Polymaths.social

Wow, I didn't fully clock until now how I was actually feeling pretty lonely in #WritingMonth until last night the tag (and a group chat I'm in) lit up with activity from everyone getting started! Kinda didn't factor in enough of a delay from being in the UTC+8 timezone, I guess.

I am so very excited and honored to be writing with you all this month!

I am brain tired and a bit exhausted right now and don't think I will be able to properly focus on writing tonight; I have the head start from staying up to midnight so I will take that and catch up a bit tomorrow after getting a proper night's sleep. The month starting on a weekend was a bit of an odd situation for my rest schedule anyway so I think this works.

#WritingMonth November word count is still: 129/30,000

I was able to do some planning today which was nice; I think I may actually swap the gender of the main character to male because this story revolves around hair magic and aesthetically, I love it when men have long hair and would love to do a story with one. It also makes a bit more sense in the opening.

Did a brief double take seeing "Amin" on a chord sheet before realizing it meant an A Minor chord, not my name.

My single Halloween tradition is to stay up to midnight to write the first 100 words of November for #WritingMonth, a tradition I will be celebrating again tonight.

(I remember years where I took a walk after restless planning waiting for midnight and thought "Huh, I wonder why so many people are walking around in costumes. Ohhhhh, wait, right.")

Can't wait to write with you all this coming month!

I got a spam email offering an AI service to help my blog posts pretend to sound human. The general summary is "Oh hey, you're doing a great job making your AI-generated blog posts sound like a real person. We can make them even better with our AI tool!"

Someone hold me back or I am gonna go on a rampage. I am fuming right now.

I don't think I talked about it at the time, but a good while ago I removed the Creative Commons license from my blog. I've finally had some ideas about how I want to license things going forward and will be working on wording it properly and putting it on my website.

The general idea will be:

• Properly credit me
• No AI training/ingestion whatsoever
• Don't simply copy/redistribute my work in full without adding your own work to it unless you get my permission
• As long as the above are met, you can do whatever you like! Commentary, quotes, spoofs, derivative works of any kind, and so on

As for the no AI bit—I will point out that while opinions are divided on whether I can legally forbid that, AI ingestion of my work does explicitly and blatantly violate what I've said I want for my work and the trust I am showing by making that work available for free.

This will probably go in a little section at the bottom of each blog post.

The plumber just asked if I'm a singer; when I was confused he clarified that my long hair makes it look like I'm in a rock band.

I thanked him for the compliment. 😄

I did an art yesterday and decided to let you see!

There are so many spam emails asking questions like 'may I send you details on how to improve your site's SEO' or 'may I follow up with a modern visual redesign for your site' or 'I can help optimize your site for LLM ingestion' that I strongly feel the urge to simply respond 'Absolutely not.'

If I didn't know replying would just get me more spam, I would.

I'm tired.

Updated GoToSocial for this instance to v0.22.3. Lemme know if you have problems.

To help deal with the current spam wave we've been receiving, I'm about to turn on GoToSocial's experimental spam filtering for Polymaths.social. Posts mentioning many users with a link or media attachment will be dropped (excluding ones from someone you follow or that mention someone you follow, so hopefully this won't interfere with hellthreads).

Let me know if this causes any problems. Here is the full documentation of the feature: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/v0.22.0/admin/spam/

If spam messages keep getting through despite this, continue reporting them as you have been. Thanks, y'all.

What projects are people planning for this November's #WritingMonth? My goal is to write 30,000 words worth of short stories.

You're all welcome to add me as a buddy: https://writingmonth.org/~amin/

I would like to do some #WritingMonth development in the next couple weeks, though I can't promise anything about my side projects at the moment due to some IRL priorities. Any requests about features to put at the top of my list if I find some time?

I will probably be on fedi less often this week than usual. If you need my attention, I will still be checking my email. (If I consider an email urgent, I'll take care of it right away, but otherwise it may go in a queue. If you need a quick response please say so.)

Heh, and when expecting a reply time via email remember that I'm in UTC+8, and that I've actually been fixing my sleep schedule this week.

I'm currently seriously considering shutting down Freedom to Write: https://freedomtowrite.org/

I made it as an umbrella for my various writing-related coding projects, back when I had several major ones planned that I have since decided against making. Currently, the only significant project I've been attributing to it is readable.css, which doesn't really justify the stated scope.

If I do this, I will move the readable-css subdomain to my main personal domain. I will redirect the old site until the domain expires, which I believe is in about nine months. I'll probably also send messages to people I know who link to the old site, to hopefully avoid broken links.

So far I've kept it up because there didn't feel like a reason not to, but domain names are getting more expensive and I always have new project ideas, and it feels like a good idea to move to setting a precedent of having project sites as subdomains of my personal website unless there are strong reasons to have their own domain.

I liked the new https://example.com design until I noticed that the SVG icon and translations are injected via JS.

…why even?

It appears Deno is now abandonware unless forked, since the company was just bought by Cloudflare, who will not be maintaining the runtime after a year from now: https://deno.com/blog/cloudflare

It is suddenly more urgent that I switch SSGs from Lume. sigh

Federation may be iffy/broken again—I'm gonna take a closer look at things and may end up taking Polymaths down for a bit. (This may happen after lunch, not right away.)

Federation has been struggling a bit this evening; for the most part the ongoing remote post cleanup in the database hadn't had too much impact but if things are still slow in the morning I may restart the service and let it finish cleaning up another time.

It hasn't been fully broken down as far as I can tell, we've just been occasionally receiving posts in bursts instead of on time.

Good night, all!