"aika" should be a variant of "aka" meaning "also incorrectly known as". I usually use "aka" to nod to the common name of something after saying a more correct one.
For example: "LLMs (aika AIs)"
Those who like what I did with readable.css may be happy to hear I’m currently planning a new stylesheet. If you want to take a guess at its focus, my working name for it is “Hansel”.
This will be a stylesheet solely controlling webpage layout, leaving a lot of flexibility about the aesthetics—those of you who heavily modded readable.css should like that. Better, it will even be able to be bundled with “themes” of its own. A theme for Hansel using readable.css aesthetics might be bundled as “Hansel/Readable”, for example.
I have a lot of ideas for this and may get started tomorrow.
And if you’re worried that this means readable.css will be abandoned, rest easy—the current state has actually stalled a lot and I expect this to get me motivated again to fix the long-standing issues from a fresh perspective. These stylesheets are for very different audiences—readable.css is a drop-in, ready-made, opinionated stylesheet while Hansel will be more of a framework to do your own work within.
Those who like what I did with readable.css may be happy to hear I’m currently planning a new stylesheet. If you want to take a guess at its focus, my working name for it is “Hansel”.
This will be a stylesheet solely controlling webpage layout, leaving a lot of flexibility about the aesthetics—those of you who heavily modded readable.css should like that. Better, it will even be able to be bundled with “themes” of its own. A theme for Hansel using readable.css aesthetics might be bundled as “Hansel/Readable”, for example.
I have a lot of ideas for this and may get started tomorrow.
Ugh my alarm didn't go off so I stayed in bed and when I finally went to check it, it was noon, not 7:30. I had plans for this morning! :P
(I didn't fall asleep for a long time last night, though, so part of me is grateful for the extra sleep.)
Operation "Falafel on Demand" is a smashing success!
Some of you may remember my first attempt at making falafel, about a week ago. Well, I surmised that the uncooked mix would keep very well refrigerated, so I made a really large amount of it about five days ago. Tonight, I tested with resounding success that now in just ~7 minutes I could make hot fresh falafel. The follow-up batch to share with family took an additional 4-5 minutes.
I hereby propose a Falafel Preparedness Index, measured in the number of minutes it takes you to go from "I want falafel" to "mmm, this falafel is delicious." My score is 10 minutes—what's yours? ;D
Happy birthday, Debian! Very happy to have spent the last three of those years with you.
I took a long bike ride today on the South Platte River trail. I used to work a few minutes away from the trail, and I always wondered where it went.
I biked most of it this afternoon, from the Adams County Fairgrounds in Brighton, to Commerce City in north Denver. The round-trip distance was 28 miles.
There was a nice rainbow over the South Platte, and some of the geese that didn't quite make it back.
The AI bubble is temporary, but the knowledge that your boss does not value your work is forever.
I made falafel for lunch today! Took some trial and error to figure out how to do the frying right (I'm shallow frying, not deep frying), but I think I figured it out by the end. Plus, the flavor was great, I think I nailed the ingredients.
#TIL the sad news that a major not-for-profit organisation for NaNoWriMo was a casualty of the #Mole Training craze, although apparently the writing challenge continues informally, much as it began (see #WritingMonth);
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/02/creative-writing-nanowrimo-to-close-after-20-years
It shut down just over a year ago, after antagonizing their community with a public statement claiming that "the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones";
https://www.404media.co/nanowrimo-ai-policy-classist-ableist/
Planning to actually get a full work day today… Wish me luck!
~] today
Today, 2026-08-10
09:00-10:00 Writing ⟳
10:00-10:30 Journal ⟳
10:30-12:00 Writing ⟳
12:00-13:00 Lunch ⟳
13:00-14:30 Writing ⟳
14:30-16:00 Coding ⟳
16:00-17:00 Writing ⟳
Building on the Developmental Model of Polymathy (Araki, 2015, 2018, 2020; Araki & Cotellessa, 2020), polymathy is conceived here as a mode of engagement with life (particularly with learning, knowing, and doing) rather than as a status label. It describes a patterned way of engaging with knowledge, understood broadly to include formal and informal learning, autodidactic activity, and meaningful personal experience. This framing emphasizes not only how learning is acquired, but how it is developed, refined, and enacted over time. Polymathy as a life project (Araki, 2018) therefore goes beyond an inventory of competencies or achievements to describe a way of living with and through knowledge.
Proposed definition by Michael Araki (https://www.qeios.com/read/XROC7M) - I know some people that should read it.
It does look like we could also filter a relay for specific keywords and/or hashtags, if there's a specific topic we're interested in getting more federated posts on. Would take a bit more work for me to figure out but could be a happy medium.
Soooooo one thing I haven't really brought up yet but the new GoToSocial release does allow us to subscribe the instance to relays. Is that something people here would like? I think the main thing that would do for us is to populate hashtag timelines.
Personally, I feel like leaving that off. I rather like the federated timeline we've built up using the tastes of those here and feel like adding relays might just reduce the surprisingly-high signal to noise ratio we've been getting. If there's a consensus the other direction, though, I'm willing to reconsider that. :)
(In case it needs clarification for some reason: I'm only inviting input on this from Polymaths.social members.)
Many of you are ignoring the word "gracious" in the above post—it's there because this is my dad, and despite the unfortunate use of a tool that hates me and my goals in life, I am in fact very happy to see him taking an interest in the culinary arts, particularly given this may be his first actual meal cooked in decades.
He doesn't really understand yet how food works, and I'm hoping to find a way to help him forward that shows a better path than blindly copying whatever even human-made recipes say, because at least to me cooking is a very iterative and personal process and highly subjective to tastes and equipment, requiring experience more than "recipes".
I'm trying to figure out what the gracious response is when a family member serves you a meal they prepared from a recipe they got out of ChatGPT.
EDIT: please see below in the thread before replying to this.
Polymaths.social is now up and running with GoToSocial v0.22.1! There's a ton in this new release so take a moment to look through the release notes:
https://codeberg.org/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.22.0
Most of it is on my end as the server administrator but it should make it much easier to track down issues and help things run smoother overall. I've turned off the instance directory feature for now but if y'all would like it on (it would still be opt-in) let me know.
On Monday, I plan to enable automated remote post cleanup. This will involve a very short bit of downtime followed by a possible performance slowdown for a day or two as it runs its first purge. I will keep y'all posted on my plans for that as I make them.
Hey, y'all! To anyone seeing this the server is indeed back up but I will need to take it back down in a few minutes for some database maintenance to make sure things run smoothly and quickly. Probably will take about 15 minutes.