Polymaths.social

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.

Have you ever contributed to a wiki? (any publicly-editable online wiki)

I may take a break from Fedi for a bit… I’m not totally decided on that yet but every so often a break really helps and I’m starting to have the feeling this may be one of those times.

FYI, it looks like OVH will be doing some maintenance on the VPS hosting Polymaths Pages a little later implementing a security patch. They've blocked out three hours for which they say we will be impacted for less than 30 minutes.

I'll try to keep y'all posted but I'm also with family and don't actually have any control over this so I may just ignore it completely. Let me know if this causes any issues and I'll see what I can do.

This will affect:

• my static sites
• any static sites from polymaths.social members that I'm hosting

Other things I host shouldn't be affected.

EDIT: based on the time they gave me this actually probably already happened.

Got a couple dozen new-to-me used CDs to rip and put on my Tangara! :D

The fireworks tonight are gonna be rough… I've already got a slight headache and loud noises and flashing lights tend to be what triggers my headaches…

Apparently the new GoToSocial release is officially out now. I'm actually going to delay on this update for a bit since it's a massive one and will have significant downtime and I might need to do more work to get it running. Also I wanna see what bugs are possibly reported and worked out in its first week or two…

Anyway, I'll keep y'all posted on my plans.

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)