I was out of town for the first half of the week, so it was a super short week. Sure didn’t feel like a short week, though…
ewwwww! renewable energy! those poor pristine viewscapes! they should tear those down and put up some pumpjacks or something more aesthetically pleasing…
⚙️ Work
President McCauley announced some major institutional organizational changes. Including moving the Office of Experiential Learning from within the TI to a newly-formed-but-not-yet-created Office of Signature Learning Experiences. I have thoughts and comments that will not be posted here.
🔗 Links
Edtech
- Shengjergji, S., Luzai, A., Mills, S., Van Nostrand, P., Cermakova, A. L., & Kucirkova, N. (2024). Environmental impact of EdTech: The hidden costs of digital learning. University of Stavanger. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31265/USPS.285 ISBN: 978-82-8439-286-8 (via Neil Selwyn, who wrote the forward for the book)
The Web
- Cory Doctorow @ Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader
- Anil Dash: It feels like 2004 again.
- Ben Werdmuller @ Werd I/O: Revisiting Known
- Gareth Edwards @ Every: The Disappearance of an Internet Domain. Britain is giving up sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, which means the .io TLD will disappear. Ben’s webstuff is on an .io domain. And Github.io, and a seemingly endless number of techish websites… poof
- Samantha Cole @ 404 Media: Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos. Matt seems like a well-adjusted and highly effective leader. What a shit-show.
AI
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Kyle Orland @ ars technica: Apple study exposes deep cracks in LLMs’ “reasoning” capabilities, writing about:
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Mirsadeh, I., et al. (2024). GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models. (preprint)
We hypothesize that this decline is due to the fact that current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data.
LLMs don’t actually reason; they just string words together based on their training data, and if that data included text that describes reasoning, the LLM can generate reasoning-looking-word-sequences.
While most companies are predicting The Singularity and superhuman AI triggered by generative AI and LLMs, researchers from a company that just launched a bunch of products with GenAI baked into them publish a paper about how LLMs can’t reason. Because of course they can’t. They’re just linear algebra at incredible scale. Which is impressive as hell, but it’s not “reasoning”. I don’t think it even counts as “intelligence”, but that’s whole ’nother can of worms.
What GenAI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic describe as “reasoning” is just trying to rephrase a prompt into separate chunks that can be run in sequence, each doing the spicy-autocomplete thing, and then stitching it all together. Sure, reasoning involves steps. But just because something breaks a prompt into steps doesn’t mean it’s reasoning…
Academia
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Bron Eager: Welcome To The Academic Side Hustle Program (via Tim Klapdor)
While I acknowledge that many people in the higher education sector are in precarious employment situations, struggling to pay the bills, and have many other factors at play, there are many others for whom the golden handcuffs of tenure, pension plans, and a steady (if not spectacular) wage make the idea of walking away seem impossible, no matter how toxic the environment becomes.
Drones
I picked up a micro drone - a DJI Neo - and have been using it to take some interesting photos (most are on Mastodon, but a couple have been posted here - home and assiniboia sunset). The DJI Fly app builds in some info about what kinds of flight restrictions are in place when you turn on the drone, but it doesn’t have everything. It’s mostly the Transport Canada zones, without local restrictions applied at the provincial or city levels:
Screenshot of DJI Fly interface, showing flight restrictions in Calgary
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City of Calgary:
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Calgary Drone Group: Sub 250 Drones
Much of Calgary is in one of 2 Transport Canada “control zones” extending around the YYC and Springbank airports. Drones under 250g can fly there as long as they stay under an altitude of 400 feet, and the operator maintains visual contact with the drone. BUT. The City also restricts drone flights over some types of parks, to protect wildlife etc. And no drones are allowed in national parks, for good reason.
So, even though the west side of Nose Hill shows as ok to fly, it’s still restricted because of Calgary bylaws.
🍿 Watching
- ★★★★☆ Shrinking (season 2, AppleTV+). They’re releasing episodes on a weekly cadence, so we’re only 2 episodes into season 2. But this is easily one of our favourite shows to watch together.
📚 Reading
I don’t have the mental bandwidth for nonfiction “productive reading” at the moment, so I started reading The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey.
🧺 Other
- I made a theme for NetNewsWire that looks more like my blog’s theme.
🗓️ Focus for next week
- Meetings.
- Flu shot (drop-in, on campus)
- Making a static snapshot of elearn.ucalgary.ca because IT is upgrading PHP and we’re not convinced that something won’t break, and we haven’t been given access to the server to make an actual backup for the last couple of years. What’s the worst that could happen? (and hopefully the wifi holds up while I run Sitesucker on my laptop - ethernet hasn’t worked since upgrading to macOS 15 because IT’s RADIUS certificate for network authentication expired over a year ago and macOS is now rightfully refusing to connect to the physical network…)
- AI Conversations community session
- Meeting with a delegation from Germany’s Federal Parliament, to share some of our work in the TI.