#oldaily — Public Fediverse posts

What did Perky Prove? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79790 My own view of mental imagery is that it is perceptualist, that is, "seeing and mental imagery are fundamentally the same kind of mental state, differing only in degree or in terms of cause." This paper looks at experiments conducted in 1910 by C. W. Perky that many have taken to show that perceptualism is true; there's no difference between our perception of a thing and an image of a thing.

Mozilla and Mistral: Partnering to expand AI competition and preserve user choice #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79789 Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo writes, "we are in jeopardy of a handful of closed-model companies controlling the browser, the search engine, the AI model, and the surrounding services that connect them." The intent here is to "offer an alternative to global tech monopolies controlling the next digital era." Fair enough.

Allocentric Navigation is Turing Complete, and Why It Matters #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79788

I totally forgot about print style sheets #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79787 This article offers "a small collection of useful CSS techniques and a quick reminder that print style sheets are still a thing." Now I haven't pinted anything from the web in maybe a decade, but I do know people who do. Specifying a print style shgeet ensures that they get something readable, not a mess with pointless navigation and other formatting meant for web users.

AI watermarking has a decentralisation problem #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79786 "With AI watermarking," writes Laurens Hof , "inference providers mark their output as AI generated." But there might be hundreds of different AI providers, each with their own key.

The podcast I was booked on turned out to be a social engineering scam to get me to install malware #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79785 The story is in the headline - "The podcast I was booked on turned out to be a social engineering scam to get me to install malware." Normally I wouldn't link to a LinkedIn post but I think the lesson is clear and urgent: "Never, ever install custom software for a meeting or podcast." Joan Westenberg described in her post how "their prep was impeccable w.

Put First Things First to Address AI Cheating #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79783 Learning outcomes, writes David Wiley, should be a combination of 'performance', 'criteria', and 'conditions'. So "While people think 'without using generative AI' is a constraint imposed on assessments to prevent cheating, it’s actually a condition added to a learning outcome." It's similar to research assignments of yore requiring students to use the library to look up sources "without using the internet".