Tootfinder

I’m not sure what sets us up to have better LMSes, but I don’t think institutions building them in-house is a viable answer.
One long-successful direction I like that has been gaining ground of late is course-specific web sites. I’m cheering the rise of static site generators, and hoping they continue to creep outside the confines of the techiest among us. A course site is not an LMS, but moving course •content• mostly out of the LMS simplifies the problem considerably!
/end

One thing that really annoys me as a cyclist and as a walker is, when a cyclist approaches from behind and trys to pass..
Next to a street with traffic,
with wind,
with a voice volume that's more like a shy cat.
And THEN getting angry if I don't give the space to pass!
Guys, you - are - NOT - audible!! And I have really good hearing!!
Either
- shout as if it's about your life or
- buy a simple bell (magic!)
- live with the fact t…

RE: https://flipboard.com/@cbcnews/canada-1akomc2pz/-/a-y07zm2wGSTuMgOEJTVI_Jg:a:107108217-/0
I wrote to the office of the Mayor last week on that shameful behaviour.
The answer I got was super weird …

Working on an #opensource project can be strange sometimes.
Personally, the strangest is seen when people want something changed.
Some peeps simply ask. (Yes, do this one)
Some get extremely angry that it isn't already like they want and demand it be changed.
Some people try to pay for the change.
Some try to guilt you to make the change by saying other…

Ask why, and know the answers are unsatisfying and contingent. It made sense at the time. Because we didn't understand yet. Because changing it would certainly break something else and we didn't know what yet and didn't have time to understand it. Yet.
Computers can be understood. Everything that is going on can be peeked at, prodded at, taken apart to know what is going on. Inside every complex system are simpler parts. The complexity comes from the combination of them, not mystery.
I cannot emphasize that enough. Just because you don't know, or nobody you know knows why something is how it is does not mean it is unknowable.

Here's an answer for a life-changing technology that truly stands out:
"The Bicycle
Selected by Reshma Saujani
In the 1890s, the bicycle, as we know it today, finally let women go where they wanted, on their own, without asking permission. It even played a central role in the fight for women’s suffrage—a simple machine with outsized impact. Today, it reminds us what technology should do: expand freedom and opportunity. Millions of American women are still fighting f…

Punk is the way.
"...stop wasting time, energy, and emotions inside the gigantic, vacant '80s malls all social networks have become."
https://brilliantcrank.com/punk-is-the-way/?ref=brilliantcrank-newsletter

Punk is the way.
Though I know the answer already, my mind sometimes wanders and then wonders if the world is ever going to feel normal again. And the answer is always "nope." There's simply too much change happening all at once and there's no way we're coming out of this with a reset

No they want your DNA to track you.
Folks, have you seen GATTACA?
▶️ U.S. lawmakers demand answers after Canadian man says border officers made him give DNA sample | CBC News
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/us-bord…

U.S. lawmakers demand answers after Canadian man says border officers made him give DNA sample | CBC News
American lawmakers are demanding answers from the Trump administration after a Canadian man says U.S. customs officers held him for three hours and forced him to provide a DNA sample before sending him home.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded
There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded | David Boles, Blogs
There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of comm…

The whole #LLM ROI thing reveals something interesting. It's basically impossible to figure out the ROI of an LLM. That makes it impossible for bean counters to make a comparison between human work and LLM work, or human work without an LLM and LLM-assisted work, to determine if the incredibly high price is worth it. But it's also impossible because you can't measure the ROI of a human, especially for skilled labor.
You can't measure the ROI of a human, because managers have no idea what people do. There's an eternally expanding amount of work designed to address this problem. But no matter how closely people are surveilled, interrogated, analyzed, there's never any real answer.
I've talked in the past about in relation to medical care. One of the dirty secrets of hospitals is that they have no way to figure out how much individual treatment costs. It's easy to understand at scale. You can know exactly how much something costs society. You can even identify patterns, using public health models, and decrease costs for society by trying to get people to avoid risky behavior (stop smoking, use protection during sex, etc). But it is absolutely not possible, at all, in any way, to figure out how much a single visit costs. This is similar to the problem of predicting climate change vs predicting the weather tomorrow in Amsterdam at 15:00. One is possible, the other is simply not.
But what is becoming painfully clear now is that this is true *everywhere*. It's trivial to know how much an industry costs. It's possible to figure out it's ROI for society. It is not possible to figure out how much value any individual worker provides. LLM ROI and cost comparison is an instance of this larger problem.
This is a problem for capitalism because it shows that the fundamental assumptions behind capitalism, that product value and labor value are quantifiable, that people can actually make comparisons between competing products, etc, are completely bullshit. The capitalist apologetics that makes up so much of economics, the lies that are told that hold this system together, are crumbling before our eyes.
If you make a lot of money, it's because you've been lucky. You have the right social networks, you have become good at convincing people to give you money. There is absolutely no way to connect that to actually providing value to society. If you make a lot of money, internalize that. Understand that you are not special, and things can change. If you don't make a lot of money, it's not because you don't provide value. Don't forget that. The system is a lie built to destroy you. Don't let it.
The ideology is sick, something something time of monsters and all that, we are together in this dying machine. We need to understand the lies. Your value can never be quantified. The way we have always figured out how to do the right thing for each other is through each other. Social connection has always guided us. But now the most socially disconnected people on the planet have hijacked the system. They direct the resources of the world, and game the system to avoid personal responsibility.
We have to build a system where everyone is accountable. We can't use abstract numbers and lies to figure things out for us. We have to build systems around people and accountability. There is no other solution.