On 11/6/22 6:52 PM, glen wrote:
That you call Mastodon 'twitter-like' is discomforting.
I call it that only because that is what I was looking for... and
because that is how Mastodon is often touted in this moment that people
are seeking Twitter-ternatives.
ActivityPub is fundamentally different.I guess the premature
registration is reasonable, given the politics of the moment. But the
'fediverse' really is distributed, very unlike twitter.
I've been a fan of distributed and decentralized (even federated) since
forever as well has having been an early enthusiast of the potential for
self-organizing, collective, social phenomenon, especially when mediated
by global electronic networking. I'm just too old, tired, cynical to
do more than pantomime the shaking of my tiny fist as I mouth vacuously
"get off my lawn" into the aether-void of my faulty apprehensions and
memories.
I really love that the Gab twits ported to Mastodon. That, unlike
Musk's perverted conception, is a real example of free speech. You
really are free to turn open source and open protocol to your weirdo
subculture. We just don't have to link to you.
Don't think 'twitter-like'. Think 'decentralized'.
bottom line is that in principle I'm a fan of *all* of this but simply
missed my window... had more of it been more available (and mature)
earlier in my life I might well be swimming in the self-similar fractal
stew of alternative modalities and subcultures linked together by
federated/distributed models.... To (ab)use SGs favorite metaphor... a
member of a a fractal Acequia Association faciltating the delivery of
fresh, nourishing water to every farmer, gardener, great and small,
Peone and Noble rather than wait for the giant smog-cloud in the sky to
drop it's acid rain on us.
In any case, I'm glad that there are others who in fact *can* indulge in
these distributions (temporal, spatial, spectral) of conceptions,
options, and idioms... maybe this rich (dare I say lush?) diversity
will rescue us from the technological lock-in, canalization, corporate
greed, and what *also* feels like the babble of post-Babel sometimes.
I think what I was exhibiting in my lame response to "how do I leave the
Twitterverse/GR/ even though i was only barely there?" was a conceptual
lock-in to the extant examples, the niches the current (or recent
previous) landscape offers instead of properly looking forward to the
ones I am probably embedded in if I would just muster the energy and
focus to look around and make sense of it. AlternativeTo.Net seemed to
provide my frail old eyes a snapshot in the Hellride (Zelazny-Amber
reference) I feel I am making (clinging desperate to the back of my
mount) through the rapidly evolving landscape.
There is probably some lesson from Essentialism
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism> (and it's failures) in this
random, reflective maundering...
In short... "sadly you are right".
On November 6, 2022 5:51:40 PM EST, Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
Trying to understand BookWyrm vs StoryGraph vs GoodReads and
Twitter vs Mastadon (and beyond), I found this aggregator of
alternative recommendations:
https://alternativeto.net/
which doesn't necessarily solve anything, it just makes it obvious
how challenging "too many choices" can be...
After a lame attempt to go with Mastadon I decided to abandond
Twitter-like things altogether. I doubt I will be willing to
throw GoodReads over for anything else because of the
participating base of my own personal/family network there. I
can at least avoid clicking through a GoodReads recommendation to
order from Amazon.
https://alternativeto.net/software/bookwyrm/
I haven't begun (tried?) to evaluate AlternativeTo.Net itself...
Is this the tragedy of the "free market" (subset of "commons")?
On 11/4/22 3:00 PM, glen wrote:
I'd forgotten about this until the release yesterday:
https://joinbookwyrm.com/
On 11/2/22 14:52, Steve Smith wrote:
On 11/2/22 9:43 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
Thanks, Glen.
It would be nice if there were a public bibliographic reference
url that one could use to name a book that only conveyed the
thing in itself. Goodreads was that once, then Amazon bought
them. Ditto for video and audio recordings and other objects
of public interest.
I admit to continuing to use Goodreads this way in spite of two
problems... the Amazon affiliation/ownership of course, but also
the too often spotty reviews... I don't provide many nor
particularly good reviews myself, so I've no room to complain
really.
So I suppose I agree with your "public bibliographic reference
url" point. It seems as if Wikipedia is a good candidate but I
haven't done the work to understand how new entries are made...
are they always required to be made by a citizen of the
community who is NOT affiliated with the book (publisher,
author, etc)? I find a *lot* of the books I seek in Wikipedia
and prefer them for reference when their book-description (and
cross links to related works, author, etc) are particularly apt,
but that is also spotty. I use Goodreads mostly to follow what
family/friends are reading and what *they* think of their reads.
The trend toward crowd-sourced public-use corpii being acquired
by private interests (even public corporations are private
interests) is disturbing (FB <-Mapillary,
Amazon<-Goodreads)... Twitter->BoringCo, etc)
Eugenia Cheng has other books and a pile of youtube videos.
Interestingly, her primary institutional affiliation is the Art
Institute of Chicago, where as resident scientist she teaches
math to art students. She has a public reading for kids
scheduled in Jersey City this month. Her definition of
category theory is "the mathematics of mathematics" which she
expands as "the logical study of the logical study of logical
things."
Hasok Chang has a third book, Is Water H2O, which Amazon fails
to index on his amazon author page, though it is on amazon at a
blistering price in every available format. I found a pdf on
the internets. It's details the history of working out the
chemical identity of water. Two themes are that 1) the
consensus answers to scientific questions often change in
anticipation of the arrival of corroboration, 2) there are
often multiple acceptable answers to scientific questions.
These are possibly consequences of being a realisitic realist.
Interesting set of recursions... we CS types tend to love our
arbitrary-depth recursion, but the special cases like
double-negatives, and Rummy's unkown unknowns and now Chang's
logical logicologoy of logics and realistic realists are ...
*special*? While some may prefer "turtles all the way down"
sometimes just a few turtles deep suffices?
- Steve
PS... couldn't help hearing/reading "Cheech&Chong" on the first
reading of this thread.
-- rec --
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 9:57 AM glen <[email protected]> wrote:
There. I fixed that for you. 8^D
On 11/1/22 19:36, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> Interesting visit with my old boss/friend today, he
mentioned some books of interest, and while looking for them I
discovered yet another book.
>
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-joy-of-abstraction-an-exploration-of-math-category-theory-and-life-eugenia-cheng/18557720?ean=9781108477222
> Exploration-Category-Theory/dp/1108477224>
> Eugenia Cheng, The Joy of Abstraction: An Exploration of
Math, Category Theory, and Life, published October 2022.
>
> A presentation of category theory that keeps the
underlying algebra basic.
>
https://bookshop.org/p/books/inventing-temperature-measurement-and-scientific-progress-hasok-chang/9513488?ean=9780195337389
> Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and
Scientific Progress
>
> An itemized history of temperature and all the wrong
turns taken along the way, more detail than even the author
cares to read again. Poetic justice to examine the operation
of the pragmatist's ratchet and pawl over the centuries as it
rescues workable definitions of temperature from thermal
confusion.
>
https://bookshop.org/p/books/realism-for-realistic-people-a-new-pragmatist-philosophy-of-science-hasok-chang/18368583?ean=9781108470384
> Hasok Chang, Realism for Realistic People: A New
Pragmatist Philosophy of Science, available on kindle on
November 30, 2022.
>
> -- rec --
-- ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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