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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3299 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've taken the plunge and created a Substack. I've done it under my real name and will be writing about NON CW things I generally find interesting mainly to divert my tendency to write thousands of words into the void of the Internet towards something marginally more "productive" than forum posting and to have a corpus of writing associated to my name that I can use later for career/social status (One of my MEDIUM posts was quite well received by my past colleagues). In light of my previous post on too much forum posting. Now I am not a prolific Motte poster by any means, but I still post too much according to my personal cost/benefit analysis of how I should allocate my time.

Now is an easier time than ever to become a writer, you don't even have to try to make a website (substack does most of the work for you), language models can do some if not almost all your grunt work of writing for you, and you can create artwork/images to supplement your text at no cost using txt2img... This doesn't mean it's easier to make it as a writer, just doing the writing.

Sidenote: I'd really wish people would move away from Medium (thanks heavens for https://scribe.rip/, which circumvents all the obnoxious crap and adds sane typographic settings) and the new kid on the block, Substack. I just saw for the first time a Substack article asking for a subscription (instead of letting me "read it now") and it just broke the cardinal highlighting rule.

Are Github/Cloudflare pages + Hugo/Jekyll/whatever's hot now that hard?

I miss the open web. *sigh*

Using github for things it was never designed to do is really obnoxious, I've been wanting to rant about that.

I mean..? It was designed as a hosting service for git repositories. Sources for static websites are kept under version control anyways, is Github Pages that big of a stretch?

Hard agree. It's a source control system FFS, not for hosting a website, or a journal, or any of the other asinine things people do on github.

or a journal

What's the issue other than aesthetic preferences? Code is text in a file, journals are text in a file.

If anything, a lot of things would be improved by a GitHub repository-like interface. I can't find the post/article (not sure) about it, but a github page for legal documents would serve to me immensely useful to a wide array of people. You could see past versions and what was changed easily, you can raise issues, you can see alternate branches and forks, etc. It wouldn't have to be the literal law, but just an experiment on how such a thing would evolve would definitely be interesting. Perhaps even a digital twin of the actual law.

What? I keep all documents under version control, whether blog posts, journals, or source and whether collaborative or individual. It's the most robust way of preserving changes and examining them over time. Git's even used under the hood for pass, my password manager.

You do you, but I think that's a serious jamming of square pegs into round holes.

I needed to learn and grok git when I wanted to start contributing to the linux kernel. Read the docs, the source code, and starting using it everywhere to get it into my muscle memory.

I guess when you're purposefully juggling hammers all day, you do start seeing some loose nails around the house.

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Dont hate on my FREE website hosting service.

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