Some praise for the behind-the-scenes tech I'm using to run this site
- Tailscale: Lightweight personal VPNs. Tailscale is so good. I don't even need to have an open ssh port on the VPS running this instance, because I can connect over tailscale SSH with zero hassle.
- Caddy: Caddy is like nginx if nginx cared about usability. e.g. it makes it trivial to put an HTTP service behind a TLS proxy. Like, it even manages the LetsEncrypt certificate for you. Totally wild.
- Docker, and the official Friendica images especially: I hate developing for containers, and avoid it when possible. But when someone else has put in the effort to make a high-quality container image, deployment is genuinely much easier, even for hosting the thing on a VPS.
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The plan for the beta
Thanks to everyone who's joined to help beta test! I'm very grateful y'all are here! ❤️
My basic plan is to use superstimul.us for the next week, posting here instead of Facebook, getting a sense of the platform so that I can help other people later, and trying to iron out basic issues if they crop up.
After that, I'm going to do a push to invite clusters of people who I'm especially excited about being here. I'll probably reach out to y'all for names of people who are cruxy for your active enjoyment/participation here (feel free to preemptively message me about this!).
Anybody can invite their friends, btw, though I would slightly prefer you held off for now, because I want to be strategic about the launch.
I might do some kind of incentive / costly-signaling scheme where I give $20 or so to the first 30 people who share a substantive post here, and not on other social media? Or something; Not sure about that yet.
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I'm considering going to the southern hemisphere for December and January, to miss the shortest days in California.
New Zealand and Chile both seem like good options: Tons of sun that time of year, good climate, safe cities, relatively cheap. Chile is a lot cheaper, and after having a lot of fun visiting Mexico, I kind of want to try living in a country where I don't know the language.
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I just played Duck Detective and I have a complaint
I am confused that it is SO well-rated. Like, it's 10/10 on Steam? The motivation behind the central crime doesn't really make sense and is barely explained. It's cute in a bunch of ways, but writing reasonable character motivations feels like a "bare minimum" thing for me. (At least in this kind of game, where you're supposed to deduce who did what and why.)
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I did a dance shoot on Friday
Check out this edit I did. The more colorful one is the "after." It's more colorful than what it was like to really be there -- but the less colorful one also isn't what it looked like to really be there. It was so dim!
This kind of choice feels salient during photography post-processing. Should I make it look like how it looked to be there? Or how it FELT to be there? Or should I just do something cool?
The ideal probably depends on the purpose of the shoot. (Is it to remember a wonderful event? Is it to create a piece of art? Is it to give people photos to use for dating apps?)
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Yeah that would be nice! Partly because it sounds nice to give people a better idea of what goes into a pretty photo -- a lot of the labor is invisible. (Sometimes people just tell me "wow you have a really good camera" when they see my photos.)
But also because there's a big difference between what is optimal for aesthetics and what is optimal for accurate-information-sharing, and I'm disappointed about how much art distorts people's beliefs
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I'm really excited for this experiment! Friendica exceeds my expectations in some ways (looks nice, has imo an especially good privacy model, seems easy to update and administer) and falls short in others (ease of finding people, occasional UI weirdness).
Please let me know if you run into any issues and I'll try to fix them or at least help resolve them
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kip
in reply to Sam FM • •SURE, it's not really right to say e.g. baking is a science whereas cooking is an art. Technically both are skills involving both instructions and intuitions, and neither is literally about doing science or creating art
HOWEVER!!
I think people do basically understand that "this is more art than science" means "this is more about intuition than being good at following straightforward instructions." Therefore: communication win
Sam FM
in reply to kip • •My issue with the phrase is not that people are misunderstanding each other, but that the use of this phrase reinforces a frustrating characterization of "art" and "science" as sets of aesthetics and tools.
I think we lose a lot when we forget that the core value of science is to learn things by following the scientific method. Art has harder to define value, but I think it's a mistake to put so much emphasis on valuing how mysterious and inscrutable someone's creative process is.
kip
in reply to Sam FM • •So you're thinking that there's a relationship between people using the word "science" all willy-nilly and people misguidedly glamorizing science? ("I fucking love science", "scientists say X")
Or some other issue?
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Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to kip • •I read Sam as saying something more like, "people understand each other fine when they say the phrase 'more art than science', but actually they have kind of wrong mental pictures about what it's like to actually do art or science, and this phrase typifies / reinforces that misunderstanding."
Art actually often requires exactly the kind of technical skill that people are referring to as "science" in this dichotomy: e.g. photography, sculpture, and painting all involve tons of technical aspects despite being ~central examples of art.
And science is in fact not centrally about its technicalness; it's about the process of learning, which in many central cases involves an intuitive stage followed by a technical stage (e.g. iiuc most physics and math starts as the inscrutable intuitions of a highly trained specialist, and only gets formalized as a way of shoring up and communicating the correctness and detail of that intuition).
I'm not sure about the specific problem Sam means to point to, but one issue I see actually feels related to your
... show moreI read Sam as saying something more like, "people understand each other fine when they say the phrase 'more art than science', but actually they have kind of wrong mental pictures about what it's like to actually do art or science, and this phrase typifies / reinforces that misunderstanding."
Art actually often requires exactly the kind of technical skill that people are referring to as "science" in this dichotomy: e.g. photography, sculpture, and painting all involve tons of technical aspects despite being ~central examples of art.
And science is in fact not centrally about its technicalness; it's about the process of learning, which in many central cases involves an intuitive stage followed by a technical stage (e.g. iiuc most physics and math starts as the inscrutable intuitions of a highly trained specialist, and only gets formalized as a way of shoring up and communicating the correctness and detail of that intuition).
I'm not sure about the specific problem Sam means to point to, but one issue I see actually feels related to your post yesterday about gender disparities: people will make wrong choices about what they want to do with their time and careers, and also what kinds of trust and expectations to afford institutions, if they have this kind of wrong mental picture of what those institutions are really like.
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Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •Sam FM likes this.
Sam FM
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •Yess. And like, most disciplines involve some combination of technical study + intuition. So you get all these cutesy claims like, "jazz improv is *actually* more of a science" just because it involves studying technical music structure. The next step is to get confused and judge jazz improv by the merit of it's technical complexity.
Side note here: when I was in art school, my professors were actually very dismissive of building technical skills. This was very frustrating for me at the time, and probably an overcorrection. But I think they were trying to push back against a tide of technical-but-meaningless artworks, and re-center expression/communication/interpretation as the core of what it is to participate in art.
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Sam FM
in reply to kip • •@kip yeah I think the misguided glamorization is pretty core to this thing. Pages like IFL Science feel like the result of treating science like an aesthetic, or putting the people in science jobs on a weird platform.
I see a similar thing happening with "rationality," being used more often to refer to "certain Berkeley weirdos" than "careful truthseeking." It's not hard to imagine a IFL Rationality page that just reposts ideas from "certified rationalists" that you are now expected to believe with 100% confidence and no skepticism.
kip
in reply to Sam FM • •like this
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Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to Sam FM • •Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •Sam FM
in reply to Sam FM • •