauf @ The Tyee: Alberta’s Strange Double Standard on Green Energy. “Solar and wind face tough rules, while fossil fuels get a pass.”

🧺 Other

• The search tool built into the Hugo Papermod theme was not good. Wayyy over engineered, which would be ok if it gave high quality search functionality. Which, it didn’t. So I replaced it with the previous javascript search tool that I had borrowed from the Book theme. MUCH faster, MUCH better search results.

🗓️ Focus for next week

• Easter long weekend means next week will be a 3 day work week for me, as I’m still taking Fridays off to burn off vacation hours.
• Top Hat reps will be on campus, giving some workshops for instructors and our team.
• Taking a first look at submissions for the TI programming feedback survey.
• Team meetings - both for LTG and TI leadership teams.