deathmtn

Whenever I see that someone's forked one of my repos, I always excitedly click over to see what they've added. Then, I remember that 90% of forks are for the purpose of safe keeping.

I applied to Twitter's developer program so that my bots can use the webhook API (a substitute for the recently deprecated streaming API) to reply to people a couple of weeks ago. This is the response I got:

Thanks for applying for access!

It looks like your proposed use case may be in violation of one or more sections of the Developer Agreement and Policy, Automation Rules, and/or the Twitter Rules.

As a next step please review these policies as they relate to your use case. Then, respond to this email with an updated use case that is in full compliance with Twitter policy.

Thank you for your interest in building on Twitter.

They don't say what is in violation of the policy. Am I supposed to guess at random and resubmit applications? To me, it sounds like they just don't want people to develop for their platform.

The guy started at a new preschool on Tuesday. There have somehow been zero transition issues. (Hopefully, I'm not speaking too soon.)

It probably helps that he knows a guy there from his old daycare. He just jumped right into playing with him as soon as that guy walked in the door. He's taken well to the teachers, and the space isn't as crowded as the old one, resulting in a much calmer atmosphere.

After school, he played with a friend he met that day, who happened to go to the same playground we went to. (Four-year-olds actually can make friends in a day and have genuinely good times with each other.) They and another kid there see-sawed, went on a tire swing, and chased each other. I had a nice chat with his dad. Preschool victory!

Hey, I made a playlist so you can listen to all of ten of Bathory's Winds of Winter in one go! The one from Blood Fire Death is my favorite.

Possibly more practical Bathory listening.

I was walking on the sidewalk drinking a canned iced latte. There was a chunk in it. These are usually really good! I spit it out on the sidewalk. Then, a coworker walked by a few seconds later. My spitting may been seen. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's an update I wrote for my Patreon backers.

Hello, Patreon backers!

Now that your greatly appreciated backing is not (for the time being) paying for godtributes' vision bill, I figure I should fill you in on what you're supporting.

About @godtributes

I applied for a license with Twitter to get access to their webhook API, a substitute for streaming, so that godtributes (and linkfinds) can possibly reply to followers again. That was on August 26. I have not heard back yet.

Recent projects

You can usually get an idea of what I've been working on here. It's a list of my GitHub projects, from most recently updated to least recently updated. I have most recently been focused on controlling where I write things down in order to spend some time outside of the psychological loops that social media leads the brain into and to be able to get at what I've written now in the future easily, regardless of what other corporations or organizations may do.

Hence, I have a personal weblog with RSS! I direct most of my writing there, large or small. (If you'd like help setting up a weblog like that, let me know! The posting client is kind of rough, but weblog is light and fast.)

At the same time, I still want to communicate with people on Mastodon and Twitter. Many individual people still have reasons to still be on social media, so I have to meet them where they are. "Am I Muslim? No. But I go where the brothers go" as Ice Cube said. So, I built something to post summaries to Mastodon and Twitter. The summaries look like this. Every time I write another 25 notes, a process runs TF-IDF analysis on each note, then puts the top few terms from each note into a summary. That way, you get a sense what I'm thinking without every single word being reposted to Mastodon and Twitter.

The thing I wrote to post to the web (with RSS), Mastodon, and Twitter is also used by three bots, Dem Bones, Land of Contrasts, and Hills. (Dem Bones and Land of Contrasts are new-ish bots that I've made this summer. One of them assembles skeletons at random, and the other generates those US-state-specific infographics.) Here's some details about that.

I've also started working in person with a friend once a week on an automated colorer. That is, it takes an image, then tries to color it in as if it were a coloring book. It's invigorating to work with someone in person. We're doing more on it tomorrow.

Here's some output from my Rothko-inspired cats on color fields project so far.

I think I'd like to structure it via my "wandering functions" probability controller. I've written specs out, but if that takes a long time to implement, I'll move on with cats on fields the old-fashioned way.

And now for some dry talk about expenses and infrastructure!

Hosting

Most of my bots and web servers live on two Digital Ocean micro instances. These are computers that have 20 GB of HD, 1 GB of RAM, 1 "vCPU". (vCPU means access to a single core on a CPU. Here's what /proc/cpuinfo says: "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz". I have to admit I have no idea how good or bad that is anymore.) Each costs $5/month.

The most important thing is that they have a reliable, fast internet connection, as opposed to the Raspberry Pi I have at home, which does run a few of my bots, like Self-Tagging Bot and The Most Successful Bot I've Met.

Recently, I've made an attempt to make my projects, including bots:

- Reasonably futureproof, meaning that they produce artifacts in a medium that is likely to be readable in ten years, like HTML and PNG, rather than Twitter.

- Portable, meaning that, at least their output, if not their operating parts, can be picked up and moved somewhere easily. If a single company goes down or becomes unacceptable to work with, my projects should be easy to take elsewhere. Something that makes this easier is keeping everything from a single project on the same server, rather than separating HTML and media, as is the recent tradition.

This second concern has its costs. I've been running three image bots, Hills Land of Contrasts, and Dem Bones as well as two weblogs on one of my servers, having them write their images to its HD. Last week, the HD filled up! I found some crud to delete and got 3 GB of breathing room, then updated the weblog client to reduce image sizes.

However, I need to either reconsider this approach or get a bigger HD for this server. I could get another 40 GB for another $5 a month, but I'm sure I'd eventually fill that up, too, though probably not for a while. And I'd like to take a break from infrastructure for projects to work on actual projects for a few months.

I think my ultimate strategy will be like this:

- Bots that do not pull from corpuses that could potentially create stuff that needs to be deleted will write straight to some cheap mass storage service like S3 or Digital Ocean Spaces. They'll be backed up to my HD at home daily (hopefully, there's a way to do this incrementally?) so that if there is a problem, I can restore from the previous day's backup.
- Bots that can create things that need to be deleted immediately (like godtributes) will work like Dem Bones does now: They'll make commits to a local git repo on the server. Then, I can go in and revert changes that are bad.

Source control

I pay $7/month for a GitHub account. I think I'd live if I had to host my repos elsewhere, so I don't think I'm in any danger of being locked in. It's just way more work to move than I have time for right now, so I'm staying there.

The thing I do want to do, however, is stop using GitHub Pages to host bot output. Except for Dem Bones, Land of Contrasts, and Hills, they all use GitHub Pages. It's free, but the GitHub API gives me more trouble than I'd like. I have static-web-archive generating RSS for archives that live in local Git repos, but doing anything when the GitHub API is the store is always a fight, so I'm not bothering with that.


OK! Thanks for sitting through that! Let me know if you want to hear more, less, or if you want details about anything in particular or you just want to say a thing! And thanks again! It really helps to know that I'm doing things for people other than myself.

Jim

To save time today and avoid heat death, I worked out early and on the extra-wide bar at the playground instead of at the regular bar. No run; gonna be rough when I do run again. 10-5-3-4. It was a struggle. This is generally a pretty odd week, so I'm not surprised.

We saw the final Adventure Time episode last night. It was intense. Some of it was wrapping up threads I was really tired of, like Fern and Uncle Gumbald, but there were a lot of glimpses of the far future that I liked, not different from the ones in the comics. And those last episode montages of the near future are always fun. This one reminded me of The Wire's ending montage.

I would've liked to see the Farm again, though he's one of the many characters in the show that has a future that is easy to predict. The Donut Witch is still cursing people who steal donuts, and the Farm is still kicking challengers' asses and snoozing.

It was a good show. Cheeeeeck, please!

Wow, Pressley won! I guess yard sign counts may be a reliable election predictor? There is this old neighborhood garage mechanic that had a Ayanna Pressley sign up. That did raise my eyebrow, but I didn't think it was enough.

She'll represent our positions very well. The same situation that often happened with Capuano will probably happen with her, in which we call the office to ask them to do something only to find out they are ahead of the game.

The only things I might come to miss are the excellent constituent communication and downstream results of changing committee positions.

The guy does a lot of riffing. He takes a sentence, pokes some slots into it, then drops words into them again and again. I guess they read a book at preschool in which someone says, "DUDE! Your head is too big for your body!" Or maybe we read it, and I forgot it and he remembered!

He has said:

- DUDE! Your ankle is too big for your leg!
- DUDE! Your pee is too big for your penis!
- DUDE! Your bun is too big for your burger!

Riffing on memes is for all ages!

Really good pineapples are super refreshing, and pineapple slicers make them accessible. It is a golden age, except for all of the other shit going on.

10-4-4-4. Some cheaty leg-swinging happened on the last couple sets. Took bike to the bar to avoid sweating and to save time. Good enough for coming back from three days off!

I think reaching my forties has finally allowed me to appreciate Bathory's slow melodic Viking era?

Though:

- It's actually not as different from the black metal stuff as I remember. That Bathory rhythm from A Fine Day to Die is still going in the guitars.
- Quorthon sadly only lived to 38.

My primary votes:

Senate: Warren
Gov: Gonzalez
Lt. gov: Palfrey?
Att. Gen: Healey
Sec.: Zakim
Rep.: Capuano
State sen: Jehlen
State rep: Hecht
DA: Palatano

I do like Pressley, but Capuano has been incredibly reliable and transparent. He's always ahead of the game when I call his office, and his newsletter is the most helpful communication from a politician I've ever seen.

Hey, so I have this meta-site going now, that runs TF-IDF analysis on this site and posts the results!

It looks like an SEO scam site because it's just lists of words, but the idea is that it'll summarize this site for you. For each archive page of posts, it picks the terms that are most common in the post, but are not common across the entire weblog. For example, if I say "Smidgeo" a lot, "Smidgeo" is not going to be the top term in this post. However, if I haven't said "SEO" often, SEO may be a top term for this post! I have SEO'd my own term analyzer.

Anyway, I like it because it gives me a sense of what I'm writing about in the aggregate. For example, on page 0, I was taking about things breaking, problems with Twitter, and tree costumes. By page 3 (posts 76-100), I had moved on to music, kids crying, and problems with Google.

We're having a second wave of The Hobbit for bedtime. It's good, but I'm now bothered that I'm not consistent when I sing the dwarf and elf songs. Which is a strange situation.