Notices by Thomas Vander Wal (vanderwal@mastodon.social), page 2

This NPR segment was interesting, but I don't know that it was fully new. I caught it in the car and hoped for find a trascript, but nope…

https://www.npr.org/2024/02/18/1232301993/a-new-study-finds-the-memory-systems-that-give-trivia-champions-an-edge

The part that was interesting is people remembering trivia well and other don't. There are patterns that work for people who are prone to this type of recall, but the patterns don't seem to work for others.

@band This is one of the things I need to work through.

I'm catching up on podcasts as back in the kitchen making rather than grabbing.

Last evening started on the FLOSS Weekly with @dsearls interviewing @evan about ActivityPub and more. - https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/759?autostart=false

I haven't heard Evan in a while, but this last year or two been listening to David J. Malen on Harvard's CS50 courses and couldn't sort out who I knew that sounded incredibly similar to him. Connection made.

Both FLOSS Weekly w/ Evan and CS50 are worth your time to at least investigate.

@band Then there is sorting out a digital garden, which may be semi-collaborative with something like Massive Wiki.

@band Using side notes on both sides (if side doesn’t have importance) could give space with alternating paragraphs so not getting overlapping notes in the margins.

Yesterday catching up on notes in Obsidian I pulled in a transcript of a talk and finally used @TfTHacker ’s Cornell Notes to add quick annotations.

I used it on a multi-column interface with 3 columns and the left panel open, so things are a little narrow, but yet it still worked well.

@band This is part of all of this that draws attention to many vastly conflicting tensions.

The early-ish OpenAI of safety and a good path forward that drew my interest years back I had assumed had been fully shelved and caution kicked to the curb for commercial success.

When Microsoft made their deal and dumped much of their internal efforts and their ethics teams, I figured old OAI was long gone. Seems it was in just frozen in carbon and now thawed.

@band The safety vs. commerce conflict seems like it ran / runs deep. It runs squarely at some questions and concerns I’ve had. There seems to have been two very much opposing understandings of reality at play.

Oddly, it seems the commercial push was also at odds with itself in a few places, which is really odd, but not surprising.

How it was handled is really nuts.

@simon @benjedwards This Ben Edwards piece is really good.

Have you seen the Jeremy Howard strong hunch over on the bird sight. It hits some of the early conflicts around safety over commerce and why it went to a non-profit model. Also why what was shared at the event last week may have tipped things to oust sama.

Ah, Friday off. Well, it is all Fridays off for the remainder of the year. I do have a meeting in late afternoon, but I’m okay with that.

Today is also the day I shifted from my bright (now slightly dingy and dirty) orange Vans, to a pair of fuchsia Vans (although sort of between fuchsia and magenta). On coffee walk I got three comments, “nice shoes”.

I have another pair of brilliant orange Vans in waiting and gray green hightops. I sort of miss the orange, but a change if fine.

@evan Yes, agree. Just dealing with the second and explaining why keeping the center handling things as simply as possible and put the deviations to the core needs. But, also need to keep the hops away from the core to a minimum to reduce latency.

@evan it sounds like you were watching explainers I was making yesterday about basics of scaling and complexity and why the center is simple and need solid next tier that handle the deviatiations and divergent rules / constraints for all that follows in that chain.

@elipariser Do you know @evan? May be worth connecting if not. Evan had a hand (and brain) in this.