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silveradeptGood morning. Let's begin with a story of finding a book which contains a story you remembered strongly, the librarian who found it, and eventually, the relative of the author who confirmed the story and had documents to show about it. What I find interesting about this is that the librarian who manages to bring this story to fruitful conclusion does what all librarians do when someone is trying to remember a book or a story they once had - through professional training, they can sometimes tell which parts of the remembering are more solid and which ones aren't, and when they need to introduce a certain amount of fuzziness into what's being sought, and sometimes they just happen to know that a thing is the one and not the other. Still, happy times to everyone for finding a story that had eluded for decades.
We put this next to an exhibition of imaginary books in New York, which admittedly, is objects as they might be envisioned, or as they were described in other books, and is not the defictionalization of those materials. Not really. But it's a good gag.
Substack is not a platform to support, with their monetary support of known -ists and their defense of why they are platforming those people should sound extremely familiar to anyone who runs into librarians that believe in keeping things on the shelves because of their free speech value and a decision that what the person wants to read is their choice and not anyone else's.
Spotify also has significant problems in relation to paying their artists, but they've begun including in their playlists works created specifically to be used as background music that are farmed out to companies tryng to make music that sounds exactly like itself, rather than including other artists or curating their playlists, because they figure that if you're listening to music as background noise, you'd rather have something generic than specific.
The figure of Baba Yaga and her appearances in stories, including what purports to be her origin, and how she's a different figure in so many of those stories.
Having said he wanted to make it to age 100 so that he could cast a vote for the Democratic candidate in the 2024 Presidential race, James Earl Carter, Jr. died, a President known much more for all the things he did after being President than for what he did during his presidency, at 100 years of age.
The president chose to commute the sentences of all but three of the prisoners currently awaiting execution for federal crimes, with the three being persons who caused mass shootings for terrorism reasons. The commutation moves the sentences down to life without the possibility of parole. Certainly welcome news to those who believe the government should not be in the business of execution.
The problem with voters getting a lesson on what they elected by putting the Republican candidate in power is the voters are 0-for-everything-since-Reagan about learning the lesson and no longer electing Republicans. Instead, they cast about for some other thing that can be used to blame their issues, and those same Republicans that hurt them are more than happy to provide as many excuses as they want. At this particular moment, one of their big excuses is that there's books in the library queering your children and making them woke, in defiance of those Good Old-Fashioned Family Values, On Which We Used To Rely. It does not help that so many of the people who hold the purse strings of the library are not the library workers themselves, but politicians and board members who either campaign on or are convinced that the thing that the library has been doing for quite some time, buying books and doing programming that reflects the experiences of their communities, and that provide windows into seeing what life is like for others, now is suddenly new and terrifying. (And they're trying to make it so that if you do the job of a library, or an educator, you're a criminal, because children might see something politicians object to.)
Billionaires donating to the inauguration fund for the Republican candidate, in the hopes that they will not be targeted too much and might even get favors in return.
The state of Louisiana has decided they no longer have to worry about infectious diseases, barring their health department from advertising vaccinations for many of the common and deadly ones, and, great shock, in response, infectious diseases have spread quickly and thoroughly in the state.
A book excerpt about what happens when a story gets out and the thing the story claims isn't backed by the evidence, and how long it can take, sometimes, to turn the ship after the truth gets its pants on. There's a lot in there about "groupthink" and medics getting things wrong, to make you feel more suspicious of medics, but the underlying parts of it seem to be more that a recommendation got promulgated based on a bad reading of a study, and then it took time, experiments, and publication of those experiments to change the consensus and the recommendations. Science working as it should, even though the working was fairly slow.
When given the opportunity to choose between a group asking you to Be something and one asking you to Do something, join the Do group. You'll get more done and have less worry about whether you're putting on the correct posture. (Plus, most of those Do groups have already been in existence for a long time and, even if they're not led by people at the intersections, they're way more likely to understand the intersections.)
Not all stories require conflict, nor do all stories require the protagonist to have the agency to go out and create change in the world.
Most writing workshops, and their attendant rules and methods, trace their lineage to a single entity, someone who was trying to teach the art of being a critic, and do not necessarily work for everyone who might end up having their lived experiences dismissed as not good writing and not be able to explain to the critics what's going on in the story. The good part is that many of the workshops mentioned are trying to incorporate new or different models of feedback into their workshops.
In technology,sineala posted a review for a collaborative document-editing tool called Ellipsus, which is still working out some of its kinks, but has an interesting Drafts feature where a document can be copied and then a beta reader can give it all the edits and feedback, and then do a merge back into the main draft (although it's overwrite, rather than selective). It's mostly being posed as a GDocs alternative, and it may have some useful export functions. For those who wish to de-Google, it seems like a potentially useful item that doesn't get into things like self-hosting and the maintenance that comes from that. Another alternative suggested in the comments was Cryptpad, using one of the public instances for document collaboration.
A device trying to assist someone with understanding how much of their energy they may have already used during the day, and to help them avoid crashing out from doing too much in too short a time. Come with a blog post about the concept of pacing yourself throughout the day, to make your limited energy budget work for you and help you get enough rest. Which, for people who are dealing with changes in their energy and ability level, it is important to be able to make it all work out.
Configuring Vim (nominally, a text editor with plugin capabilities) as a tool for writing fiction, blog posts, or other text activity, rather than primarily as a code editor. Text editors on Linux, like vim, emacs, and the like, often end up as multi-tools for various purposes, and many of them start with a base assumption that you are using them to write code, examine code, or alter configuration files that have code-like syntaxes or constructions. Their flexibility and plugin extensibility then makes it possible to learn one set of manipulations for an entire suite of possible creations or tasks, and then with the use of other programs, those text files can be formatted into all kinds of different file types. (There are definitely people who are seeking to accomplish most, if not all, of their tasks through the use of one of vim or emacs, such that they only rarely have to leave that environment. I can see the appeal, but I also feel like some of this might be trying to square a circle.) The justification for switching to vim was essentially to cut out as many steps and programs between text drafting and final publication, combined with a version control system and pushing to remote repositories to make the files themselves available everywhere in their most updated form when it was time to work on them.
Brittanica, the company behind an eponymous encyclopedia, is offering their encyclopedic knowledge and research as a training set for LLMs, and possibly offering their own "AI" enhancements of the Brittanica data set. This, of course, has the strong possibility of crash and burn as soon as the chatbot, LLM, or other, is allowed to synthesize or get creative, rather than sticking to the regurgitation of what is in the data set.
With sufficient amounts of data, like the public blockhain ledger, things that may have been believed anonymous, like bitcoin transactions, are sometimes identifiable, even if it would take an entity with subpoena power to force someone to give up the identities of certain users of banks or other financial institutions. Although that now tells me that bitcoins and cryptocurrency are much older than the advertisements on television would suggest.
On software development for the long term, and keeping your software useful and getting used in the long term, which seems to have a fair amount of thoughts about simplifying everything and using only the necessary amount of complexity. Which, given some of the other posts I've made this year about how I feel about my simple little scripts, perhaps I'm doing better than I think I am.
On the virtues of clearing traps and rakes that others are likely to step on, and how, like glue work, rake-clearing is also generally excellent and unquantifiable.
And, never forgive the people who wrecked your tech, who wreck the environment, who make everything worse, because they feel everything is forgivable if Number Goes Up on whatever number they're paying the most attention to this nanosecond.
Last for this year, A broken piano, an accomplished musician, a late-night session, and what would be an exceptional album. Here's hoping that you have an excellent year next year, one better than what this one was by at least a factor of two.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
We put this next to an exhibition of imaginary books in New York, which admittedly, is objects as they might be envisioned, or as they were described in other books, and is not the defictionalization of those materials. Not really. But it's a good gag.
Substack is not a platform to support, with their monetary support of known -ists and their defense of why they are platforming those people should sound extremely familiar to anyone who runs into librarians that believe in keeping things on the shelves because of their free speech value and a decision that what the person wants to read is their choice and not anyone else's.
Spotify also has significant problems in relation to paying their artists, but they've begun including in their playlists works created specifically to be used as background music that are farmed out to companies tryng to make music that sounds exactly like itself, rather than including other artists or curating their playlists, because they figure that if you're listening to music as background noise, you'd rather have something generic than specific.
The figure of Baba Yaga and her appearances in stories, including what purports to be her origin, and how she's a different figure in so many of those stories.
Having said he wanted to make it to age 100 so that he could cast a vote for the Democratic candidate in the 2024 Presidential race, James Earl Carter, Jr. died, a President known much more for all the things he did after being President than for what he did during his presidency, at 100 years of age.
The president chose to commute the sentences of all but three of the prisoners currently awaiting execution for federal crimes, with the three being persons who caused mass shootings for terrorism reasons. The commutation moves the sentences down to life without the possibility of parole. Certainly welcome news to those who believe the government should not be in the business of execution.
The problem with voters getting a lesson on what they elected by putting the Republican candidate in power is the voters are 0-for-everything-since-Reagan about learning the lesson and no longer electing Republicans. Instead, they cast about for some other thing that can be used to blame their issues, and those same Republicans that hurt them are more than happy to provide as many excuses as they want. At this particular moment, one of their big excuses is that there's books in the library queering your children and making them woke, in defiance of those Good Old-Fashioned Family Values, On Which We Used To Rely. It does not help that so many of the people who hold the purse strings of the library are not the library workers themselves, but politicians and board members who either campaign on or are convinced that the thing that the library has been doing for quite some time, buying books and doing programming that reflects the experiences of their communities, and that provide windows into seeing what life is like for others, now is suddenly new and terrifying. (And they're trying to make it so that if you do the job of a library, or an educator, you're a criminal, because children might see something politicians object to.)
Billionaires donating to the inauguration fund for the Republican candidate, in the hopes that they will not be targeted too much and might even get favors in return.
The state of Louisiana has decided they no longer have to worry about infectious diseases, barring their health department from advertising vaccinations for many of the common and deadly ones, and, great shock, in response, infectious diseases have spread quickly and thoroughly in the state.
A book excerpt about what happens when a story gets out and the thing the story claims isn't backed by the evidence, and how long it can take, sometimes, to turn the ship after the truth gets its pants on. There's a lot in there about "groupthink" and medics getting things wrong, to make you feel more suspicious of medics, but the underlying parts of it seem to be more that a recommendation got promulgated based on a bad reading of a study, and then it took time, experiments, and publication of those experiments to change the consensus and the recommendations. Science working as it should, even though the working was fairly slow.
When given the opportunity to choose between a group asking you to Be something and one asking you to Do something, join the Do group. You'll get more done and have less worry about whether you're putting on the correct posture. (Plus, most of those Do groups have already been in existence for a long time and, even if they're not led by people at the intersections, they're way more likely to understand the intersections.)
Not all stories require conflict, nor do all stories require the protagonist to have the agency to go out and create change in the world.
Most writing workshops, and their attendant rules and methods, trace their lineage to a single entity, someone who was trying to teach the art of being a critic, and do not necessarily work for everyone who might end up having their lived experiences dismissed as not good writing and not be able to explain to the critics what's going on in the story. The good part is that many of the workshops mentioned are trying to incorporate new or different models of feedback into their workshops.
In technology,
sineala posted a review for a collaborative document-editing tool called Ellipsus, which is still working out some of its kinks, but has an interesting Drafts feature where a document can be copied and then a beta reader can give it all the edits and feedback, and then do a merge back into the main draft (although it's overwrite, rather than selective). It's mostly being posed as a GDocs alternative, and it may have some useful export functions. For those who wish to de-Google, it seems like a potentially useful item that doesn't get into things like self-hosting and the maintenance that comes from that. Another alternative suggested in the comments was Cryptpad, using one of the public instances for document collaboration.A device trying to assist someone with understanding how much of their energy they may have already used during the day, and to help them avoid crashing out from doing too much in too short a time. Come with a blog post about the concept of pacing yourself throughout the day, to make your limited energy budget work for you and help you get enough rest. Which, for people who are dealing with changes in their energy and ability level, it is important to be able to make it all work out.
Configuring Vim (nominally, a text editor with plugin capabilities) as a tool for writing fiction, blog posts, or other text activity, rather than primarily as a code editor. Text editors on Linux, like vim, emacs, and the like, often end up as multi-tools for various purposes, and many of them start with a base assumption that you are using them to write code, examine code, or alter configuration files that have code-like syntaxes or constructions. Their flexibility and plugin extensibility then makes it possible to learn one set of manipulations for an entire suite of possible creations or tasks, and then with the use of other programs, those text files can be formatted into all kinds of different file types. (There are definitely people who are seeking to accomplish most, if not all, of their tasks through the use of one of vim or emacs, such that they only rarely have to leave that environment. I can see the appeal, but I also feel like some of this might be trying to square a circle.) The justification for switching to vim was essentially to cut out as many steps and programs between text drafting and final publication, combined with a version control system and pushing to remote repositories to make the files themselves available everywhere in their most updated form when it was time to work on them.
Brittanica, the company behind an eponymous encyclopedia, is offering their encyclopedic knowledge and research as a training set for LLMs, and possibly offering their own "AI" enhancements of the Brittanica data set. This, of course, has the strong possibility of crash and burn as soon as the chatbot, LLM, or other, is allowed to synthesize or get creative, rather than sticking to the regurgitation of what is in the data set.
With sufficient amounts of data, like the public blockhain ledger, things that may have been believed anonymous, like bitcoin transactions, are sometimes identifiable, even if it would take an entity with subpoena power to force someone to give up the identities of certain users of banks or other financial institutions. Although that now tells me that bitcoins and cryptocurrency are much older than the advertisements on television would suggest.
On software development for the long term, and keeping your software useful and getting used in the long term, which seems to have a fair amount of thoughts about simplifying everything and using only the necessary amount of complexity. Which, given some of the other posts I've made this year about how I feel about my simple little scripts, perhaps I'm doing better than I think I am.
On the virtues of clearing traps and rakes that others are likely to step on, and how, like glue work, rake-clearing is also generally excellent and unquantifiable.
And, never forgive the people who wrecked your tech, who wreck the environment, who make everything worse, because they feel everything is forgivable if Number Goes Up on whatever number they're paying the most attention to this nanosecond.
Last for this year, A broken piano, an accomplished musician, a late-night session, and what would be an exceptional album. Here's hoping that you have an excellent year next year, one better than what this one was by at least a factor of two.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2025-01-01 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-01 08:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-01 05:28 pm (UTC)We'll find out in 19 days.
I'm considering whether I should start calling the Republican party the Face Being Eaten By A Leopard Party (FBEBALs).
no subject
Date: 2025-01-01 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-07 03:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-07 05:33 am (UTC)