Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens
I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter. I’ve deleted the app from my phone, and check it a couple times a day from my laptop. I’ve been reading more news and fewer tweets. I followed a Twitter bot that reminds me to go do something else that’s not scrolling slack-jawed through tweets.…
AI-generated essays are nothing to worry about (opinion)
After reviewing 22 AI essays I asked my students to create, I can tell you confidently that AI-generated essays are nothing to worry about. The technology just isn’t there, and I doubt it will be anytime soon. […] The students in this class were mostly juniors and seniors, and many were majors in rhetoric and…
Nested (procedurally generated game of expanding drop-down lists)
A text game that you play by opening folders.
In June, 2002, I was blogging about… a female autistic scholars lament, Dr. Seuss, Orthodox Christianity and coding, Shakespeare, and weblogs after 9/11
In June, 2002, I was blogging about A female autistic scholar’s lament The origins of Horton Hears a Who A NatGeo article on the media-saturated life of Iowa college students The function of “er” in speech A Pravda article on parallels between Orthodox Christianity and computer programming Dr. Toast’s Amazing World of Toast (I really…
Why did I only blog 3 times in June 2001?
What was I doing during the summer of June 2001? My daughter was born about nine months later, so I know at least part of what I was doing at the time. 04 Jun 2001 Violent video games encourage violent behavior (Contemporary Pediatrics) 06 Jun 2001 Sci-Tech Web Awards 2001 08 Jun 2001 Author “used…
Between static hand-coded HTML pages and modern content-management systems, there used to be a wonderful bazaar of “mildly dynamic” websites
When I started my blog in 1999 (by adding a date to a “Link of the Day” archive I had been maintaining for a year or so), I coded everything in HTML, by hand. This was before Facebook, before YouTube, before Wikipedia, and around the time that the domain google.com first went live. Most of…
‘I saw the possibility of what could be done – so I did it’: revolutionary video game The Hobbit turns 40
.. Realising that statistics wasn’t for her, Megler answered a newspaper advert for a part-time programming job at a local software company called Melbourne House. It was 1980, and she was halfway through a course that focused on designing operating systems and developing programming languages. “The day I was hired, the first thing my boss…
GenZ prefers searching with TikTok, Instagram over Google
Educating myself about how today’s college students search for information online. 1) TikTok shows them relevant content FASTER than Google. The algorithm knows them WELL, and they love that. — Adrienne Sheares (@AdriSheares) August 12, 2022
Chess robot grabs and breaks finger of seven-year-old opponent
Last week, according to Russian media outlets, a chess-playing robot, apparently unsettled by the quick responses of a seven-year-old boy, unceremoniously grabbed and broke his finger during a match at the Moscow Open. “The robot broke the child’s finger,” Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation, told the TASS news agency after the incident, adding that…
Can AI write good novels?
I expect that this is probably the year I’ll need to consider how my profession will change if students start relying on AI writing software. Like many people in my social media feed, this summer I’ve been playing a bit with AI image software, and thinking about how all the photographers and artists whose work…
I am not up on My Little Pony lore. Can anyone suggest why this AI features a winged Vulcan pony creature when prompted with lyrics from the US national anthem?
when someone say ur joke louder than u and get all the credit
Checking sources back in 2006 involved using this *steampunk* contraption.
Research Before Google Books
Google worker says he was fired for blowing whistle on cult
A former Google video producer has sued the internet giant alleging he was unfairly fired for blowing the whistle on a religious sect that had all but taken over his business unit. The lawsuit demands a jury trial and financial restitution for “religious discrimination, wrongful termination, retaliation and related causes of action.” It alleges Peter…
Internet Explorer cheated its way to the top, and I won’t miss it
I started teaching myself HTML in earnest after I attended a crowded presentation at the Modern Language Association in the early 90s. Midway through his demonstration of what a mouse was, the speaker asked a crowd of hundreds who had used a graphical web browser (everyone raised their hands), and who had used the Internet…
Farewell Internet Explorer: You Weren’t All Bad
The main reason I still dislike Internet Explorer was because its popularity often meant you had to create one version of a website that was compatible with emerging and established industrywide standards, and another version that worked in Internet Explorer. So I still cringe when I see that dizzy “e” icon — except in this…
Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient
We’ve all encountered this scene in all the the AI-goes-amok stories, just before the scientist’s “Fools! I shall crush you all!” speech. The technology giant placed Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google “collaborator”, and the company’s LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system.…
Computers and Writing workshop on Inform 7. (Happening now. In an asynchronous way.)
Inform 7 Source Code (released under the “CC BY 4.0” license) Your Office Demo (CandW22 Inform 7 Workshop, Video 1) Journalism Game Scenario (CandW22 Inform 7 Workshop, Video 2) Noir Detective Game Scenario (CandW22 Inform 7 Workshop, Video 3)
I just dusted off a #textadventure project I started in Inform6 around 1999.
I just dusted off a #textadventure project I started in Inform6 around 1999. By around 2007 I had rebuilt about 90% of it in #inform7 and expanded it in fits and starts. But I haven’t touched it in 11 years. It took me about 90 minutes to update all the deprecated code, but it runs!