Stephen Downes

A long time ago, someone I followed used to write about a 'distributed wiki'. Today we would call that a 'federated wiki' and point to, say, Ibis. So it's a natural that Ibis would integrate with the wider fediverse, which it does with version 3.0. "With this version Ibis can finally federate with other Fediverse platforms such as Lemmy (example) and others." Now it's not all sunshine and roses. "Note that Mastodon currently ignores activities sent by Ibis for unknown reasons." I haven't tried installing Ibis so I can't comment on how well it works, but the idea of a federated wiki moves distributed wikipedias into a new realm.

Dave Pollard revisits - and revises - his thoughts from twenty years ago on the wisdom of crowds. "Once we start to look at real crowds - large, disparate, disorganized, distracted, preoccupied, gullible, confused, and often uninformed, misinformed, and distraught groups of people - we cannot expect any wisdom, or indeed, any coordinated, intentional, rational actions." So how could James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds have seemed so right back then and so wrong today. I think part of the explanation lies in the distinction between groups and networks. Groups are not wise at all, but networks can be. And part of it lies in different ways of being 'wise'. We associate a lot of the trappings of cognitive science with wisdom - executive function, intentionality, purpose, etc. - and that's one type of wisdom, maybe, but not the sort of wisdom we would associate with networks, which instead excel at non-'cognitive' forms of wisdom: pattern recognition, self-organization, etc.

At this point in my life, the biggest challenge isn't to establish a career or to make a name for myself - for better or worse, that time has passed. No, it's to avoid stagnating and rotting. Actually - that's the biggest challenge at any age. In this article Paul Jun writes about the friction he introduces into his life to "drill basic movements until they become involuntary". It' about writing and studying writing. But it's also about the work he does lifting weights, or the ten mile photo-walks he takes on weekends. I totally get all that. And here's the key: "I've noticed that if you can think well, AI becomes a multiplier. If you can't, AI just amplifies your mistakes... The people who built strong foundational capabilities—who can read deeply, think critically, create originally—use these tools as extensions of their existing strength."

This is from a few months ago, but it makes a good point. "MCP's simplicity means that, like RSS autodiscovery and OpenSearch, it can catch on quickly and deliver powerful leverage for developers." But what does it mean to say it's 'like RSS'? "ou can think of it as llms.txt on steroids, a kind of sitemap that works as an attention-focusing mechanism." And lets us compare notes. "I realized that MCP invites us to explore synergies between how people interact with our stuff — docs, source code, examples — and how LLMs do."

This is another step closer to a distributed ID system allowing us to control and use our own ID independently of any given service provider. "By creating a DID method for Nostr, this specification enables Nostr identities to participate in the broader decentralized identity ecosystem, supporting verifiable credentials, authentication, and other identity use cases." Via Laurens Hof.

Eric Schwitzgebel introduces a preprint (37 page PDF) in which he considers whether AI will force us to reconsider the 'human-centered' approaches to ethics. It's not fundamentally different from the argument Peter Singer makes with respect to animals, to my mind. Along with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Schwitzgebel critiques "three recent books that address the moral standing of non-human animals and AI systems: Jonathan Birch's The Edge of Sentience, Jeff Sebo's The Moral Circle, and Webb Keane's Animals, Robots, Gods." He writes, "All three argue that many nonhuman animals and artificial entities will or might deserve much greater moral consideration than they typically receive, and that public policy, applied ethical reasoning, and everyday activities might need to significantly change." I also agree with this, though it's the sort of thing that Must Not Be Said.