Another traveler of the wireways.

  • 78 Posts
  • 304 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Given the absence of specific communities (or active ones so far), if people would like they could start these conversations over in !general@lemmy.world.

    I recognize it’s not the same, particularly for getting to those deep dive points you mention with ATLA, but gotta start somewhere, right?

    Also I can easily give this go-ahead being one of the mods there. Up to now I’ve hesitated popping into threads like this and pointing people there because I’m not a fan of consolidation, but it’s become apparent some simple meeting area may help to get more niche communities spun off and going.


  • You might try different media if you haven’t already, as in, instead of pencil/pen and paper, maybe colored pencils or markers. Maybe even try getting some black paper and trying to draw with white color pencils instead.

    I’m sure you may have tried a variety of things over the years, so I’m just spitballing, but also if you’re trying to dive into the deep end with more complex drawings, you might revisit and really hone the fundamentals. Fundamentals being like getting clean lines by practicing drawing those over and over till you can get a nice, sharp line (which often isn’t a single pencil/brush stroke!).

    Once you have those down you may move on to the simple shapes, squares, triangles, circles, and try to recognize how those are put together for more complex forms. It’s a tough skill to get down, without a doubt (I’m not some proficient artist personally), but it’s just that: a skill that takes not only practice but learning methodologies. One of the toughest parts with drawing is that there’s so many methods to go about it to figure out which helps you improve.









  • I kind of agree about this not entirely fitting science, but I think the survey part is what gives it that little edge to fit here.

    Without reading it in the full context, I’m also not sure what Nozick may have meant with the “want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person” idea. I suspect the idea may be that given a fully constructed context, you may be limited to however that context permits you to be instead of an independently actualized/realized person.

    Although if that may be what Nozick was getting at, it’s not without its own problems, much as you highlight with their position supposing existence harboring deeper meaning and significance apart from conscious creations.


  • Finally, Nozick supposed that “plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct”.

    I find myself agreeing with this, particularly after a lot of time spent in such man-made realities whether in the form of books, movies, or games. At some point, some element of these I think will speak to people and inspire them to pursue on their own in some way, whether a hobby of a character, or creation of their own media or sub-field. An action that cannot be anticipated and generated by any such experience machine or simulation in a way that adequately satisfies someone.

    Their AI partner, they explain, “has been treating me like no other person has ever treated me”.

    This is an aside, but this jumps out at me as an interesting tell…Given that these AI partners aren’t necessarily sophisticated enough to fully emulate people and there’s historical precedent for people seeing in them some traits they want to see, I wonder if this could be viewed as an angle to developing AI-intermediary therapy whereby one may learn that it isn’t the AI treating them well, but the patient themselves.

    The AI may be serving as a method to direct their inner monologue into patterns of thought that are kinder and more uplifting compared to however they may otherwise be.

    “As we get more familiar with technology and especially virtual technology, we are going to care less and less that something is virtual rather than non-virtual,” Weijers notes.

    Frankly, I think we’ve already been here for some time. The technological element undeniably alters matters, but society itself has arguably been in this situation for as long as people have been capable of abstract thought. People have always existed between knowledge and ignorance, amidst facts and fabrications, and indulged themselves as much and often more in fabrications as facts.

    What has consistently been of more concern is how much they draw from their indulgence rather than lose, rather than the ontology of it.


  • Personally, although the terms have become increasingly blurred over the years, I refer to changing to a new version of software (including an OS, and both ideally with some improvements) as updating it rather than upgrading.

    I reserve upgrade more for changes of hardware with some form of improvement over its predecessor. I’d suspect I may not be alone in this, but I dunno how common it may be. When switching to a mix of both, I simply say I’m getting a new [insert specific device depending on which].

    Although I’d hesitate to call many new phones an all-around upgrade when they’re either removing features (headphone jack/expandable storage) or getting more cumbersome to hold (can you even call some modern phones a handset anymore?).


  • How do you stay in the know about this kind of stuff? I’m curious about all the cool stuff out there I wouldn’t even know I’m curious to find.

    I was going to mention YaCy as well if nobody else was, so I can chip in to this somewhat. My method is to keep wondering and researching. In this case it was a matter of being interested in alternative search engines and different applications of peer to peer/decentralized technologies that led me to finding this.

    So from this you might go: take something you’re even passingly interested in, try to find more information about it, and follow whatever tangential trails it leads to. With rare exceptions, there are good chances someone out there on the internet will also have had some interest in whatever it is, asked about it, and written about it.

    Also be willing to make throwaway accounts to get into the walled gardens for whatever info might be buried away there and, if you think others may be interested, share it outside of those spaces.



  • Despite its name, Bookstack isn’t an ebook organizer or ebook organizing server software, it’s more in line with a wiki or personal knowledge organizer software.

    I inadvertently found myself coming across software you might sorta like @Spiffyman@slrpnk.net in the form of Zettlr. It’s FOSS, uses Markdown formatting, and is able to export to a variety of different formats.

    Downsides are that there’s currently no mobile app, nor plugin/extension support, so the base software is what you get. Nevertheless, it’s a very fully featured piece of software from what I can tell and has pretty good documentation to help learn your way around it. Bonus as well is that it’s cross-platform, so you can run it across different OSes on desktop.

    Edit:
    Also OP, if you’re really fond of TiddlyWiki but want more guidance on making it more structured, you might look through these notes. TiddlyWiki is really cool, however it certainly takes some getting used to with its style.