2025-03-22 | 🕸🪵 Blog 🪞 Reflections | AI 🤖 Book 📚 Exploration 🗺️

🤔 Titles are hard…

… but they can also be fun 🥳.
💎 I made a Gemini Gem to help out.

✒️ Title Craft

Help me come up with a concise, catchy title for the following.
First, come up with broad categories that fit the content.
Continue to combine the categories until they no longer overlap.
Then, come up with single word for each category that combined make a concise, catchy title.
Finally, choose one emoji for each word.
Format the result as follows:
Emoji1 Category1 | Emoji2 Category2 | …
Or use a short title with emojis
Present many options. Then present some more. Inject a lot of variety and explain the rationale.

📜 I have 127 old posts to title.
➕ Plus one for today.

🪞🕸️🪵 Reflecting on Reflections

🗓️ It’s almost been a year since I started blogging 🤯.
2024-04-19 | 👋 Hello, World! 🌎
🧮 This is my 128th daily reflection 🪞.
🎲 Well… not all of them are very reflective.
Sometimes this feels more like a log 🪵.
A log 🪵 on the web 🕸️.
A 🕸️🪵 weblog
A blog 🌐.
👌 And that’s okay.

🔬 Tiny Blogging 🤏

🎯 My goal was to make it very easy to blog.
✅ That way I’d be more likely to do it.
🤏 A Tiny Habit.
✅ It’s been very easy.
📱 I write from my phone.
📝 I’ve made templates.
🤖 I’ve automated.

🤖 AI-Generated Content 📝

🤖 I’ve recently started generating content with AI tools 🤖.
😬 I’d been accumulating more empty posts for books than I was comfortable with 😬.
📚 This site exists to serve as a reference for myself and others 📚.
📝 I read a lot of good books and want to share my notes 📝.
🤔 But it’s easier to read than it is to write 🤔, especially when reading audio books 😁👂.
📖 So I’ve read a lot more books than I’ve written notes on 📖.
💸 A blank page isn’t very valuable 💸.
🤯 And a few fragmented sentences on a fragment of the content are not much better 🤯.
⏱️ AI tools can generate a book report nearly instantly ⏱️.
😐 It’s not my writing. It’s not perfect 😐.
🙌 But it’s better than nothing 🙌.
💡 And with some iterative prompt engineering, I’m pretty happy with the quality of book reports I’m generating 💡.
💯 Not perfect, but valuable 💯.

🌐 Networked Book Exploration 📚

🌐 And networked.
📚 Generating a book report with book recommendations is a great way to explore.
🗺️ I ask for books that relate in a variety of ways in order to cover more ground.
🤔 It’s fun to think of prompts that increase variety and breath in recommendations.
🔍 How do you explore a space relative to a starting point you can’t see yet?

➡️ similar
⬅️ opposite
⬆️ more general
⬇️ more specific
🔬 more rigorous
🤝 more accessible
📖 fictional

📐 Multidimensional Exploration 🧭

📐 What dimensions meaningfully characterize books?
🤔 Maybe I can find some more.

⚖️ Rigor vs Accessibility
🌐 Generality vs Specificity
📈 Popularity vs Obscurity

📏 It’s easy to explore along these 1-dimensional scales.

🎭 Categorical Exploration Challenges 🧩

🎭 It’s hard to explore categorical spaces.
🔄 I can ask for a book on an opposing topic.
➖ But topics don’t live on a line.
🤔 Maybe there’s a useful notion of opposite (probably several) for a topic.
🔁 But ask for the opposite twice and you get back to where you started.
🧭 That wasn’t very adventurous.

❓ Oblique Relationships 🧐

❓ How do I ask for a topic that’s obliquely related?
🤔 Maybe I can ask for 2 topics that are different, and collectively form a set of 3 distinct topics with the original. Kinda like forming a triangle instead of a line.
⚠️ But then maybe we’ll tend to get 2 relatively arbitrary topics that happen to not intersect the first.
🤖 And perhaps we’ll get monotonous results, where the bots will tend to prefer picking the same arbitrary others.
🤝 Can I somehow relate those other topics to the first and to each other?

❓ Recommend 2 books that obliquely relate to this book in different ways?

🔄 I could also try asking for the opposite of the opposite. In this case, opposite isn’t so well defined, so we may not get back to the original topic. A bit of noise may propagate and push us to new territory.

🧪 I’ll have to experiment.

🧠 Relevant Disciplines 📚

🧠 I wonder if there’s a well studied discipline that can help here. Maybe topology. Or Linguistics. Or literature. Or search? Optimization maybe. Stochastic something or other? Knowledge representation? Graph traversal? AI? Maybe the Dewey Decimal system could help define a space to explore. Information architecture?

🚀 More to explore. Adventures abound.

⏸️ For now I pause.

🔍 Broken Dates 📅

📅 The date at the top of each of my web pages has always been the last time I published any web page.
🐛 Not the worst bug in the world, but it’s a bit annoying.
🔎 Also, I noticed that Google hasn’t been indexing recently published pages very quickly.
- 📊 Currently, I have 248 pages indexed and 144 not indexed.
- 📉 Of those 144, 124 of them are Discovered - currently not indexed.
- 🤔 Which (I believe) means they haven’t crawled them yet.
- 📈 But (according to the search console’s crawl stats report) they’ve been crawling my site about a hundred times per day this month.
- 🔄 The purpose of those crawls is 98% refresh and 2% discovery.
- 💡 Hypothesis: if Google thinks every one of my web pages needs to be updated every time they crawl my site, they’ll waste a lot of time crawling pages that haven’t changed, and they’ll have less crawl budget to spend on a first crawl for newly discovered pages.
- ❓ I don’t know if this is true
  - Edit: signs point to yes, 🕷️ Google uses the last mod field on sitemaps
- but I expect to find out if it helped in a few days or so, because…
🛠️ …I fixed it.

⚙️ Attempted Fixes 🛠️

🔄 First I tried updating Quartz to the latest version.
- 🚧 But that’s not super easy to do.
- 📂 Updating is done via Git and all the files are kept in my repo.
- 🤯 Since I’ve changed a few things (and don’t remember exactly what) it’s kind difficult to tell what my changes were if I were to just update to the latest version of everything.
- 🚫 So I didn’t update everything.
🧐 But I did look at the updated quartz.config.ts file.

🛠️ The Fix

📄 I added git to the CreatedModifiedDate plugin’s priority list 🚀
🔄 I updated quartz/plugins/transformers/lastmod.ts to the latest version ✨
🤖 I (had copilot) ensure git is available at build time 💻
⚙️ And I set the defaultDateType to “modified” in quartz.config.ts 📅

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