Camino Day 4 & 5
Castelo do Neiva to Carreço and Carreço to Seixas. Both 22km stages.
As I've gotten farther from Porto the towns have gotten smaller and more of the route had consisted of forest paths and walled alleys, typically routing into town whenever there's a Big Old Church to get a stamp at
The past two days I've been traveling with other solo women that I met on the road, one from the UK and the other from Lithuania, both friendly and enthusiastic. B, who I spent both days with, was excited to learn it was my birthday and told everyone we ran into at the hostel (something I wouldn't have done myself). A big group of us went out for dinner and everyone sang happy birthday in their native language.
I've enjoyed the sense of community among the pilgrims; the one thing everyone has in common is that we're all on a Big Adventure.
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Note: You can invite people to this instance if you'd like! Please only invite people you trust to be kind, friendly, and reasonable. Especially only invite people you're sure are human.
To invite someone, go to your "contacts" page and click on "invite friends" in the left sidebar. You'll need their email address.
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Me to my partner, after complaining about doing something that I mildly regretted:
"Oh well, I guess I have to have *some* flaws, or I wouldn't be relatable"
Incidentally, is tagging a thing here?
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I've done this but it looks ugly:
Apparently this can be controlled with some shenanigans, see StackOverflow. I don't know if that's within the power of @Ben Weinstein-Raun to control?
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Camino Day 3
Shorter day today. Walked 18km from Apulia to Castelo de Neiva.
Still spending the majority of the day in or near towns but the towns are getting smaller with stretches of greenery in between
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Do y'all remember that princeton election guy who forecast a win for Clinton with 99% in 2016? I just found a post-mortem interview with him where he says:
Probabilities are not a good way to convey uncertainty. The first reason being that it’s hard to estimate the true amount of uncertainty, and I discovered that.
I... have never before felt such a strong urge to say "skill issue". But people weren't saying "skill issue" yet in 2016, so nobody got the chance. Time is cruel.
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Sam Wang and Nate Silver had an interesting back-and-forth, if I remember correctly. A friend of mine was convinced that Sam was right and that Nate was “putting his thumb on the scale to cover himself.”
In hindsight, it seems to me that Sam’s approach was more of a straightforward averaging of polls, while Nate’s method is more like a gambler’s—integrating his own beliefs into the model.
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Camino Day 2
Today was more coastal boardwalks, then through a mid-size city, then more coastal boardwalks, then some back roads in farm country. The albergue that I planned to stay at filled up by 3pm and I ended waling an additional 8km, making this a 28km day in total from Labruge to Apulia.
I'm second guessing some of my decisions. I stuck with the coastal route today (meaning I'm committed for the next couple of days) but I had the opportunity to take a more inland route and now I wonder if that would have been more "nature-y". I could have stopped in the city and saved my legs. I could have gotten more stamps if I had planned differently, etc.
Tomorrow will be a shorter day so I can recover. My host says it's easier to find albergues between here and the Spanish border
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Okay, so if these complex systems like weather and biology are theoretically best described by some ideal set of policies, then would these complex systems, even the stable self-replicating ones be considered non-agentic?
I struggling to see the fundamental difference between a fire that is hungrily eats all the wood in the pile, and me, a person that a hungrily eats all the snacks in the pantry. Unless we're considering some ineffable free well, I mostly see the difference that my systems are much more complex and illegible, making it hard to map out the full causal chain from the biochemistry in my psychology to my hands reaching for a bag of chips.
Combustion is much simpler, but from some all-knowing perspective, they're both self-sustaining chain reactions of chemistry.
How do tools differ from trading partners?
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Camino Day 1
Started from the Sé do Porto and walked as far as Labruge on the Sendo Litoral route for a total of ~24km. The route goes along the coast and is a mix of sidewalk and boardwalk. It was foggy throughout the morning and then cleared up in the afternoon but stayed cool all day. The coast was beautiful.
My feet hurt. I'm going to try to do a similar mileage tomorrow and hope I acclimate to walking
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Test post (message?)
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I just figured out OAuth and wrote my findings up on their wiki at wiki.friendi.ca/docs/api-authe…
I probably will integrate it with flexiprocity, but I'll probably take my time about it. I anticipate it being quite fiddly.
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I'm guessing it's only because I have only 1 friend so far, but I have an empty feed, so I am discovering posts using the circular button in the navbar. It's a confusing interface!
> "The top left icon, with the rectangular grid, is the thing to click in order to see the "Facebook timeline" analogue
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AI noise removal is still not that good
I end up with a lot of super-noisy photos because I do social dance photography. The light in the room is dim, and I need a fast shutter speed because people are moving quickly, so I'm letting in even less light. This is terrible for noise.
Unfortunately, it seems that the best AI noise removal tools are still not that good! I am surprised.
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I hear good things about Lightroom's denoise - do you have a way you could try that? The random online tools are often pretty far behind state of the art, if that's what you've tried so far.
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Oh cool! I can try Lightroom and this DxO thing (haven't heard of it). I think I may have already tried Photoshop's denoise feature -- maybe that's the same as whatever Lightroom is doing.
Topaz was what I tried in the screenshot. It seemed like it was supposed to be one of the best options, but I'm glad that top comment says it's actually far behind others
Further attempts:
According to someone on the thread that Kevin linked, Topaz works better if you're using raw files instead of JPGs. Indeed, it does!
Not sure it's good enough that I'd actually want to use it. I'll think about it.
Looks like I did try de-noising in Lightroom already -- I cancelled my Adobe subscription so I can't redo it, but it's still on there when I open Lightroom. It's kind of impressive, but also still looks pretty unnatural in a lot of ways. (Some things too blurry, some things too crisp.) Looks like some poorly-stylized digital painting rather than a photo. (At least for the photo I tried. I can't share it because it's not a very flattering shot of the person pictured.)
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Post for collecting bugs reported on this friendica instance
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network
page? on your global community
page?
Reminds me of of the "you are bugs" scene in the three body problem.
> And as we go about changing the world to suit our preferences, the rats will remain unconsulted. It seems clear to me that rats will only get what they want, when what they want happens to be nearly-costless to humans.
This seems like it's making progress towards a formalization, though I think it still struggles.
If you imagine that covid virons were agents, then it seems to me that although there's a sense in which we're much more powerful than them, and you know, humanity could, if "it" wanted, defeat them, they can kinda get what they want without enormous costs to humans. And yet humans are still much more powerful than covid virons.
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Hosting providers
Right now superstimul.us is hosted on a Vultr VPS instance. I use Vultr because it's a decently reliable VPS host that offers OpenBSD (though this instance is running in Docker on a Debian system). Much cheaper than AWS; comparable pricing and features with many other VPS providers.
But I just went looking at the prices of competitors, and Hetzner is cheap. How is it so cheap? For roughly the same price I'm paying for this host, I could get ~8x the vCPUs and RAM, and 4x the storage.
It would be a hassle to migrate at this point, but I'm definitely tempted.
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Notes on the outcome of groups experiment
I think groups are a pretty half-baked feature, and I don't expect people to use them much. A "group" (previously called a "forum", and most of the documentation hasn't been updated to reflect this change) is basically an account that auto-reshares things it's tagged in. You can give it a few different settings for how it responds to follow requests, and another setting for the visibility of its reshares. To administer a group, you have to create a second account for it (which friendica does make relatively easy but not trivial), and then switch to being logged-in "as" the group.
So, yeah I guess it might be useful for coordinating things somehow, and the setting with private reshares is maybe promising (though also marked "experimental"). But it seems much less natural to me than the corresponding concept on Facebook.
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