Dear friends of Tomorrow’s Teaching,
I have experimenting with a new tool these past few days and created a series of educational videos on YouTube, which you may find interesting. It is a series of whiteboard explainers about the main theories of Western Ethics. You can find the already published parts here (the last one will be published at the end of this week):
In a future post in this newsletter, I will go into how to make this kind of video and what I learned while I was creating this series. I think that this kind of video has a lot of potential to be used in teaching, alongside other materials.
But for today, I want to answer a question I got from a reader about how to access NotebookLM (which we talked about last time) from outside the United States.
This is a common question, because all sorts of services are limited to the US or a selection of Western countries, and my own place of residence, China, is almost always left out. Which does not make any sense, by the way, because my university does obviously have access to ChatGPT, which they provide as a service to staff and students — so why can an individual not access it? Anyway, there is an easy fix for that, and this is what I will show you today.
The Opera browser
You already suspect that this is going to involve a VPN, and you are right. The thing with VPN services is, though, that you either have to register and pay for them, in order to get a high-quality, secure service, and then it might actually not even work in your country (some countries are notorious for not playing nice with VPN services).
Or you can use one of the many “free VPN” offers, but these are operated by people you don’t know and shouldn’t trust. A VPN can, after all, see and intercept all your communications with your target website, and if it is operated by the bad guys, it could record your connections or possibly even steal your data. This is why I would personally not want to connect to any “free VPN” service that I don’t positively know to be trustworthy — and I have no such information about any one of them.
This is why I was very happy to discover that one of the most used browsers after Chrome, Firefox and the Microsoft IE/Edge family, now offers a built-in VPN: the originally Norwegian-made Opera browser.
Like most things nowadays, Opera’s shares are held to around 80% by a Chinese conglomerate, so that may be a factor you’d like to consider. But it still mainly a European company with headquarters in Oslo, and additional offices in Sweden and Poland. While all this won’t make it certain that your data will be safe when using its VPN, it certainly seems more trustworthy than a random pirate VPN operated by some entity you have no information at all about. If you pay for a VPN from one of the big providers, and it works for you, then I’d stick with that. But for the rest of us who don’t want to pay for yet another service that they will only use to circumvent the access controls of OpenAI, Opera seems a good enough solution.
Installing and using Opera
To download and install Opera, just go to
... and press the big button on the top. The nice thing about Opera is that it has versions for almost every platform: Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, and Chrome OS.
After installing it, you can use it like any normal browser, but it has a number of interesting features that you don’t always find in other browsers:
A handy screenshot tool to take pictures of web pages;
Its own, integrated GPT model, called Aria;
And, the reason we are here, a built-in, free VPN.
Screenshots
The screenshot tool you can find in the toolbar on the top right, and it works just as you would expect it to. You can choose to capture the full web page you’re looking at, or only the visible part, or to crop it down to a particular area. Of course, you can do the same with your operating system’s screen grab tool, but I find it, for example, quite difficult to get a screenshot on my Samsung Android phone, where you need to be an Octopus to press all the required keys at the same time. Being able to get a screenshot by tapping a button is much easier.
Aria
Aria is a custom GPT model, but Opera does not specify which version it is. Here is an introduction to Aria and how it differs from ChatGPT:
From my experiences with it, it is at about the level of GPT 3.5. So it is usable, but nothing to write home about. What makes it interesting, is that it is integrated in the browser, and you can invoke it by pressing Ctrl+/ at any time, which brings up a little dialog window that waits for your prompt. This is handy.
You can also highlight any text in the browser, which brings up another small box with 3 choices: Explain, explore and translate the highlighted text.
Let’s briefly give it a spin. I’ll be using the article Kant's conception of freedom. Using reason to resist manipulation from Daily Philosophy. I’ll highlight the following passage from this article:
In the traditional liberal conception of freedom, being free stands for the ability to do whatever one wants without interference or coercion from others. Yet, this conception of freedom is incomplete.
Let’s see what Opera will do if asked to explain this passage:
Explanation:
The traditional liberal conception of freedom means being able to do whatever one wants without interference or coercion from others. However, this understanding of freedom is considered incomplete.
Keywords: Traditional liberal conception, Freedom, Interference, Coercion.
This is disappointing. It essentially repeats what the text is saying.
Let’s ask explicitly about the liberal conception of freedom. We press Ctrl+/ to open an Aria prompt:
Explain to me what the liberal conception of freedom is, with examples, and how it is different from other conceptions of freedom.
This gives much better results:
The liberal conception of freedom, also known as negative freedom, emphasizes the absence of interference or constraints on an individual's actions. This view believes that individuals should be free to pursue their own goals and interests without external coercion. Here are some key points about the liberal conception of freedom:
Absence of Interference: Liberal freedom focuses on the idea that individuals should be free from external interference or coercion in their choices and actions. This means that individuals have the right to make decisions without being unduly influenced by outside forces.
Individual Autonomy: Liberalism values individual autonomy and the ability to make choices based on one's own rationality and preferences. It emphasizes the importance of self-determination and self-governance.
Rule of Law: In the liberal conception of freedom, the rule of law plays a crucial role in safeguarding individual liberties. Laws should protect individuals from coercion and ensure that their rights are respected.
Examples of the liberal conception of freedom include:
Freedom of Speech: Liberals advocate for the freedom of expression, allowing individuals to voice their opinions and ideas without fear of censorship or reprisal.
Freedom of Assembly: The right to peaceful assembly is another example of liberal freedom, enabling individuals to gather and protest peacefully without interference from the government or other authorities.
Differences between the liberal conception of freedom and other conceptions include:
Positive Freedom: Unlike the liberal view, positive freedom focuses on the idea of self-realization and the ability to achieve one's full potential. Positive freedom may involve the provision of resources or opportunities to enable individuals to fulfill their goals.
Republican Freedom: Republican freedom, also known as civic freedom, emphasizes participation in the political process and the ability to shape one's own laws and institutions. It focuses on collective self-government rather than just individual autonomy.
Communitarian Freedom: Communitarian perspectives of freedom stress the importance of the community and social relationships in shaping individual freedom. It values the common good and social cohesion alongside individual liberties.
In summary, the liberal conception of freedom prioritizes the absence of external interference and the protection of individual rights and autonomy. It differs from other conceptions of freedom by focusing on negative liberty rather than positive self-realization, civic participation, or community values.
I’d say, this is quite useful or a quick look-up of terms one is not very familiar with.
Let’s try a translation. We’ll take the same sentence as before, highlight it, and have it translated into German and Greek, because these happen to be two languages that I speak and where I can judge the translation quality.
Somewhat weirdly, clicking on “translate” after highlighting the passage, translates it immediately into... English again. This seems to be the default, meant to translate other languages so that they become readable. If we want to have an English passage translated into any other language, we need to ask for the translation in the prompt (“translate this passage into German,” for instance). Here are the translations:
English: In the traditional liberal conception of freedom, being free stands for the ability to do whatever one wants without interference or coercion from others. Yet, this conception of freedom is incomplete.
German translation: In der traditionellen liberalen Vorstellung von Freiheit bedeutet Freiheit die Fähigkeit, alles zu tun, was man will, ohne Einmischung oder Zwang von anderen. Doch diese Vorstellung von Freiheit ist unvollständig.
Greek translation: Στην παραδοσιακή φιλελεύθερη έννοια της ελευθερίας, το να είσαι ελεύθερος σημαίνει τη δυνατότητα να κάνει κάποιος ό,τι θέλει χωρίς παρεμβολές ή εξαναγκασμό από άλλους. Ωστόσο, αυτή η έννοια της ελευθερίας είναι ατελής.
These sound good to me. A good test for translation quality is to go back and forth a few times and see where one ends up. Here is what comes out when I translate the Greek back into English:
In the traditional liberal sense of freedom, being free means the ability to do whatever one wants without interference or coercion from others. However, this notion of freedom is flawed.
The biggest difference here is “flawed,” which is actually wrong. “Aτελής” means incomplete, not flawed. So it works well the first time, but, as with most translations, after a few iterations, we will probably end up with something barely recognisable. But this is okay. Nobody will do this kind of thing in real use.
If we highlight “liberal conception of freedom” and click on “Explore topic”, we get the following:
Explanation: The liberal conception of freedom is a philosophical and political concept that emphasizes the rights and liberties of individuals. It is based on the idea that individuals should be free from external constraints and interference in order to pursue their own goals and desires.
Related topics:
Classical liberalism: Explore the origins and principles of classical liberalism, which advocates for limited government intervention and maximum individual freedom. Positive and negative liberty: Learn about the distinction between positive liberty (the ability to pursue one's goals) and negative liberty (freedom from external constraints) within liberal theories of freedom. Liberalism and justice: Examine the liberal conception of justice, which prioritizes the protection of individual rights and the principle of equality.
...where the text contains embedded links, onto which one can click for further explanations. This is, again, quite handy, and makes using Aria worthwhile if one is exploring a topic one knows little about. I could imagine this being helpful for a student having to read an article in a foreign language.
Unfortunately, this works only with HTML pages and not with PDF files, so one cannot use this to get explanations while reading a paper from Google Scholar online. It still works if one highlights, copies and pastes the highlighted text into an Aria prompt, but it’s not as handy as just clicking on the highlighted text in the browser window.
You can also always access Aria from the left sidebar. Just move the mouse to the left window border of the Opera browser, and it will offer a number of plugins and functions one can use, among them Aria.
Anyway, let’s now briefly look at the integrated VPN.
Make me American!
On the left of the address bar, left of the little lock icon that shows that the page is encrypted, you’ll see a little purple label that says “VPN.” This shows that the VPN is active. If you click on it, it opens the dialog shown here on the top left:
This allows you to switch the VPN on or off with one click, and also to say where you want to appear that you’re coming from. You can choose between “Americas,” “Asia,” “Europe” or “Optimal location” (not sure what this means). Unfortunately, one cannot choose the US in particular, but if you try to choose “Americas” multiple times, you will get offered different servers, and eventually one will be in the US.
For many services it does not matter where exactly you are: ChatGPT will allow you to connect from almost any country in the Western or West-allied world. But NotebookLM is more choosy, and will only allow you to use it from within the US. So you may need to try a few times until you get connected to a suitable server.
So that’s it. The Opera browser and how to use NotebookLM and other online services if you are not in the US.
I hope you found that useful, and see you next week!
— Andy