Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

soaking beet seeds (detroit: red and gold, mix) on paper towels overnight to plant tomorrow

Planted today:
* kales (nero toscana, lacinato, red russian)
* lettuces (romaine, black seed, red sails)
* peas (sugar snap, green arrow)
* orache (h/t @mcmoots)
* green onions
#gardening

same energy:
* that video going around of someone finding a whole NYC apartment behind a mirror in their apartment
* me learning that the Zotero folks have a whole other research-focused open source application (Tropy) that I'd previously never heard of
/cc @darius

Has anyone tried a financial subscription model for Mastodon/ActivityPub?

It seems like the architecture would make it relatively easy to build OnlyFans/Twitter Super Follow/Patreon type features, where some posts are delivered to everyone, but a subgroup that pays a fee receives additional messages to their inboxes.

A notebook describing my search for found amulets in the Project Gutenberg corpus:
https://npdoty.name/code/amulets/

Thanks @aparrish for Project Gutenberg poetry corpus (and for often posting exploratory notebooks) and @andrew for encouragement.

Ten rare, found amulets:

had grazed the top of the bone, for Polydamas had come up to him
Te Deums to the night, invoking rest
They, like the foliage, change their tint to brown;
His charioteer drive to the hollow barks,
Nor sweet Acrisian Danäe, from whom
Tityus and Ixion too.
May Hermes, herald of the dead, convey
Then they bent theyr good yew bowes,
given--at least in the present state of the critical art--of the
What! your soul was pure and true;

Context: https://text.bargains/amulet/

Maia (https://maiachess.com/) has totally changed my experience of playing chess against the computer. Each game feels competitive, like playing someone on my level, but it feels like playing *someone*: it makes mistakes, not random mistakes or stupid mistakes, but the kind of mistakes I make.

It plays like a human, rather than an artificially-limited AI, because it's predicting what a similar skill-level human would do.

@joshmillard I love the size and apparent texture of these tokens: https://twitter.com/joshmillard/status/1355963686842556418
Like, there could be a hole in one corner and it's some hieroglyphs, or a key to enter a certain clubhouse, or a QR code -- for your keychain?

while it looks like https://web.hypothes.is/ as an organization has pivoted to working with education in particular, the annotation product seems to still work, and there's an unofficial extension for Firefox and I logged back into my account (from many years ago) and I'm highlighting things, so I'm happy

how can I highlight/annotate on the Web? do we still not have a standard for this, or even popular client-side tools? is hypothes.is still a thing?

it's interesting to note the discomfort (much of the Twitter discussion is also people realizing that they weren't invited to participate) given that livestreaming something is a common online interaction, but it's a disappointment when being very directly contrasted to some (even low-fidelity) more interactive subset.

it's a direct exclusion even in discussing "new publics", and I appreciate the presentation noting that public space historically isn't egalitarian

ways to interact that aren't just a Twitter feed ... except if you're on the livestream the only way to interact is a hashtag on Twitter

it's kind of a bummer to hear about all the social tools and all the value of interaction and discussion for a festival -- we should all contribute and disagree, getting to know people is the most important part, etc. -- but then actually it turns out that only some people were invited to those, I'm not invited, I'm just supposed to watch the livestream video for the next few days #newpublicfestival

commit 30617f7069f7fd548d50e5e8d86f6c01bcbe3615
Author: Nick Doty <npdoty@ischool.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sat Dec 19 16:53:50 2020 -0500

filed dissertation!
readme and template explaining the exact manual steps for rendering the ucb filed version

the challenge of the long writing project is that at any time, I can ask myself, "could I write this better in some way?" and of course the answer is always yes, and so I keep going. but then even worse is the moment where I answer, "no, I can't do any better" because it feels not like the sense of completion that the work has improved to some local maximum, but rather that my own capabilities are exhausted
#dissertation

reached that stage of writing where I try to organize and edit to make everything cohere together and get that particular brain stretching discomfort as I realize that I simply cannot keep everything I've written in my head at once
#dissertation

we gave money, we wrote hundreds of letters and postcards, we emailed and called our families, I answered questions at the bus station and helped people get rides to early voting, J called absentee voters to help fix ballot issues, we drove out to a small town and dropped off literature and talked to voters

Ethan Zuckerman's list of properties for a "civic logic" of social media is surprisingly close to Mastodon/ActivityPub feature list:
* many, smaller communities
* creating their own rules for moderation/administration
* interoperability so people can try different ones
* different ways to support them financially
#DPinfrastructure