Vic Work: notes on learning, technology and play

I've had an on-and-off thing with GTD for over 15 years. I've tried, and paid for, more apps and plugins than anyone needs in their lifetimes. Every January meant a new paper planner with a new promise, and every February meant a new hangover after the planner got neglected. Funny thing, among all this - I was doing so well. I had jobs, and jobs upon jobs. Bringing home the bacon, you know? Living the dream. People's projects kept coming, and I kept saying "yes", because I always felt like work...

There are two types of language learning stories that are relatively easy to write, whether you're writing books or blogs, articles or policy papers. First, there's the case of the relentlessly positive author, whose mission seems to be to list all the ways in which being a language learner changes your life and the world around you for the better. And then, there's the bitter and suspicious voice, out to prove that all things multilingual, multicultural and multifaceted are somehow too dangegou...

My VPN app upgraded itself to Version 4. fanfare V4 was an 850 megabyte download, constantly used 200-300MBs of my RAM, and no longer came with the command-line interface (CLI). sad trombone I decided to uninstall v4 and re-download the cli. It's a 30 megabyte download and has no RAM footprint to speak of. Some things are worth every bell & whistle you throw at it. Others are just plumbing: ugly AF and oh-so-crucial to get right. Know which ones you're building / maintaining. ...

Yup, you could try to hack at Google's #algorithm. LinkedIn's. X's. Do what you're told, when you're told, with the right bells & whistles. Feels good to catch that wave. Then you're off it, and that's a bummer. That's when we buy ads to get back on - to bypass the lineup. "Algorithm" means "A finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems". You have those. For work. For study. For play. For art. For decades. Hack these instead. Be your own puz...

A survey of community college students in the US, adapting to remote study, has intriguing data for #LearningDesign. Only a minority of these reported 0 tech issues. For most, #OnlineLearning was a slow, clunky experience, draining their confidence. Our #EdTech remains tied to privilege - our starting place is where RAM is cheap, broadband is reliable, and coding small isn't necessary. The learners let down by this live just outside Harvard or MIT. Build for them. DOI 10.1007/s11528-021-00587-8 ...

Each Cruse car needed to be helped out, on average, every 2.5 miles. Cruse employed more remote employees to fix this than it would have drivers. All so we could live out our Jetsons fantasy. Each shiny and polished OpenAI product had to be scraped clean of profanity, bias, and racism at prototype stage by remote workers in Kenya, on a pittance. All so we could fantasise about the coming benevolent singularity. Each new neural network is trained by gig workers in developing countries, without ...

A few months ago, to manage burnout, I switched off every LinkedIn notification. Things were quiet for a while. Then a LinkedIn email in my inbox. A new feature, you see - hadn't been part of my purge. Gotcha! Then another one. Another new thing. Back to 1-2 emails, & 3-4 notifications per week. Rob Nixon (2011) defines "slow violence" as "[A]n attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all". If your platform keeps reverting to slow violence - check for your nearest exi...

Backspace key on keyboard: stops working Capitalist self: "I was thinking of getting a new keyboard anyw - WHY DOES THIS ONE COST £259" Techbro self: "There must be a way to map an unused key to become Backsp - WHY IS DEBIAN SO COMPLICATED" Luddite self: takes screwdriver, yanks the Backspace key out, cleans out The Unspeakable Gunk Backspace key: works Self: disgusted but re-integrated Let this be a lesson about our order of priorities when fixing tech problems. Have a good weekend. :) ...

Going through the list of recent updates to WCAG, the web #accessibility guidelines, I smiled. The way #WCAG is shaping up is good to see - not just for web users with disabilities. It makes sure e.g. you don't have to enter the same info more than once. Or that CAPTCHAs aren't too devious. If you're serious about anything you build online, I suggest you start as close to WCAG as possible & move out from there. You'll be building helpful, humane tech for tired & overwhelmed users. Good s...

The reason why AI seems so good is the same reason why our sneakers / burgers / phones seem so cheap. It's someone else's labour. Unacknowledged, underpaid. Sure, soon enough the workers will get too expensive for the models to keep using them. But by then, the AI models will have their shiny feet in our door. If you can't see anyone doing the work on your content by then, chances are it's you. (Rowe, Niamh. “Millions of Workers Are Training AI Models for Pennies.” Wired, October 16, 2023.) ...

The first Noble Truth tells it simply: there's suffering. Duhkha. Unease. Standing unstable. A bumpy ride. In #DigitalLearning, it seems, it's paraphrased: there is social anxiety. Lots of it, everywhere you look. (DOI 10.1186/s41239-023-00419-0) There are always dozens of requirements for everything a #LearningDesigner builds, coming from all sides. Might as well add this thousand-year-old question: "will this here make learners more or less anxious?" Most rides are bumpy enough without us. ...

There is a paper out today suggesting that #SystemsThinking could learn from Darwin (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2310223120) It concerns weather systems & astronomy, but what if the following were true about anything you build / design? "[T]he system will evolve... if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions." One-size-fits-all stopped being reasonable in businesses, #EdTech, or anywhere. Build something else. Smaller. Hungrier. Or angrier. Watch it adapt...

Visual artists whose works have been scraped to train AI models are now building tools to protect their art. Glaze & Kudurru are two recent examples. With language, you'd be forgiven for thinking there's no such firewall. But meaningful language (as Ursula le Guin would argue) is always an event between people. Curiosity, contexts and personalities are all the defence you need. ...

Computer says NO. Computer says NOT ELIGIBLE. Computer says it will access your location even if you thought you told it not to. It's always been OK to talk back at it, you know. Except now it's even chattier, & better at bullshitting. Our ways of thinking about how we talk through / with computers are stuck in ivory towers of academic & technical English (DOI: 10.1002/9781118584194.ch6) We need plain ways of knowing how to talk back at computers before all but the nerdiest of us get sil...

It was surprising to me that algorithm and rhythm have unrelated etymologies (look them up; I shan't spoil the fun). The ideas are closely connected, if you let them be. It's easy to think of algorithms these days as these mysterious black boxes that somehow rule the machines we use. It's easy to forget about the codes and technologies we ourselves are coded by ( DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-26624-1_7) The reason cyborgs exist is that organisms & machines are equally ruled by rhythms and algorithm...

The Balance app for meditation is an example of an app I've really enjoyed using recently. (I'm not affiliated) It's simple, versatile, and generous. The guided meditations adapt to the time you can spare, the skills you want to build, and the experience you have already. The app also mixes the visual + auditory learning well, giving you a micro-lesson on screen before delivering the rest of the meditation through your headphones. It's free to try for one year. Go search it out. ...

Researchers now begin to understand what meditation does to us (DOI: 10.1016/j.bbr.2018.08.023). There's another important effect, though. These 13-15 minutes spent with yourself are not spent doing other things. Research already suggests that social media use messes with your cortisol recovery (DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01609). I've been replacing "doomscrolling" with "dudescrolling" before bedtime these days; sitting and watching the thoughts in my head unfold. Take care of your inner wiring. ...

According to data from Carta, the number of startups closing due to dissolution / bankruptcy in 2023 points to "the most difficult year for startups in at least a decade." Put that schadenfreude / indifference on ice for a minute & consider this: Many of these startups' employees used to devote time to keeping key repositories stable & user-friendly. They used to make sure the piping & plumbing worked for them. Now they're busy hustling for work. The web breaks slowly at first, then ...

We now know that pregnancy re-models a mother's brain (DOI:10.1126/science.adi0576). Hormones prepare the brain structure to begin responding to a world with new priorities. On a smaller, less intense scale, consider this: these kinds of changes happen to us every day. Joy, fear, pain, reward, pride, peer pressure - and all the hormones we're always awash with as a result... It would be easier to list things that don't have such effects. (Many of them are to be found at schools, ironically) ...

We were on our way home after viewing a house. "Sharp right," said the satnav. "Oh no," I thought. "That's the narrow lane again." 50 meters later, we came up against a line of cars, no way of passing them. I had to reverse these 50 meters. I feared and hated that moment. The house was lovely, but the area around it was built for big cars and confident drivers. Not me. Whatever you build - one of the better design questions you can ask is, "could I still use it if I was having a really bad day?"...

Google: "We get to decide what you search for. We'll tweak your search terms to be better for us." X: "We get to decide what your news story looks like. We'll strip out the headline to make it suit our feed." Apple: "We get to decide who repairs our machines. We'll make repairs inaccessible if it helps our business." I could probably come up with a new example like this every day of the week. Tech privilege = getting to decide. Check yours, get more - then spread it all to others. ...

I was preparing my strength training for the off-season. I had a doubt. I googled it. Ended up on a discussion forum for a franchised strength training program. Somebody else had a similar question, and they posted it. The author and founder of the program replied on the forum, mocking the rookie's assumptions and making fun of him. Cue more rookie abuse from followers. If you think your job as an instructor/leader is fact and bile delivery - we have bots for that. Show us some human strengths. ...

Somebody said this the other day: the real beauty of things like Universal Basic Income is the chance to start from scratch. To walk away from a bulls#t job, a failed project, an abusive situation - without fear of ending up under the bridge. When we build, lead, teach, or learn, the consequences may be less dramatic - but I still think many of us don't get to work with enough clean slates. There's always the baggage of expectations, specifications, "we-have-always-done-it-that-ways". The ne...

The way in which we got computers to work with words is impressive - as long as you don't expect more than you can get. To simplify: neural networks got reasonably good with language as a result of isolating words, and encoding words as collections of vectors. This then allowed us to access the kinds of math that were needed to train the models and produce results at scale. Now, how about learning? If you were to simplify the learning process to something which words can fully encapsulate, th...

Voyager 2 was launched 50 years ago, and its mission in space is still ongoing. This week, you may have heard that its antenna got re-positioned due to an incorrect series of commands. The good news is this: several times a year, Voyager 2 is programmed to reset the antenna's orientation. I think it goes about it the ancient-sailor way, by measuring its position relative to some well-known stars in the sky (although romantic AF, I can't confirm that). Think about this for a minute. Fifty year...

This week, one of my work projects involves looking at archived educational web pages, and bringing some of them to life. Looking at the "first published" dates for some of them can be surprising at first. A short learning resource on cytoskeletons... first published in 2002. Still popular enough to attract visitors. Think about it. 21 years ago, somebody was already building a website. Someone was making decisions, dealing with tech issues, doing the best they could with what they had, and sh...

This post is a short dialogue with myself. I am writing this in response to some recent events on the Fediverse. The reason I'm writing this is to help me record and work out some ideas connected to these events. And the reason for writing this in the form of a dialogue - following Paulo Freire and bell hooks' example - is that on this occasion, I'm more interested in retaining various perspectives / questions than in deciding on which side to pick. There are two sides to the dialogue: the side...

Tonight, I'm handing over my latest translation project. I can't tell you what it is, yet - but I can tell you that it was a lot of fun! I can also share with you the most important things I learned when working on this freelance project. There is a world of difference between the way in which you work on projects you have to take (for money) and projects you choose to take (because they're interesting). This was the latter. There is only so much you can do to make average bits of text read OK...

Today's "AI news article writer" announcement by Google reminded me of "137 Seconds", one of Stanislaw Lem's brilliant science fiction short stories. It's about machines helping to write stories, and about humans struggling to keep up with the world as machines see it. It's funny, and witty, and scary in many, many ways. It was written over 50 years ago, and is available here in Antonia Lloyd-Jones' brilliant translation (navigate the page for parts II and III) ...

This post is my personal brainstorm, which I'm sharing for the benefit of anyone in a similar situation. I found out that Pycon UK - my local Python conference - is happening in just over 2 months' time in a city near me. That's great! However, although I recently re-started regular Python shenanigans, I'm still very much a rookie. This gives me a little anxiety. Here are ten ideas for things I can do to still enjoy my time at Pycon UK. Focus on the people: I'm always excited to be around peop...