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2025-03-22 | ๐Ÿ•ธ๐Ÿชต Blog ๐Ÿชž Reflections | AI ๐Ÿค– Book ๐Ÿ“š Exploration ๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ

๐Ÿค” Titles are hardโ€ฆ

โ€ฆ but they can also be fun ๐Ÿฅณ.
๐Ÿ’Ž I made a Gemini Gem to help out.

โœ’๏ธ 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 | โ€ฆ
Or use a short title with emojis
Present many options. Then present some more. Inject a lot of variety and explain the rationale.

๐Ÿ“œ I have 127 old posts to title.
โž• Plus one for today.

๐Ÿชž๐Ÿ•ธ๏ธ๐Ÿชต Reflecting on Reflections

๐Ÿ—“๏ธ Itโ€™s almost been a year since I started blogging ๐Ÿคฏ.
2024-04-19 | ๐Ÿ‘‹ Hello, World! ๐ŸŒŽ
๐Ÿงฎ This is my 128th daily reflection ๐Ÿชž.
๐ŸŽฒ Wellโ€ฆ not all of them are very reflective.
Sometimes this feels more like a log ๐Ÿชต.
A log ๐Ÿชต on the web ๐Ÿ•ธ๏ธ.
A ๐Ÿ•ธ๏ธ๐Ÿชต weblog
A blog ๐ŸŒ.
๐Ÿ‘Œ And thatโ€™s okay.

๐Ÿ”ฌ Tiny Blogging ๐Ÿค

๐ŸŽฏ My goal was to make it very easy to blog.
โœ… That way Iโ€™d be more likely to do it.
๐Ÿค A Tiny Habit.
โœ… Itโ€™s been very easy.
๐Ÿ“ฑ I write from my phone.
๐Ÿ“ Iโ€™ve made templates.
๐Ÿค– Iโ€™ve automated.

๐Ÿค– AI-Generated Content ๐Ÿ“

๐Ÿค– Iโ€™ve recently started generating content with AI tools ๐Ÿค–.
๐Ÿ˜ฌ Iโ€™d been accumulating more empty posts for books than I was comfortable with ๐Ÿ˜ฌ.
๐Ÿ“š This site exists to serve as a reference for myself and others ๐Ÿ“š.
๐Ÿ“ I read a lot of good books and want to share my notes ๐Ÿ“.
๐Ÿค” But itโ€™s easier to read than it is to write ๐Ÿค”, especially when reading audio books ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿ‘‚.
๐Ÿ“– So Iโ€™ve read a lot more books than Iโ€™ve written notes on ๐Ÿ“–.
๐Ÿ’ธ A blank page isnโ€™t very valuable ๐Ÿ’ธ.
๐Ÿคฏ And a few fragmented sentences on a fragment of the content are not much better ๐Ÿคฏ.
โฑ๏ธ AI tools can generate a book report nearly instantly โฑ๏ธ.
๐Ÿ˜ Itโ€™s not my writing. Itโ€™s not perfect ๐Ÿ˜.
๐Ÿ™Œ But itโ€™s better than nothing ๐Ÿ™Œ.
๐Ÿ’ก And with some iterative prompt engineering, Iโ€™m pretty happy with the quality of book reports Iโ€™m generating ๐Ÿ’ก.
๐Ÿ’ฏ Not perfect, but valuable ๐Ÿ’ฏ.

๐ŸŒ Networked Book Exploration ๐Ÿ“š

๐ŸŒ And networked.
๐Ÿ“š Generating a book report with book recommendations is a great way to explore.
๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ I ask for books that relate in a variety of ways in order to cover more ground.
๐Ÿค” Itโ€™s fun to think of prompts that increase variety and breath in recommendations.
๐Ÿ” How do you explore a space relative to a starting point you canโ€™t see yet?

๐Ÿงญ Generic Relationships for Blind Book Exploration

  • โžก๏ธ similar
  • โฌ…๏ธ opposite
  • โฌ†๏ธ more general
  • โฌ‡๏ธ more specific
  • ๐Ÿ”ฌ more rigorous
  • ๐Ÿค more accessible
  • ๐Ÿ“– fictional

๐Ÿ“ Multidimensional Exploration ๐Ÿงญ

๐Ÿ“ What dimensions meaningfully characterize books?
๐Ÿค” Maybe I can find some more.

  • โš–๏ธ Rigor vs Accessibility
  • ๐ŸŒ Generality vs Specificity
  • ๐Ÿ“ˆ Popularity vs Obscurity

๐Ÿ“ Itโ€™s easy to explore along these 1-dimensional scales.

๐ŸŽญ Categorical Exploration Challenges ๐Ÿงฉ

๐ŸŽญ Itโ€™s hard to explore categorical spaces.
๐Ÿ”„ I can ask for a book on an opposing topic.
โž– But topics donโ€™t live on a line.
๐Ÿค” Maybe thereโ€™s a useful notion of opposite (probably several) for a topic.
๐Ÿ” But ask for the opposite twice and you get back to where you started.
๐Ÿงญ That wasnโ€™t very adventurous.

โ“ Oblique Relationships ๐Ÿง

โ“ How do I ask for a topic thatโ€™s obliquely related?
๐Ÿค” 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.
โš ๏ธ But then maybe weโ€™ll tend to get 2 relatively arbitrary topics that happen to not intersect the first.
๐Ÿค– And perhaps weโ€™ll get monotonous results, where the bots will tend to prefer picking the same arbitrary others.
๐Ÿค Can I somehow relate those other topics to the first and to each other?

โ“ Recommend 2 books that obliquely relate to this book in different ways?

๐Ÿ”„ I could also try asking for the opposite of the opposite. In this case, opposite isnโ€™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.

๐Ÿงช Iโ€™ll have to experiment.

๐Ÿง  Relevant Disciplines ๐Ÿ“š

๐Ÿง  I wonder if thereโ€™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?

๐Ÿš€ More to explore. Adventures abound.

โธ๏ธ For now I pause.

๐Ÿ” Broken Dates ๐Ÿ“…

  • ๐Ÿ“… The date at the top of each of my web pages has always been the last time I published any web page.
  • ๐Ÿ› Not the worst bug in the world, but itโ€™s a bit annoying.
  • ๐Ÿ”Ž Also, I noticed that Google hasnโ€™t been indexing recently published pages very quickly.
    • ๐Ÿ“Š Currently, I have 248 pages indexed and 144 not indexed.
    • ๐Ÿ“‰ Of those 144, 124 of them are Discovered - currently not indexed.
    • ๐Ÿค” Which (I believe) means they havenโ€™t crawled them yet.
    • ๐Ÿ“ˆ But (according to the search consoleโ€™s crawl stats report) theyโ€™ve been crawling my site about a hundred times per day this month.
    • ๐Ÿ”„ The purpose of those crawls is 98% refresh and 2% discovery.
    • ๐Ÿ’ก Hypothesis: if Google thinks every one of my web pages needs to be updated every time they crawl my site, theyโ€™ll waste a lot of time crawling pages that havenโ€™t changed, and theyโ€™ll have less crawl budget to spend on a first crawl for newly discovered pages.
    • โ“ I donโ€™t know if this is true
    • but I expect to find out if it helped in a few days or so, becauseโ€ฆ
  • ๐Ÿ› ๏ธ โ€ฆI fixed it.

โš™๏ธ Attempted Fixes ๐Ÿ› ๏ธ

  • ๐Ÿ”„ First I tried updating Quartz to the latest version.
    • ๐Ÿšง But thatโ€™s not super easy to do.
    • ๐Ÿ“‚ Updating is done via Git and all the files are kept in my repo.
    • ๐Ÿคฏ Since Iโ€™ve changed a few things (and donโ€™t remember exactly what) itโ€™s kind difficult to tell what my changes were if I were to just update to the latest version of everything.
    • ๐Ÿšซ So I didnโ€™t update everything.
  • ๐Ÿง But I did look at the updated quartz.config.ts file.

๐Ÿ› ๏ธ The Fix

  1. ๐Ÿ“„ I added git to the CreatedModifiedDate pluginโ€™s priority list ๐Ÿš€
  2. ๐Ÿ”„ I updated quartz/plugins/transformers/lastmod.ts to the latest version โœจ
  3. ๐Ÿค– I (had copilot) ensure git is available at build time ๐Ÿ’ป
  4. โš™๏ธ And I set the defaultDateType to โ€œmodifiedโ€ in quartz.config.ts ๐Ÿ“…

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