When I first heard about Wingspan app I dismissed it in an instant - why do I want to sit in front of the screen instead of being at the table? As someone working in IT boardgames are my escape from virtual world

I agree and I think that dynamic is definitely at play but it is eclipsed by the immediately evident truth that the digital game is as much a genuine love letter to birds wearing the disguise of an awesome strategy game as the board game itself.

A love letter is a love letter, the details of what medium the letter is written in doesn’t matter, and what better crush to write a love letter to than the birds bursting wild and free into even the most terraformed artificial human environments.

…Do you think you could teach a crow to play wingspan?

Inis seems like one of the best out there in terms of actually providing a fun experience for everyone involved in the area control genre.

Being a bird fan is just the healthy sane thing to do, it isn’t a niche hobby it is a pleasure of being on earth that everyone should enjoy.

Wingspan is gorgeousssss.

The app is too!

Oh super cool, yeah checking out your Dokuwiki personal website it just reminds me how much I like the software. The UI of pages is so simple and clean and Dokuwiki is so easy to setup I honestly don’t see the reason to really go with a normal website over using Dokuwiki unless you have very specific needs (especially because with the farm/animal plugin or whatever you can host multiple different wikis on the same website).

I don’t think Dokuwiki is perfect for what you want though but it is so lightweight and customizable that I originally mentioned it to suggest considering if you can tweak your workflow to make it work.

Have you looked at Logseq? It is a free and open source personal wiki/knowledge base with a great mobile app. The structure is every day has its own page that you add notes to, you then link to other pages to create them and move on to editing those pages like a normal wiki. Might be a little closer to what you are looking for.

https://logseq.com/

Hmm, Dokuwiki is a reallllllly underrated wiki software that is extremely lightweight and doesn’t require a database to run on (files are just stored in a folder). Multiple different wikis can be run on the same Dokuwiki server with plugins and in general it is a supremely easy way to host a body of text and images that can be easily edited by multiple people (or be kept private). The media manager for uploading images and managing them is really nice too.

Backing up your wiki on Dokuwiki is also absurdly easy because it is just a folder… that you can backup in any number of ways (git… syncthing… whatever).

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

Seriously, Dokuwiki needs more love.

edit I responded to this from an educational systems framing, not a single person using LLM/chatbot to try to understand something -framing, which was a bit awkward my bad…

I find the idea of LLMs for education really exciting… in a vacuum. In our current society where we pathologically seem unable to value human skills like teaching and the jobs of teachers in general, technology is going to be used as a cudgel to rationalize further divestment of resources from teachers and teaching. One only has to look at the educational “reform” program Bill Gates funded and pushed that warped the education system in the US for years and years that no teachers actually wanted and that received unwavering support from the general public and government because Smart Computer Guys are actually smarter than everyone else even in contexts that have nothing to do with computers… sigh

Beyond all of that I don’t really think LLMs are that useful when being prompted in a one on one conversation. There is just no way to tell how much you are being bullshitted. I do find that asking the same question to multiple LLMs on arena.lmsys.org does get me fairly quickly to technical answers however, since I can evaluate from a series of answers and cross reference (obviously you still need to google at the end of it to verify, and it is a fair point why you wouldn’t just do that in the first place).

I think in the far future (a positive vision of it) a good bit of education will be crafting questions and prompts for LLMs and then critically evaluating from a set of answers given from different LLMs/chatbots. The homework assignment could be evaluated based on how critically and intelligently a student compared several different LLM answers and triangulated an answer from it.

All that being said, LLMs are 1000% the next bitcoin, they are absolutely part of the enshittification of search engines and most of the people who are excited about them are insufferable…. but I can still step outside of that and see that there is an educational utility here, however even the act of focusing on the educational utility of LLMs in conversations about education is dangerous since it provides such a clear route for further cutting funding and resources for teachers.

Like who gives a shit about AI next to the fact that we treat human teachers like trash and give them no funding to do their jobs so they have to shell out from their own money to buy classroom supplies (???). The problem is we think education isn’t worth investing in and that teachers don’t have a professional skillset (they are just burger flippers but they pass out worksheets to kids instead of making fast food) that should be respected and nurtured.

In other words, computer people are so up their own ass they really are incapable of understanding even the basic practical problems of every day teaching that must be overcome. Those skills required to be an effective teacher (especially to determine what a human really needs to learn) are invisible to them, they are fuzzy soft skills that are at best nice to have and at worst an annoying set of behaviors and social expectations to memorize and perform. These people with this mindset will never ever be able to do anything but ruin education (again, see Bill Gates) with computers.

I am however interested in the long term to see how teachers and educators who also understand LLMs and chatbots will integrate these things into the process of teaching, but I am only interested if the computer isn’t treated as more important than the human connection between the teacher and student…

I really like what they are hunting for, it extends what happened in a one off TNG episode and I think it is a fantastic choice for structuring a season around.