Polymaths.social

I finally finished this blog post, which was very difficult for me to write, but I think it says things I needed to say.

It's about how AI has personally harmed me and has been hurting my motivation to write for years.

If you're a writer, I do have some hope and vision for the future I've written here, and I'd like to share it for you. It's not all doom and gloom.

https://benjaminhollon.com/musings/stop-asking-writers-about-ai/

I look forward to hearing from people what they think. Hopefully this piece helps some people. (Boosts are very welcome.)

I've added a couple other implementations of my urlref concept to my blog post about it!

• @bojidar_bg wrote about his implementation using a bookmark folder in his browser
• @moonsea re-implemented the idea as a perl script to better fit her use case

This is so cool! If you've got your own take or would like to chat about the concept/system with me, I would love to.

Here is my original blog post about urlref, with the new "other implementations" section: https://benjaminhollon.com/musings/urlref/

I've just updated Polymaths.social to GoToSocial v0.21.3, "Most Sacrilegious Sloth". Let me know if you have any issues with it.

https://codeberg.org/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.21.3

@irgndsondepp

Getting a 404 right now from http://schafe-sind-bessere-rasenmaeher.de/index.xml again

To those using Polymaths Pages:

@orbitalmartian had a problem where for some reason the file permissions of the files for his site were changed (not sure why) so the webserver couldn't read it. If you have the problem you should be able to fix it with this command:

chmod -R 750 /var/www/<your username>

If it does happen, also let me know so I can take a look at the commands you're using to upload to see if I can figure out what caused this.

I'm diving deep into the release notes for the new GoToSocial release candidate and there's some super exciting stuff, mostly which will help out my end as the server admin.

That said, here's one cool thing I found that doesn't show up in the "release highlights" list: https://codeberg.org/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/pulls/4827

This will allow those of us who like custom CSS on our profiles to have styling for specific profile fields based on their names! That could be really cool, though I'm still thinking up exact use cases I'll try.

@irgndsondepp

Your site's RSS feeds all seem to be throwing 404 errors?

Now that I’m done traveling I’ll actually be able to respond in a timely way to people who were interested in trying Polymaths Pages, the free static hosting I’m now providing to members on my instance.

Just visit https://polymaths.page for instructions and send me (here or via email) an SSH public key and the names of any custom domains you want to use, and I’ll get you set up. I’m happy to help if there is any confusion or issues.

(Even if you don’t plan to significantly use it to host your main sites, you’re welcome to set it up to claim your <username>.polymaths.page subdomain and put something silly up there, like I did)

Good time as any to put out this notice, particularly to Polymaths.social folk—

I am shortly going to be traveling internationally across 13 timezones. Do not expect responses from me in the next… let's say 48 hours. I may check in during layovers but even if, say, the server is down, I may be too exhausted to deal with it.

So I'm finally actually making the "Polymaths Pages" free static site hosting I'd been wanting to provide for members here for ages. I'd had some grand visions, but have decided to just go much lower tech, which should also be more reliable.

If you're interested in being a guinea pig, lemme know. (Only polymaths.social members, please.)

Hm, it's interesting to me that you "drive" a car, an word for action, but you "ride" a bicycle, a passive word. Odd choice of words, methinks.

Heh, I have no intention of doing it (I do love running Polymaths, and I already have a private alt) but it would be funny to have my personal account's handle be @theoneandonly@benjaminhollon.com or something like that.

Today's thought experiment for my web crawler development is about how to improve my adtech/tracker detection. Currently, I'm just blocking by hostname, which has a lot of false negatives.

What I want to do is allow importing a standard adblock list like EasyList… I've been thinking over implementation a bit (can't find any libraries that do quite what I want in Python), and I'm wondering if I could actually do this fully in the database. Postgres has pattern matching capabilities, and I did find a library that'll parse the lists for me, so surely I could get that working?

The question is if it would be performant, but I think it could be…

My hummus-making side hustle is in full swing.

Bananas for scale.

I'm close enough to actually finishing my lengthy rewrite-from-scratch of Clew's crawler and index structure that I can actually start having frontend ideas, so I've been doing some brainstorming…

Something I've been wanting to add for a long time is an "EXPLAIN" mode similar to Postgres's, where you'd add "&EXPLAIN" to the end of the URL and get a debug view of the results page that gives you breakdowns of how it did things like parse the query, rank results, apply filters, and so on.

I think I'll definitely add that; while beta testing (and maybe after) I'll put a link on the results page to enter that mode to make things easier for my testers.

(I'm not quite at the point of recruiting beta testers yet, but I promise I'll post when I am.)

Updated my interaction policies to require my approval for replies to any of my posts by people I'm not following.

Fedi is just occupying a different place in my life these days and I need to calm down my notifications.

Still love y'all. <3

It's getting to the point where I find it impossible to trust anyone who makes money saying things about tech, no matter how pure their intentions seem.

That does not say good things about how the tech industry is going.

My pet peeve: people saying "compliment" when they mean "complement". I know it's not a big deal, but aaaaaa it irks me. Possibly since trying to use "complement" implies aiming for sophisticated writing, as opposed to many other tpyos which could just be in ordinary conversation.

I think I'm going to skip last week's weeknotes. Not a ton to report other than things that will be more relevant this coming week.

I also didn't get any complaints about federation today. Is it solved? What wondrous news that would be.