Another traveler of the wireways.

  • 2 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle



  • Given the absence of specific communities (or active ones so far), if people would like they could start these conversations over in !general@lemmy.world.

    I recognize it’s not the same, particularly for getting to those deep dive points you mention with ATLA, but gotta start somewhere, right?

    Also I can easily give this go-ahead being one of the mods there. Up to now I’ve hesitated popping into threads like this and pointing people there because I’m not a fan of consolidation, but it’s become apparent some simple meeting area may help to get more niche communities spun off and going.


  • You might try different media if you haven’t already, as in, instead of pencil/pen and paper, maybe colored pencils or markers. Maybe even try getting some black paper and trying to draw with white color pencils instead.

    I’m sure you may have tried a variety of things over the years, so I’m just spitballing, but also if you’re trying to dive into the deep end with more complex drawings, you might revisit and really hone the fundamentals. Fundamentals being like getting clean lines by practicing drawing those over and over till you can get a nice, sharp line (which often isn’t a single pencil/brush stroke!).

    Once you have those down you may move on to the simple shapes, squares, triangles, circles, and try to recognize how those are put together for more complex forms. It’s a tough skill to get down, without a doubt (I’m not some proficient artist personally), but it’s just that: a skill that takes not only practice but learning methodologies. One of the toughest parts with drawing is that there’s so many methods to go about it to figure out which helps you improve.


  • How do you stay in the know about this kind of stuff? I’m curious about all the cool stuff out there I wouldn’t even know I’m curious to find.

    I was going to mention YaCy as well if nobody else was, so I can chip in to this somewhat. My method is to keep wondering and researching. In this case it was a matter of being interested in alternative search engines and different applications of peer to peer/decentralized technologies that led me to finding this.

    So from this you might go: take something you’re even passingly interested in, try to find more information about it, and follow whatever tangential trails it leads to. With rare exceptions, there are good chances someone out there on the internet will also have had some interest in whatever it is, asked about it, and written about it.

    Also be willing to make throwaway accounts to get into the walled gardens for whatever info might be buried away there and, if you think others may be interested, share it outside of those spaces.


  • OP mentioned TiddlyWiki, which I think is a good option if you’re wanting to keep everything together and in a pretty longlasting format, plus there’s a small but creative community that’s made all kinds of interesting plugins for it.

    However, if you’re looking for something very small and similarly flexible, there’s also Feather Wiki. Outside of these two, another person already mentioned it but there’s Zim, which may feel a little more comfortable to use as it’s separate desktop software from your browser.

    I’ve not made anything with Feather Wiki, but I’ve dabbled with TiddlyWiki and Zim and liked both for different reasons. TW for possibility of sharing/publishing in a nice looking format, and Zim for linking together different offline notes and files (it can also export to bare html which you may then make look nicer with some CSS).

    Lastly there’s also Zettlr that I’ve only just started playing around with. I think it may work a little better than Zim in terms of handling offline note sorting and linking files, but I’m not sure yet.


  • Despite its name, Bookstack isn’t an ebook organizer or ebook organizing server software, it’s more in line with a wiki or personal knowledge organizer software.

    I inadvertently found myself coming across software you might sorta like @Spiffyman@slrpnk.net in the form of Zettlr. It’s FOSS, uses Markdown formatting, and is able to export to a variety of different formats.

    Downsides are that there’s currently no mobile app, nor plugin/extension support, so the base software is what you get. Nevertheless, it’s a very fully featured piece of software from what I can tell and has pretty good documentation to help learn your way around it. Bonus as well is that it’s cross-platform, so you can run it across different OSes on desktop.

    Edit:
    Also OP, if you’re really fond of TiddlyWiki but want more guidance on making it more structured, you might look through these notes. TiddlyWiki is really cool, however it certainly takes some getting used to with its style.



  • […] but the profitable parts (algorithmic indexer and the app view with advertisements) are very much still in the hands of BlueSky the company.

    Yeah, we’ll have to see if/when they fully enable third parties to run their own indexers and app views to see how committed they are to all this, and even then as the thread you linked indicates, there would remain many questionable architectural problems to AuthTransfer.


  • I came away from reading over the AuthTransfer protocol and its handling of moderation/enabling users with a very major sense of, “We outsource almost everything!”

    As L. Rhodes writes:

    […] One effect of ATproto’s structure is to multiply the number of administrative relationships for which each user must decide for themselves—often on little to no information—who deserves their trust. The complexity of its infrastructures seems like it would sometimes make it difficult to assess when that trust has been betrayed, and by whom.

    So Bluesky may redistribute some technical power from host admins to users, but it also gives them much more to navigate. It makes their need for power more desperate, and I’m not at all sure that the power trickling down to them through those other layers of infrastructure will be sufficient to the need. No doubt many will compensate by sticking to the parts of the network operated by Bluesky itself—apparent choice, de facto lock-in.





  • But I don’t want to seek out shows. There’s very little interesting stuff being released anymore. They ignore making products for groups in favour of making products for everyone, which results in products for no one. I cannot cope with that.

    It seems like some other replies are glossing over this, and here’s the thing: you gotta seek out interesting stuff. Many of the big tech algorithms are focused on the latest, hottest things, sure with some personalization tossed in related to your interests, but still more related to new and popular.

    You want a heap of interesting stuff, you can’t keep following what’s trending, you gotta set out and seek out stuff related to your own interests. Not in a physical sense either, but poking around online.

    Follow a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Find a director/artist you like, look at what else they’ve been involved with or done creatively, check that out however you can, then look at those they’ve collaborated with and if you like their stuff, check out their collaborators’ work, follow the influences and inspirations. You will hit some duds, but you may also find some real gems the algorithms never woulda served up anytime soon.

    What’s more, the further back you dig, the likelier you are to come across that really weird niche work that some folks started out with, that got eyes on them before they may have “sold out” by working on bigger, more mainstream work.


  • This is going to sound dead obvious, but I’d honestly recommend some Intro to Philosophy/Logic/Ethics books, e.g. Logic: A Very Short Introduction or The Logic Manual. I know you’re not necessarily looking at logic specifically, btw, but it’s one of the regular recommendations with philosophy more generally, especially if you branch out to other thinkers.

    Also a somewhat common introductory text that I personally didn’t care for is Sophie’s World, which acts as a narrative historical overview of Western philosophy. If you want that sort of thing you may be just as well with a text like A Little History of Philosophy, which might be available via your library.

    Finally, for ethics, you might look to Hornbook Ethics and/or Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Besides A Little History of Philosophy, if memory serves all of these I’ve linked to have at one point or another been required texts for different philosophy and ethics courses depending on where one attends, so in reading these independently you’d basically be getting some intro level course education on the cheap.

    Honestly though, I’d say reading the primary texts as you’re doing isn’t a terrible way to go about it, as that’s what many philosophy courses would have you do anyway. What I would recommend alongside that is the same as I’d recommend for any older text then, which is to read up on the historical context to get a better sense of what may have influenced their writing, how they were received by their peers and broader community (if they were noticed at all during their life), and develop your understanding from there.

    Sorry if this is a bit much, but I hope it helps! Be sure to check your local libraries for any of these before buying them btw, as they may have hard copies available despite not having digital copies. Also remember that college/university libraries may be an option too, albeit likely more costly if they do offer a library card to borrow materials.