First, I am still conflicted about generative AI. It’s still a horrible, extractive, resource-intensive, opportunistic, hype-addled, broligarchy-enhancing opaque bullshit machine. And it’s still the elephant in every room, the sometimes-unspoken layer underneath every conversation, such that I can’t just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Hence the ongoing conflict.
For thinking-out-loud, this was prompted by Audrey’s recent post on mirrors, awareness, and AI: A Better World Is Possible. Especially, this bit:
But here’s what I think: most people don’t want “AI.” Most people are exhausted by the onslaught of technology “upgrades” that have consistently made everything worse.
Update: I’ve revised my Today dashboard since this was originally published. Claude helped me figure out how to combine a couple of the blocks and make it work much better.
I’ve been using a Canvas as a “dashboard” (the “Map” tab in the screenshot below - here’s a screenshot) to see lots of info quickly, and have had a separate “Tasks” dashboard note (the “Tasks” pinned tab in the screenshot) to view upcoming/overdue/urgent tasks. But that didn’t quite get at what I needed - a quick way to find (and re-find) notes that I’m actively working on.
I’ve been using, developing, implementing, supporting, and critiquing educational technologies for longer than I care to admit. In that time, roughly once every decade, a major new technology emerged that was simultaneously cast as both the future and death of education. Computers in the 1980s. Multimedia and the Internet in the 1990s. “Web 2.0” in the 2000s. MOOCs in the 2010s. And now, generative AI (GenAI).
I don’t look at the webserver logs for this webthing in detail, but have been curious given the spikes in bot traffic over the last several months. Much of it is the traditional “I’ll just crawl your entire website multiple times per day to feed my search index”, but there’s been a LOT of “I’ll just crawl your entire website multiple times per day to feed my LLM training dataset, and I will ignore rate limiting that you’ve set in robots.txt”
Deja vu all over again. I did this the last the the bad orange man was elected, and before that back in 2008, but this time I’m going a bit further. It sucks. This is hard, and I know it looks performative and theatrical and melodramatic, but it’s something that I think I have to do. I’m sad and frustrated and pissed off that I even have to think about this nonsense. I’m conflicted on so many levels.
I’ve been using Claude since the 3.5 model was released, and have been paying for the Professional tier for the last 5 months (and counting). $30 CAD per month for a tool that I use pretty regularly. All AI companies are problematic, but Anthropic feels slightly-less-problematic than OpenAI, certainly less so than Grok. Claude feels less gimmicky - it is strictly a text generator and doesn’t generate images. Its ability to build simple software is pretty impressive, even if the process can be mind-numbingly frustrating at times.
I’ve been using Obsidian as my note-taking app for a couple of years now. I’ve got over 5,000 notes for various things. Including lots of meetings. There are times when my job is basically going to meetings. And I need to be able to keep track of what we intend to talk about in each meeting (especially as they start to blur together).
Graph of over 5,000 notes in Obsidian. The red dots are mostly meetings. Blue are people, Orange-ish are Topics. Green are vendors.
It’s like the 2007 blogosphere may be returning1? Hopefully. Anyway, Alan tagged me in this chain letter blog challenge thing, so here goes…
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
My first blog posts were written in the then-new Apple iTools “iWeb Publish” tool. I have vague memories of static pages being saved to my iDisk, then synced to a webspace on an Apple server somewhere. I’m not sure why I started posting on that. Just to try it out? Maybe there’s something to this whole Web thing? I’d started just before going to my first WWDC, so was drinking the kool-aid pretty deeply at the time. Early posts were about our not-yet-born child (who is 22 years old as I write this), WWDC, and learning objects software development stuff from the early CAREO days.
This fall marked 30 years that I’ve been working in edtech. I’d done some edtech projects before then, but Fall 1994 was when I started doing it for a living. 30 years is a long time, simultaneously forever and gone in a flash. Instead of writing a 50,000 word series of posts documenting minutae, I took some time to reflect on some of the major themes and changes that have defined my career so far. (the minutuae are already documented on my Projects page, in my Ancient archive, and in my CV.)
The growing use of GenAI in education, technology, and society raises four main conflicts: misunderstanding its capabilities, insatiable resource hunger, outsourcing creativity, and complicity in a problematic system.
I finally tried out Google’s newly-announced NotebookLM generative AI application. It provides a set of LLM-powered tools to summarize documents. I fed it my dissertation, and am surprised at how useful the output would be.
The most impressive tool creates a podcast episode, complete with dual hosts in conversation about the document. First - these are AI-generated hosts. Synthetic voices, speaking for synthetic hosts. And holy moly is it effective. Second - although I’d initially thought the conversational summary would be a dumb gimmick, it is surprisingly powerful.
I explored Pavel Samsonov’s article on the limitations of being ‘data driven,’ reflecting on the importance of being ‘data informed’ in complex work environments where trust and collaboration are essential.
Graph of over 5,000 notes in Obsidian. The red dots are mostly meetings. Blue are people, Orange-ish are Topics. Green are vendors.