[FRIAM] gone Meta on Twitter, GoodReads, etc.

Sun Nov 6 20:52:19 EST 2022

That you call Mastodon 'twitter-like' is discomforting. 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 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'.

On November 6, 2022 5:51:40 PM EST, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> 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 <gepropella at gmail.com> 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
>> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20221106/88c84417/attachment.html>