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diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/my_feed_and_reading_list.md b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/my_feed_and_reading_list.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c11dd85 --- /dev/null +++ b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/my_feed_and_reading_list.md @@ -0,0 +1,193 @@ +--- +title: How I read things on the Internet now (no, of course I don't leave the terminal!) +description: >- + I've been sprucing up how I follow what's happening on the Internet. I can + now read all the things I want to read pretty efficiently, and enjoy doing + it, which is exciting. +pubDate: 2025-01-19 +--- + +## The problem + +I like to read things on the Internet sometimes. Or listen to things. Or watch +things. + +Some interesting people write blog posts. Some beautiful people make music. Some +silly people make comedy sketches. Sometimes my friends are sharing stuff with +their friends, which means me (WIP on that front: I'll get back to that). + +I want to know about it. I want to read interesting things that will educate +me. I want to hear beautiful music. I want to hear about what my friends are up +to. + +I can't read everything as it comes in, it's too much: I'll need to sift a lot +of it out quickly. I'll need to sift through it regularly to stay on top of it: +like, several times a week, if not daily. And sometimes, while I'm doing my +daily sifting, I'll find something I really want to read, but I haven't got +time right now: I'll save this for the weekend. + +For a while, I've been hosting [CommaFeed][commafeed] on [PikaPods][pikapods]. +This has been OK ([OMG, RSS is cool][rss]), but the interface is just clunky +enough to make it a chore to use. That means I don't sift through stuff +regularly, and that means my feed piles hundreds of unread posts high. + +It also hasn't been any good for distinguishing between stuff I don't want to +read *ever*, and stuff I don't want to read *right now* but will get round to +later. I could in theory use the bookmarking feature built-in to my browser, +but removing things after I've read them is too clunky, so I don't do it. + +## The solution + +Every morning, I open my terminal and run [newsboat][newsboat]. + + + +I know the unread count is pretty fresh, because I've set up a systemd service +to run newsboat at startup to fetch the feeds. + +I press `l` twice to open a post. Then I press `n` to navigate to the next +unread post until I run out of unread posts. + + + +If I encounter something I want to read later, but don't have time right now, I +press `b`, which runs a home-made bookmarking script. Here it is: + +```bash +### readlater.sh ### + +# newsboat passes a few arguments: +# the first one is the post URL +url="$1" + +# I turn the URL into a suitable filename +filename=$( \ + echo $url | \ + sed "s/.*:\/\///" | \ + sed "s/\//./g" | \ + sed "s/\.html\$//g" \ +) +filename="$filename".html + +# If I've already got this in my reading list, +# I don't add it again +if [[ -a "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename" ]] +then + exit 0 +fi + +# Otherwise, I download the post with curl +# and pipe it to a file in my reading list +# folder, ~/readlist/unread +curl "$url" > "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename" +``` + +I can also run this script manually and pass it a URL of my choice at any time, +say, if I find an interesting article while browsing the Web. + +When I want to read from my reading list, I run `readnow.sh`, which simply +opens my reading list folder, `~/readlist/unread`, in my terminal file browser +of choice: namely, [ranger][ranger]. + + + +Although ranger has a preview, I'll typically open the file up in my terminal +web browser of choice, which is [w3m][w3m] (plus a couple of custom +key-bindings). I've configured this to be my preferred web browser in ranger by +shifting it to the top of the list of HTML browsers in +`~/.config/ranger/rifle.conf`. + +```conf +### ~/.config/ranger/rifle.conf ### + +... + +ext x?html?, has w3m, terminal = w3m "$@" +ext x?html?, ... + +... +``` + +Having configured my default web browser in my ranger config, all +I need to do is press `l`. + + + +No ads, no cookie popups, no giant banner images taking 2 seconds to load and +shifting the content all over the place: just the text I want to read. Isn't it +beautiful? + +Once I'm finished reading the post, I'll press `q` to quit w3m and return to +ranger. Assuming I don't need to read it again, I'll press `dm` to move the +post to `~/readlist/read` - my way of marking a post as 'read'. + +I've done this by writing a super simple script, `markread.sh`: + +```bash +### markread.sh ### + +filename="$(basename $1)" + +if [[ -a "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename" ]] +then + mv "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename" "$HOME/readlist/read/$filename" + echo "Marked $filename as read." +else + echo "I couldn't find a file in ~/readlist/unread with the name: $filename" +fi +``` + +...and hooking it onto the custom keybinding, `dm`, in ranger: + +```conf +### ~/.config/ranger/rc.conf ### + +... + +# map `dm` to run markread.sh in the shell, providing the active filename +# as the first and only argument +map dm shell markread.sh %f + +... +``` + +## The result + +I can now keep up to date, and I enjoy doing it. + +I get not everyone likes to live in the terminal. I think the key takeaways +are: + +- Make it really easy to sift through new posts +- When you sift, sift through every post, and for each one, either read it + straight away, or add it to your reading list +- Sift daily +- Make it really easy to add things to your reading list +- Make it really easy to browse, read things, and mark things read in your + reading list +- Set aside time to catch up on your reading list +- Make the whole thing joyful (both because joy is good, and because you won't + do it otherwise) + +## Next steps + +I still haven't really figured out social media. I'd like to stay up to date +with what my friends are doing, especially the ones I don't see very often. If +my friends are posting stuff on the Internet, I'd love to see it. + +I still need to know: + +- Are my friends posting stuff on the Internet? +- If so, where? +- What's the best way of subscribing to their posts - even if they live on + different websites and in different formats? +- What's the best way of sending and receiving comments/replies/reactions? + +TBC. Answers on a postcard please. + +[commafeed]: https://www.commafeed.com +[pikapods]: https://www.pikapods.com +[newsboat]: https://newsboat.org +[ranger]: https://ranger.github.io +[rss]: /blog/2024/05/02/no_more_youtube +[w3m]: https://w3m.sourceforge.net diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/newsboat-post.webp b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/newsboat-post.webp Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..3d34afc --- /dev/null +++ b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/newsboat-post.webp diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/newsboat.webp b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/newsboat.webp Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..b6929cc --- /dev/null +++ b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/newsboat.webp diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/ranger.webp b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/ranger.webp Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..f325e56 --- /dev/null +++ b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/ranger.webp diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/w3m.webp b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/w3m.webp Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..0548a47 --- /dev/null +++ b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/w3m.webp diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e906062 --- /dev/null +++ b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md @@ -0,0 +1,139 @@ +--- +title: Why scientists need philosophers +description: This is a practice essay, OK? Don't shoot me if it's no good. +pubDate: 2025-01-24 +--- + +I've recently been working at a +[Philosophy of Science MOOC]([phil-sci-coursera]) on Coursera, the online +courses website. Later on, they set you an exercise to write a short essay +addressing how philosophy can contribute to science. + +So this is my punt. Life is too short to revise or, hell, even research this, so +don't take any of this as my settled opinion or as my best work. Whatever. With +that caveat in mind, it might still be entertaining at least, or maybe even +spark some thoughts. + +--- + +Walk into a particular room in the Science Museum in Kensington, and you will +find yourself enveloped in a cavern of ironmongery and miscellanea. The shelves +droop under the weight of bolts, files, screws, bits, grinders, saws, +protractors, clamps and pins. The inventory scrolls endlessly past you, voices +reciting the lists of trinkets like an incantation. + +This is the workshop of James Watt, meticulously reconstructed from the +original as it was left in his home in Birmingham after his death. This +entrancing space invites you to imagine a tireless creative, endlessly +tinkering away at his next contraption. + +And yet for all that - and for all his immense valorisation as the lynchpin of +Britain's industrial revolution - Watt was reluctant to think of himself as the +engineer everyone else loved. He aspired to be remembered not as an engineer +but as a scientist. + +To understand why James Watt, one of the most admired engineers who ever lived, +wished he were famed as a scientist instead, is to understand something +essential about modern Western thought. + +In Watt's lifetime, scientists increasingly became the elite of society. In the +nineteenth and twentieth century, this trend only gathered pace. We constructed +our modern public health infrastructure on the advice of pathologists and made +medicine scientific. We funded scientific expeditions to map the world, even to +its remotest corners (in part to help us conquer it). We adopted radical new +economic policies in response to scientific economic theories. We built vast +infrastructure networks to communicate waves of invisible energy discovered by +pioneering physicists, and built nuclear plants to generate more of the stuff +by means of nuclear science. We even designed social programmes on the basis of +scientific anthropology. By the end of the twentieth century, scientists were +our prophets, priests and kings. Or so we thought. + +In the 1990s, at the so-called 'end of history', it was assumed that there +would be no more need for social upheaval. Humanity had arrived at the ideal +system of social organisation. And among other ideologies - secularism, +libertarianism, democracy - an essential part of the package is that science +was our ultimate and incontestible way of securing knowledge about the world. + +Yet now, that certainty is broken. Religious fundamentalism, whether Christian, +Muslim, Hindu, or else besides, is politically empowered in many places, +together with its rejection of science. + +At the same time, the myth of science is ever more punctured. The supposedly +scientific West has increasingly come to appreciate that their scientific +heritage also includes much we would rather ignore - phrenology, race science, +systematic blindness to female bodies in medicine. + +Meanwhile, scientists themselves are noticing that their holy calling has +turned out to be rather less holy than they had hoped. They find science +pulled between the competing demands of truth and tenure. Scientific knowledge +is locked behind the paywalls of exclusive journals, which even many academics +struggle to access, never mind the general public. + +What then for science in the twenty-first century? + +Yet there is another story available. It starts with confessing that the old +stories got things wrong in important ways. When we put ideology aside, science +has not been on an uncontested march to universal acceptance since Galileo. +There has been continual change, continual conflict, continual readjustment of +our ideas to the changing demands of the age. + +In Galileo's day, it may have been a fight to establish that there was much to +be seen by simply looking. As empirical observation started to prove its worth +in the early modern period, thinkers wrestled with new problems: how to +reconcile the evidence of Scripture with the evidence of the senses? How to +understand how sensation can give us knowledge at all, granted that any +observer may be vulnerable to illusions, tricks and dreams? And if that's how +sense data work, what then for our mathematical or logical knowledge, which +seems to already bind the world even before we start experiencing it? + +This centuries-long struggle culminated in the work of Kant, who in his 1786 +magnum opus, the _Critique of Pure Reason_, set out a masterful - if infamously +obscure - system, which enabled thinkers to understand just how empirical +knowledge might work. + +Yet two generations later, Charles Darwin lit the flame under new controversy +about the relationship between scientific and religious knowledge. His bizarre +and wildly imaginative theory of evolution by natural selection challenged the +Genesis Creation accounts, and this was soon to be followed up with the theory +of tectonic shift. + +Some said that where scientists contradicted the authority of Scripture, the +word of God must always win. Others said that science alone had the keys to +knowledge, and if what the Bible said couldn't be proven scientifically, then +it couldn't be accepted. Some said that science and religion were two +incommensurable attempts to study the same subject matter, while others said +that they covered completely separate spheres. + +Gradually, all of these views moved to the extremes. Now, most people (though +not all) agree that science and religion have overlapping spheres, and can +inform one another, but neither the Book of Nature nor the Book of Scripture +has the decisive final say. + +Now, in our post-Christendom Western context, it's more important than ever to +understand how science and religion can talk to one another. Religious +minorities - as all religions now are in the West - are vulnerable to the risk +of becoming epistemic islands, cut off from the knowledge of the rest of the +community, unless we can find ways that science can talk across creedal +differences. + +We need, too, for scientifically marginalised communities, such as non-white +people, whom science has ignored, or worse, to be more tightly integrated into +science, both so that knowledge might increase, and so that the benefits +knowledge gives might be fairly shared. + +In light of these urgent needs, today's philosophers are considering science +not just as an epistemic problem, but as a social problem. As philosophers once +established science as the bedrock of modern knowledge, so philosophers today +have the task of figuring out how science can glue together our societies. + +Science has been at its most dangerous when it hasn't been questioned. At all +times, as long as we practice science, we need to consider what it means, what +it means to do science well, how it can generate knowledge, and how it ought to +be used as a powerful instrument of change. + +And perhaps that might justify James Watt in his obsession to be seen as a +scientist: since we can't get by just with practitioners. We need people who +can see our practices from the outside and shine a mirror back on us. If we +want science, then we need philosophers. + +[phil-sci-coursera]: https://www.coursera.org/learn/philosophy-physical-sciences |
