Polymaths.social

This is utterly delightful. In the future I may bring my notebook and pen and do some writing here.

The Polymaths.social financial transparency page has been saying that we were paid $8.10 for the Polymaths Pages VPS this month instead of paying $8.10. My bad. I caught the issue when reconciling my bank statement with my own ledger. Should be fixed:

https://polymaths.social/financial-transparency/

"aika" should be a variant of "aka" meaning "also incorrectly known as". I usually use "aka" to nod to the common name of something after saying a more correct one.

For example: "LLMs (aika AIs)"

Those who like what I did with readable.css may be happy to hear I’m currently planning a new stylesheet. If you want to take a guess at its focus, my working name for it is “Hansel”.

This will be a stylesheet solely controlling webpage layout, leaving a lot of flexibility about the aesthetics—those of you who heavily modded readable.css should like that. Better, it will even be able to be bundled with “themes” of its own. A theme for Hansel using readable.css aesthetics might be bundled as “Hansel/Readable”, for example.

I have a lot of ideas for this and may get started tomorrow.

Ugh my alarm didn't go off so I stayed in bed and when I finally went to check it, it was noon, not 7:30. I had plans for this morning! :P

(I didn't fall asleep for a long time last night, though, so part of me is grateful for the extra sleep.)

Operation "Falafel on Demand" is a smashing success!

Some of you may remember my first attempt at making falafel, about a week ago. Well, I surmised that the uncooked mix would keep very well refrigerated, so I made a really large amount of it about five days ago. Tonight, I tested with resounding success that now in just ~7 minutes I could make hot fresh falafel. The follow-up batch to share with family took an additional 4-5 minutes.

I hereby propose a Falafel Preparedness Index, measured in the number of minutes it takes you to go from "I want falafel" to "mmm, this falafel is delicious." My score is 10 minutes—what's yours? ;D

Happy birthday, Debian! Very happy to have spent the last three of those years with you.

https://bits.debian.org/2026/08/debian-turns-33.html

I made falafel for lunch today! Took some trial and error to figure out how to do the frying right (I'm shallow frying, not deep frying), but I think I figured it out by the end. Plus, the flavor was great, I think I nailed the ingredients.

Planning to actually get a full work day today… Wish me luck!

~] today
Today, 2026-08-10
09:00-10:00 Writing ⟳
10:00-10:30 Journal ⟳
10:30-12:00 Writing ⟳
12:00-13:00 Lunch ⟳
13:00-14:30 Writing ⟳
14:30-16:00 Coding ⟳
16:00-17:00 Writing ⟳

Soooooo one thing I haven't really brought up yet but the new GoToSocial release does allow us to subscribe the instance to relays. Is that something people here would like? I think the main thing that would do for us is to populate hashtag timelines.

Personally, I feel like leaving that off. I rather like the federated timeline we've built up using the tastes of those here and feel like adding relays might just reduce the surprisingly-high signal to noise ratio we've been getting. If there's a consensus the other direction, though, I'm willing to reconsider that. :)

(In case it needs clarification for some reason: I'm only inviting input on this from Polymaths.social members.)

I'm trying to figure out what the gracious response is when a family member serves you a meal they prepared from a recipe they got out of ChatGPT.

EDIT: please see below in the thread before replying to this.

Spent a good bit today trying to get my local backups back in order (since I wasn't running them while traveling). Did some adjustment of the pruning then ran a compaction—apparently saved 430GB?? That sounds wrong but that's what the command says.

Will keep at it later today, see if I can get repository checks to start taking a decent amount of time. I may split up the repository into smaller ones like I do with my remote backups, so it can split the checking into multiple chunks without me needing to leave cancelling an hours-long process.

Hey y'all, so—

There is a lot of Polymaths.social maintenance needing doing that I've been putting off because I was traveling.

1. I need to update us to the new version, which is a huge change on the database structure and may take hours to migrate.
2. Once that's done, I need to set it up to delete old remote posts we don't care about to save space.
3. Also at some point I really need to reboot my server. (This would also affect everything else I host except the Polymaths Pages sites.)

I suspect the first two items will help clear up a few federation issues we've been having since they seem database-related.

Instead of trying to do all three items at once, which would mean less downtime, I plan to split them up so it's easier to see which causes any problems that arise. I plan to perform the migration my Friday afternoon (UTC+8).

Since this migration is a bigger deal than others we've had, I plan to actually update https://status.polymaths.social/ which I haven't done in a while, so check there for progress reports and such. It's now also hosted via Polymaths Pages so it won't go down if the server is, which is nice. XD

I will be in a car or a plane for most of the next 24 hours or so and sleeping for a number of the subsequent hours. When I'm recovered I will be on UTC+8 time and my website will update accordingly.

If you need me in that time… well I'm afraid you'll be out of luck. Sorry. :P

If I've learned anything from reading countless murder mysteries it's that anyone who talks about their will is about to be killed.

To those scammers who are asking to pay to put "guest articles" on my website:

You're not getting off on the right foot by saying you really enjoyed my "content". At least make a specific comment if you expect me to believe you, and don't use that demeaning term for my craft.

This was one of the few times I've had the urge to actually reply to a scam email to tell off whoever wrote it.

(this one got through my spam filter somehow)

I’m now two timezones further West. My website homepage will update accordingly with the exact offset when I next fire up my laptop (tommorow; it late).

Unfortunately at some point on the trip I lost my beloved headphones of the last 3.5 years.

Normalize live play-by-play ridicule online of the slop AI webinars employers make us watch! Great job, @joel.

RE: https://polymaths.social/@joel/statuses/01KXNYMFY3YGP7WFHY5NN9N9QM

I just received my author copies of my First-Class fiction story and poem—so lovely to get my hands on them at last! Thank you @nantucketlit !

(My writing is on the reverse side.)

@axxuy

Are the bookmarks on your site supposed to be listed as having 1,000,000 likes? XD

I just tested by liking the bookmark of my post and it now shows as 1,000,001.