mrcgnc

It's all procedural. I get some parameters I can tune, like thresholds and how crooked to make the road, but the algorithm does the rest.

This is my blog drawn as a network, with a light coat of paint to make it look like a video game map. Each city is a post, bigger cities have more incoming links, and roads are connections between posts. It updates semi-automatically every time I publish. (I used an LLM to write the code and drew about 90% of the art myself in Inkscape.)

For a long time I've been unsatisfied with the linear feeds and tag soups that most blogs use, so I decided to experiment with a non-linear view. I built some CLI tools that combine embedding similarity, LLM suggestions and human review to find the links between posts and quantify their strength. Now, every time I write a new piece, it takes me about 5 minutes to generate its links to/from older posts and grow the map accordingly.

The map is meant to look playful more than precise. For me, the key feature is how it enables making your own "journey" through the blog. The tricky part was finding a layout where closely related posts end up near each other AND the landscape doesn't change dramatically with every new post. I'm not a graph expert, but t-SNE on shortest-path distances over the link graph turned out to work well in my tests. Each update starts from the previous positions with early exaggeration off, and a Procrustes alignment keeps the map from rotating or drifting.

I hope it helps people get lost in there and find things they want to read. I'd like to see something like this on other blogs, so I'm sharing it here. I wonder if anyone else has tried similar ways to un-linearize their blogs.

I'm also a TRPG player and GM, and I have total aphantasia. I can't possibly speak for all aphantasics, but I wouldn't want you to make most of those accommodations for me if I were a player at your table.

Metaphors and analogies are very useful for me, because they provide archetypes of mental models for my understanding of the world (in this case fictional). There's nothing inherently visual in them or difficult for me.

I love to see artwork, and maps certainly help understand the geography of a scene, but I'm not sure that has much to do with aphantasia. If the GM's verbal description is good, I actually prefer not seeing pictures, so that I can fill in what I can with my own imagination.

Maybe the biggest thing that aphantasia does in this context is give me a strong filter against "useless" details. If you describe a monster with knife-like jaws, or a woman with pink bubblegum hair, that's interesting because they are potentially useful "action hooks", i.e. knowing those might influence my decisions, be it tactics or conversation prompts. On the other hand, if you describe all the random colored spots on the monster's back or tell me that the woman's hair is blond with curls "like overcooked macaroni" or whatever, those are not going to mean anything to me, and they're going to bore me.

The idea here is creating tentative events in one's own calendar, not tentatively accepting someone else's events. This is to prevent overbooking oneself. It's a simple feature and I'd personally use it a lot.

Context: Ente is a hosted photo storage service with e2e encryption similar to Google Photos.

True, but then I would argue (as a layman) that AGI would need to be able to guess what matters in a given context to really be AGI.

I'm a paying customer and this is yet another nice addition. It's something only you can do. Please keep doing this kind of stuff!

Other things I've had to deal with: in Myanmar people usually don't have a concept of first and last name, just two (females) or three (males) words that form their "name" (as far as I can remember).

Also, often names in Sri Lanka look like this: Rajapaksha Mudiyanselage Siril Ariyaratna. Two family names and one or two given names. Regardless of the number of fields used, displaying long names like that needs some special considerations.

That comic is an example of excessive subordination, another common pitfall.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/cmt-40/kantoo/...

Neat, now I have a name for these. A lot of what is considered "bad writing" seems to consist of these "garden-path sentences", written unintentionally. Finding one of these in a text is a good indication that the author either didn't re-read what they wrote, or re-read it and couldn't step out of their own head to notice how confusing it is.

I like the idea. It reminds me of Reddit's Place, but with no way to coordinate. It's a rather frustrating experience, especially when others erase your hard-earned black squares (or when I did it myself in a moment of distraction), but it's also strangely addictive.

> I don't want China to get to the south pole first with humans and then say this is ours, stay out

I suspect that the very act of saying this only contributes to increasing the zero-sum space race mindset.

Discussed here as well:

A whiteboard for my study.

I feared it would be a short-lived whim desire but I'm using it daily and I love it. So much smoother than a note-taking app for ideation, and also better than a notebook, because whatever I've drawn will decorate the room and gently remind me to think about its contents.

> For in fact what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an all in comparison with the nothing, a meeting between nothing and everything.

The path through this existential angst, I think, is in the realization that the nothing can't exist if there isn't something somewhere. The hole needs a doughnut around it.

Likewise, the infinite has no dimensions, it has no "infinity" in it without something finite to compare it to.

The relative size doesn't matter, the presence itself does.