reading | Chris Aldrich

Typed index card which reads "The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions." ---Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book? (1932) #reading practices #advice

“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”
—Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book? (1932)

Annotated on December 07, 2023 at 09:51PM

Replied to a tweet by

Courtney Robertson (Twitter)

Any thoughts about the Goodreads replacement going toward @indieweb / Mastadoon model? As in, still a social network, but entirely related to self-owning our part in the system? https://t.co/82eX8RTyX3
— Courtney Robertson (@courtneyengle) October 27, 2021

On the IndieWeb front there are some interesting evolving examples and state of the art documented at:

In particular, I quite enjoy the micropub client IndieBookClub for posting reading updates to my WordPress site (it supports other platforms with Micropub support too.) More details: https://indieweb.org/indiebookclub. Here’s an example of how I’m tracking what I read on my own site: https://boffosocko.com/kind/read/ or if you want just the books.

If you’d like a non-WordPress hosted solution, you might take a look at Manton Reece’s excellent Micro.blog platform which has a nice book/reading UI: https://micro.blog/discover/books or https://micro.blog/discover/books/grid. (It uses IndieWeb technologies including micropub, so you can use IndieBookClub with it. You can also syndicate to it from your WordPress site if you prefer to have your own infrastructure and just join the community there for the conversation.)

I’m happy to help if you’d like further tips/pointers for any of the above.

On the Mastodon front, you might take a look at Mouse Reeve‘s Bookwyrm (GitHub) which is one of the best custom set ups in the ActivityPub space.

Bookmarked Readup: Social Reading (readup.com)

Readup tracks your reading progress. In our community, you can’t comment on articles you haven’t really read.

An interesting little tool for comment posts. Gameable?

Annotated Tuesday 19 May, 2020 by

John Naughton (Memex 1.1)

Interestingly, I’ve found that Kindle is useful in this respect. I buy Kindle versions of books that I need for work, and highlight passages and bookmark pages as I go. And when I’ve finished the software obligingly has a collection of all the passages I’ve highlighted. ❧

John, you should spend a minute or two to learn about Hypothes.is as an online tool for doing this. It’s a free account or you can self-host the software yourself if you like. There are also functionalities to have public, private, or group annotations.

I often pull my own annotations to my personal website similar to your own Memex and publish them there (example: https://boffosocko.com/kind/annotation/)

Incidentally you can also annotate documents stored locally on your computer, but viewed through a browser as well as collaboratively annotating with others.

Read Imagining the #IndieWeb Version of WikiTribune by

Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)

Like many I joined WikiTribune, the new social network for news. The service quickly overtook Aacademia.edu as the primary spam engine of my inbox. Got me thinking that Nuzzel, an app that algorithimically surfaces stuff to read by what your followers share on Twitter, already ads a layer of trust...

👓 Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You | Dan Cohen | Buttondown

Read Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You by

Dan Cohen (buttondown.email)

This newsletter has not been written by a GPT-2 text generator, but you can now find a lot of artificially created text that has been.

For those not familiar with GPT-2, it is, according to its creators OpenAI (a socially conscious artificial intelligence lab overseen by a nonprofit entity), “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text.” Think of it as a computer that has consumed so much text that it’s very good at figuring out which words are likely to follow other words, and when strung together, these words create fairly coherent sentences and paragraphs that are plausible continuations of any initial (or “seed”) text.

This isn’t a very difficult problem and the underpinnings of it are well laid out by John R. Pierce in *[An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise](https://amzn.to/32JWDSn)*. In it he has a lot of interesting tidbits about language and structure from an engineering perspective including the reason why crossword puzzles work.
November 13, 2019 at 08:33AM

The most interesting examples have been the weird ones (cf. HI7), where the language model has been trained on narrower, more colorful sets of texts, and then sparked with creative prompts. Archaeologist Shawn Graham, who is working on a book I’d like to preorder right now, An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead with Agent Based Models, Archaeogaming, and Artificial Intelligence, fed GPT-2 the works of the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) and then resurrected him at the command line for a conversation about his work. Robin Sloan had similar good fun this summer with a focus on fantasy quests, and helpfully documented how he did it.

Circle back around and read this when it comes out.

Similarly, these other references should be an interesting read as well.
November 13, 2019 at 08:36AM

From this perspective, GPT-2 says less about artificial intelligence and more about how human intelligence is constantly looking for, and accepting of, stereotypical narrative genres, and how our mind always wants to make sense of any text it encounters, no matter how odd. Reflecting on that process can be the source of helpful self-awareness—about our past and present views and inclinations—and also, some significant enjoyment as our minds spin stories well beyond the thrown-together words on a page or screen.

And it’s not just happening with text, but it also happens with speech as I’ve written before: Complexity isn’t a Vice: 10 Word Answers and Doubletalk in Election 2016 In fact, in this mentioned case, looking at transcripts actually helps to reveal that the emperor had no clothes because there’s so much missing from the speech that the text doesn’t have enough space to fill in the gaps the way the live speech did.
November 13, 2019 at 08:43AM