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2025-03-22 | ๐ธ๐ชต Blog ๐ช Reflections | AI ๐ค Book ๐ Exploration ๐บ๏ธ
๐ค Titles are hardโฆ
โฆ but they can also be fun ๐ฅณ.
๐ I made a Gemini Gem to help out.
โ๏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 | โฆ
Or use a short title with emojis
Present many options. Then present some more. Inject a lot of variety and explain the rationale.
๐ I have 127 old posts to title.
โ Plus one for today.
๐ช๐ธ๏ธ๐ชต Reflecting on Reflections
๐๏ธ Itโs almost been a year since I started blogging ๐คฏ.
2024-04-19 | ๐ Hello, World! ๐
๐งฎ This is my 128th daily reflection ๐ช.
๐ฒ Wellโฆ not all of them are very reflective.
Sometimes this feels more like a log ๐ชต.
A log ๐ชต on the web ๐ธ๏ธ.
A ๐ธ๏ธ๐ชต weblog
A blog ๐.
๐ And thatโs okay.
๐ฌ Tiny Blogging ๐ค
๐ฏ My goal was to make it very easy to blog.
โ
That way Iโd be more likely to do it.
๐ค A Tiny Habit.
โ
Itโs been very easy.
๐ฑ I write from my phone.
๐ Iโve made templates.
๐ค Iโve automated.
๐ค AI-Generated Content ๐
๐ค Iโve recently started generating content with AI tools ๐ค.
๐ฌ Iโd been accumulating more empty posts for books than I was comfortable with ๐ฌ.
๐ This site exists to serve as a reference for myself and others ๐.
๐ I read a lot of good books and want to share my notes ๐.
๐ค But itโs easier to read than it is to write ๐ค, especially when reading audio books ๐๐.
๐ So Iโve read a lot more books than Iโve written notes on ๐.
๐ธ A blank page isnโt very valuable ๐ธ.
๐คฏ And a few fragmented sentences on a fragment of the content are not much better ๐คฏ.
โฑ๏ธ AI tools can generate a book report nearly instantly โฑ๏ธ.
๐ Itโs not my writing. Itโs not perfect ๐.
๐ But itโs better than nothing ๐.
๐ก And with some iterative prompt engineering, Iโm pretty happy with the quality of book reports Iโm generating ๐ก.
๐ฏ Not perfect, but valuable ๐ฏ.
๐ Networked Book Exploration ๐
๐ And networked.
๐ Generating a book report with book recommendations is a great way to explore.
๐บ๏ธ I ask for books that relate in a variety of ways in order to cover more ground.
๐ค Itโs fun to think of prompts that increase variety and breath in recommendations.
๐ How do you explore a space relative to a starting point you canโt see yet?
๐งญ Generic Relationships for Blind Book Exploration
- โก๏ธ similar
- โฌ ๏ธ opposite
- โฌ๏ธ more general
- โฌ๏ธ more specific
- ๐ฌ more rigorous
- ๐ค more accessible
- ๐ fictional
๐ Multidimensional Exploration ๐งญ
๐ What dimensions meaningfully characterize books?
๐ค Maybe I can find some more.
- โ๏ธ Rigor vs Accessibility
- ๐ Generality vs Specificity
- ๐ Popularity vs Obscurity
๐ Itโs easy to explore along these 1-dimensional scales.
๐ญ Categorical Exploration Challenges ๐งฉ
๐ญ Itโs hard to explore categorical spaces.
๐ I can ask for a book on an opposing topic.
โ But topics donโt live on a line.
๐ค Maybe thereโs a useful notion of opposite (probably several) for a topic.
๐ But ask for the opposite twice and you get back to where you started.
๐งญ That wasnโt very adventurous.
โ Oblique Relationships ๐ง
โ How do I ask for a topic thatโs obliquely related?
๐ค 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.
โ ๏ธ But then maybe weโll tend to get 2 relatively arbitrary topics that happen to not intersect the first.
๐ค And perhaps weโll get monotonous results, where the bots will tend to prefer picking the same arbitrary others.
๐ค 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?
๐ I could also try asking for the opposite of the opposite. In this case, opposite isnโt 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.
๐งช Iโll have to experiment.
๐ง Relevant Disciplines ๐
๐ง I wonder if thereโs 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?
๐ More to explore. Adventures abound.
โธ๏ธ For now I pause.
๐ Broken Dates ๐
- ๐ The date at the top of each of my web pages has always been the last time I published any web page.
- ๐ Not the worst bug in the world, but itโs a bit annoying.
- ๐ Also, I noticed that Google hasnโt been indexing recently published pages very quickly.
- ๐ Currently, I have 248 pages indexed and 144 not indexed.
- ๐ Of those 144, 124 of them are
Discovered - currently not indexed
. - ๐ค Which (I believe) means they havenโt crawled them yet.
- ๐ But (according to the search consoleโs crawl stats report) theyโve been crawling my site about a hundred times per day this month.
- ๐ The purpose of those crawls is 98% refresh and 2% discovery.
- ๐ก Hypothesis: if Google thinks every one of my web pages needs to be updated every time they crawl my site, theyโll waste a lot of time crawling pages that havenโt changed, and theyโll have less crawl budget to spend on a first crawl for newly discovered pages.
- โ I donโt know if this is true
- Edit: signs point to yes, ๐ท๏ธ Google uses the last mod field on sitemaps
- but I expect to find out if it helped in a few days or so, becauseโฆ
- ๐ ๏ธ โฆI fixed it.
โ๏ธ Attempted Fixes ๐ ๏ธ
- ๐ First I tried updating Quartz to the latest version.
- ๐ง But thatโs not super easy to do.
- ๐ Updating is done via Git and all the files are kept in my repo.
- ๐คฏ Since Iโve changed a few things (and donโt remember exactly what) itโs kind difficult to tell what my changes were if I were to just update to the latest version of everything.
- ๐ซ So I didnโt update everything.
- ๐ง But I did look at the updated
quartz.config.ts
file.
๐ ๏ธ The Fix
- ๐ I added
git
to the CreatedModifiedDate pluginโspriority
list ๐ - ๐ I updated quartz/plugins/transformers/lastmod.ts to the latest version โจ
- ๐ค I (had copilot) ensure
git
is available at build time ๐ป - โ๏ธ And I set the
defaultDateType
to โmodifiedโ in quartz.config.ts ๐