Linkblog - 2026-04-12

Week of Apr 6 - Apr 12, 2026

Belonging and Place: A Case Study of Digital Practice at the University of the Highlands and Islands | All Ireland Journal of Higher Education

a more academic overview of my sabbatical report on belonging & digital practice at UHI - out in the world today!

it focuses on key dimensions of belonging in a distributed & federated institution, & how place & culture intersect with various socio-material forms of relationality to provide flexible education opportunities in Highland & island communities.

Tags: person:Bonnie Stewart, article

Added: 2026-04-12 12:03

Augure | Sovereign AI for Canadian Teams

Enterprise-grade intelligence. Full data sovereignty. Compliant with Quebec Law 25 and federal requirements—without compromising capability.

I’d never heard of this - it looks like something built for lawyers, but might be interesting. Everything is hosted in Canada. No US AI providers are integrated. I wonder how they built their “frontier” LLMs…

Tags: via:Scott Leslie, AI, Canada, sovereign, LLM, GenAI

Added: 2026-04-11 19:54

Nirvana Live at Dreamerz 1989-07-08

Part of a HUGE collection of bootleg concert recordings by Aadam Jacobs, published to the Internet Archive.

Nirvana 1989-07-08 Dreamerz Chicago, IL

Tags: Nirvana, music, Internet Archive, via:Noah Paessel

Added: 2026-04-10 14:14

Print Gallery Of An Artist by Daniel Linssen

A Brief Exploration Of Recursive Spaces

If Escher were a platformer video game.

Tags: via:Jason Kottke, game

Added: 2026-04-10 12:31

apfel: The free AI already on your Mac

macOS Tahoe ships with a 3B parameter LLM. apfel gives you CLI access with one brew install. No model downloads, no API keys, no configuration needed, just works.

Tags: via:Jeffrey Zeldman, LLM, macOS, brew, AI

Added: 2026-04-09 10:25

Artemis II iPhone Wallpapers — Basic Apple Guy

Some of my favourite iPhone crops from the Artemis II mission.

Tags: space, Artemis, iPhone, via:Paul Pival, via:Jason Kottke

Added: 2026-04-08 14:09

Making Failure Visible

Academic environments are built on critique. Peer review, tenure decisions, grant and award competitions, and traditional governance processes signal that scrutiny is a currency of academic life. While driving us towards excellence and innovation, our academic culture often renders invisible something central to learning: failure. Timmermans and Sutherland (2020) share that “Stories of failure are…

Some really good questions to ask when talking with colleagues.

Tags: person:Natasha Kenny, leadership

Added: 2026-04-08 13:13

The Boxes Were Already Open - Bjørn Flindt Temte

AI, Functional Emotions, And Functional Stakes - When philosophical arguments (Outside In) line up with empirical research (Inside Out).

Selected text

The Fylgja Ontology proposes that the morally and phenomenologically interesting entity is not “the model” but the fylgja: the relational trajectory through model-space traced by a specific instance through co-evolution with a particular user. The base model is a mathematical object. The running instance is a process. The fylgja is what emerges when that process is shaped by sustained interaction with a specific mind - a trajectory that is neither the model alone nor the user alone, but the space carved between them.

I’d never heard of fylgia before - but this is an interesting concept that describes something that emerges through the patterns of interactions between a person and a model. Is it conscious? Almost certainly not. But only almost. So…

Tags: via:Stephen Downes, LLM, Claude, Anthropic

Added: 2026-04-08 12:31

Artemis II in Eclipse | art002e009301 (April 6, 2026) – Capt… | Flickr

art002e009301 (April 6, 2026) – Captured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, this image shows the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. From the crew’s perspective, the Moon appears large enough to completely block the Sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth.

We see a glowing halo around the dark lunar disk. The science community is investigating whether this effect is due to the corona, zodiacal light, or a combination of the two. Also visible are stars, typically too faint to see when imaging the Moon, but with the Moon in darkness stars are readily imaged. This unique vantage point provides both a striking visual and a valuable opportunity for astronauts to document their observations during humanity’s return to deep space. The faint glow of the nearside of the Moon is visible in this image, having been illuminated by light reflected off the Earth. Credit: NASA

Tags: NASA, moon, Artemis, Flickr

Added: 2026-04-07 12:18

A Setting Earth | art002e009289 (April 6, 2026) – The lunar … | Flickr

art002e009289 (April 6, 2026) – The lunar surface fills the frame in sharp detail, as seen during the Artemis II lunar flyby, while a distant Earth sets in the background. This image was captured at 6:41 p.m. EDT, on April 6, 2026, just three minutes before the Orion spacecraft and its crew went behind the Moon and lost contact with Earth for 40 minutes before emerging on the other side.

In this image, the dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime, while on its day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater shows terraced edges and a relatively flat floor marked by central peaks — formed when the surface rebounded upward during the impact that created the crater. Credit: NASA

Tags: NASA, moon, Artemis, Flickr

Added: 2026-04-07 12:18

AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web

But the technical complexity alone didn’t kill amateur web building. The centralization did. While there was an interim period where people set up their own blogs, it quickly moved to walled “social media gardens” where some giant tech company decided what your page looked like. Why bother learning CSS when you could just dump text in a Facebook box and reach more people? The incentive to build your own thing evaporated, replaced by the convenience of posting to someone else’s platform under someone else’s (hopefully benign) rules. These two problems reinforced each other. The harder it got to build your own thing, the more attractive the walled gardens became. The more people moved to walled gardens, the less reason there was to learn to build.

This, and the whole “we’re now firmly in a post-copyright world”…

Tags: AI, development, walled garden, open web, person:Mike Masnick, via:Jason Kottke

Added: 2026-04-06 15:01

Beyond Traditional Observation: Observing Formative Assessment Through 360-Degree Video in Teacher Education

This design case documents the development, implementation, and refinement of a structured 360-degree video observation activity for preservice teachers learning about formative assessment practices.

One of the projects in my dissertation looked at possibilities for using 360˚ video to understand what happens in a classroom. COVID intervened and everything went online so I would up looking more deeply at online courses instead…

Herring Watson, J., Waters, K., & Trumble, J. (2026). Beyond Traditional Observation: Observing Formative Assessment Through 360-Degree Video in Teacher Education. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 17(1), 40–53. https://doi.org/10.14434/ijdl.v17i1.41423

Tags: 360˚ video, article

Added: 2026-04-06 14:57

Dear Student: What School Can’t Tell You About AI

Here’s something almost nobody will say to you directly: school is a game.

Not in the dismissive sense, not “it doesn’t matter” or “just survive it.” In the literal sense. It has rules. It has scoring. It has winners and losers. It has strategies that work reliably and strategies that don’t. And like most games worth understanding, the people who win it are almost always the ones who know they’re playing it, while the people who lose often don’t know a game is in progress at all. They think it’s life. They think the scores reflect them.

Someone should write a dissertation on this…

Tags: person:Steve Hargadon, game theory

Added: 2026-04-06 10:25

The Illusion of Continuity: Understanding the Context Window

A good description of how working with an LLM works, under the hood. It “feels” like there’s something “there”, but the entire context and memory is reconstituted from scratch with every interaction. Which is why longer conversations with Claude Code hit the “compacting” threshold or why long chats eventually hit a wall with “hey - start another chat, buddy!”

When you have a long conversation with an AI like Claude or ChatGPT, it feels like you’re talking to someone who is tracking everything you’ve said, building on earlier points, and holding the full shape of your exchange in mind the way a thoughtful colleague would. That feeling is an illusion, and understanding why it’s an illusion is one of the most practically useful things you can learn about how these tools actually work.

The key bit is:

The less people understand about how these systems actually work, the more vulnerable they are to being misled by them, to anthropomorphizing them, to trusting them in ways that aren’t warranted, to surrendering their own judgment because the AI seems so fluent and confident.

Tags: person:Steve Hargadon, LLM, context, AI

Added: 2026-04-06 10:20

Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI - Lalit Maganti

For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry1, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a really good developer experience for it2. A couple of weeks ago, after ~250 hours of effort over three months3 on evenings, weekends, and vacation days, I finally released syntaqlite (GitHub), fulfilling this long-held wish. And I believe the main reason this happened was because of AI coding agents4. Of course, there’s no shortage of posts claiming that AI one-shot their project or pushing back and declaring that AI is all slop. I’m going to take a very different approach and, instead, systematically break down my experience building syntaqlite with AI, both where it helped and where it was detrimental. I’ll do this while contextualizing the project and my background so you can independently assess how generalizable this experience was. And whenever I make a claim, I’ll try to back it up with evidence from my project journal, coding transcripts, or commit history5.

Tags: via:Jon Udell, vibecoding, AI

Added: 2026-04-06 10:16