Kicking the habit
Unfogged has been in a decline for a long time now. It’s just not as interesting to me anymore. My brand of humor isn’t extremely appreciated over there (i.e. I don’t get much positive feedback), though I’m sure it’s around average. My positions on issues are not challenged seriously by anyone, and most of the topics aren’t ones that I have anything to add to.
So I’m going to try to stop reading. Finding another good blog to comment at is going to be quite hard. I’ll have some regrets. It’ll be a lot like breaking up with an old girlfriend when you’ve drifted apart. But it’ll be a positive thing. Less Wrong is already a good blog I’m reading regularly. Overcoming Bias is also a pretty good source of stuff. But neither will quite fill the hole left by Unfogged. The blogosphere is so huge, and it’s so hard to sift through. Well, maybe I should focus less on online time-wasting anyway.
Of course, now I have to figure out where I’m going to get my news.
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:07
Be careful with OB and LW. There is a lot of insight floating around, but they’re embedded in a set of intellectual and emotional assumptions that are misleading at best. One could say that about pretty much anything, I suppose, but in these cases, especially LW, unwitting or unmitigated acceptance of assumptions seems dangerous.
October 7th, 2009 at 7:42
Bummer. Unfogged has been dull lately, so I do understand, but come by and say hi every so often if you think of it.
June 11th, 2010 at 12:03
I’ve come to your blog from Lambda the ultimate where you posted a forum topic “Interpreter to compiler generator?”
I’m taking this post as being about forum problem, and the pain of moving on. I have an idea for solving the forum problem. Err, no, actually I have a way of looking at it sideways and coming up with new kind of forum/thingy that you wouldn’t have to move on from.
I put the idea on Hacker News
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920110
which lead to an interesting discussion and some clarification
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=921438
Since my health is poor and I’m not managing to work on OuterCircle myself, I was hoping that somebody else would pick up the idea and run with it.
Since you are posting on Lambda the ultimate I assume that you are a strong coder. Since you are having to move on from a cherished forum I think that the OuterCircle will be of interest to you. So I am hoping to interest you in taking the OuterCircle idea and doing something with it.
June 11th, 2010 at 12:37
Huh. Faskinating idea. Implementing it at the internet protocol level seems like way too 90’s thinking to me, though. Seems like it’d be better off going through at least two stages prior to that. 1) Auto-generated whitelists of existing bloggers (so you can follow their lists) based on their blogs and link patterns, and integrated into existing RSS reader software. 2) Community web sites hosting such content.
I suppose it’s possible I might someday work on such a project. But it’s far down on my list at the moment. Although step 1 would be pretty easy to do. It might only take a couple weeks, really, including an interface to google reader. (Given that it would have to do a bit of crawling, it might not be possible as a javascript site extension, but it could be done as a browser plugin, perhaps. It’d probably integrate really well into google gears. I don’t know mozilla chrome or google gears, though.)
June 11th, 2010 at 12:56
And sure, p2p protocols like Freenet or what-have-you might be a good end-goal. But it seems like worrying about Slashdot effects right off the bat might be getting ahead of yourself.
I think the key to adoption is to do as much piggybacking as possible. Use the existing data from buzz feeds and such plus whatever you can slurp off of the sites you read. Get the algorithms integrated into popular platforms like Drupal and Reddit and whatever runs DKos and then you can get different communities talking with some sort of OpenID-like system, and then you can get traditional blog software involved like Wordpress and Typepad. Somehow integrate the data into the site feeds. Etc.