2026-04-05 00:50:00
Okay, I think I clicked something wrong and deleted previous version of this post but nothing is lost.
Due to the recent incursion in our space - by which I mean a known bigot from Turning Point USA became a host of RPG Blog Carnival this month - we'd like to invite you all to join an effort to counter this by making Gay Beholder Blog Fiesta - a bandwagon type even which will end in about a month! Make posts about your queerest creation on your blogs or websites or wherever you publish your work and tag them #GayBeholderBlogFiesta. Tell us about it, you can find us on Mastodon at tabletop.social or dice.camp or Discord at rainbow OSR or NSR Cauldron servers!
Spread the word around, the more of us the merrier. At the end of the month one of us will gather all the posts and publish them in one place for everyone to see.
2026-04-04 19:39:19
After just a couple months, I have already developed the habit of reading the Most Recents from Bear Blog from my mobile phone in between anything. It's gotten to the point where I'm once again opening Safari every hour or so to do it. I recently stopped using private browsing, which makes it even easier. It feels like how I used to use Reddit which I've been off of for at least a year or so. Surfing my YouTube feed has creeped back into the picture too.
I do really like when I read something and jot a couple notes so that I can email the person later, but I don't like the compulsion. With a community as small as Bear Blog, it also feels possible to stay "caught up". That FOMO feels encouraging even though realistically I'm only going to open about 2 out of 20 posts and actually read half of those.
I'd love to make a routine of sitting down to read at the computer, but the additional friction of blogging and reading blogs (which might be better framed as the "lubricated" experience of other platforms making blogging seem slow by comparison) combined with the business of life makes it difficult. I'm writing this as a reaction to the fact that I'm not writing and that I wanted to just write something. I want to be living in the moment and making things. When I'm not, I want to be taking the time to rest instead of compulsively filling downtime that should be restful with digital stimulation.
2026-04-04 01:04:00
My bubble and I have been reading Tanya Klowden and Terry Tao's new state-of-the-union style philosophy paper on AI, Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI. I should probably write a post about it sometime.
In that paper, Tanya and Terry mention this other paper, Roy Wagner's "Mathematical consensus: a research program". I looked it up. It is open access on Springer. I was a bit surprised to have missed this paper, it seems very much my alley.
I read the paper today, and boy was it fun.
One of the distinguishing features of mathematics is the exceptional level of consensus among mathematicians.
Which we all internally just know perhaps. But when said like that, it gave me goosebumps. What does this mean philosophically? About the human condition etc. Anyway, if you're into math, you might immediately say, "Formalization techniques ofc!".
Since a sharp rise in consensus occurs around the turn of the 20th century, it makes sense to explain this consensus by the concurrent formalization of mathematics.
Not so fast eh? He goes on to set the scene with his definition of mathematics, a very beautiful one.
It is commonplace to observe that mathematics is the realm of knowledge distinguished by a clear agreement on right and wrong answers.
But then he immediately corrects into the obvious nuance. Mathematicians don't actually agree on truth. They disagree about the axiom of choice and about whether asking if an axiom is "true" even makes sense. What they do agree on is whether a given proof is valid. That's the consensus we are interested in, and it's a much more specific and interesting claim than "math people agree on stuff".
So how do mathematicians reach their consensus? He articulates a dance.
Mathematician P (prover) suggests a proof. Mathematician C (critic) challenges it. The challenge is of the form “I don’t quite see how you justify this statement in the proof”. The answer may draw on a large variety of tools: known theorems, analogies to known similar cases, explication of implicit steps, reference to a diagram, etc. After a while, C may be persuaded that the proof is valid, P may be convinced that it is not, or C will require a re-write of some aspects of the proof. Several iterations may follow, at the end of which, usually (but not always), the prover and critic will reach an agreement concerning the validity of the proof.
There's a twist though.
P: my proof is valid
C: no what about X?
P: see X is actually A, B, C
C: yeah the old proof isn't valid, the new one is a new proof
That's the simple dance. There are ofc more complex dances. The story of the abc conjecture is one such. That thing is still unresolved.
Perhaps the most famous contemporary disagreement about the validity of a proof (again, not entangled with the problem of individuation), is Shinichi Mochizuki’s purported proof from 2012 of the abc conjecture. The majority of the mathematical community finds the proof impenetrable or outright invalid, but a circle of supporters is still convinced. In 2018, the efforts of two critics, Peter Scholze and Jakob Stix, culminated in pointing out a corollary whose proof doesn’t work. Mochizuki, however, claims that they simply misunderstand the corollary (Klarreich 2018). As one commentator put it, Scholze and Stix “appeal to ‘certain radical simplifications’ that seem to get the heart of the matter, but they are also aware that ‘such simplifications [might] strip away all the interesting mathematics that forms the core of Mochizuki’s proof’. … It is this that Mochizuki condemns as illicit, and in his own support, he offers a number of examples that, he claims, lead to incorrect results if so treated. But Mochizuki, in defending himself, again uses some idiosyncratic definitions for common constructions in category theory, while still using standard terminology.”
The paper goes on. The quick paper preview blog post ends here, but I highly recommend giving the paper a read, it is a fun one.
2026-04-04 00:30:00
If you haven't noticed already, I really love creating things that encourage creativity in general, and blogging in particular. A challenge like JulyReply, inspiring blogger stories, or a blogger's toolbox collection.
I think they're great blogging boosters. A push without being pushy. Made just as much for others as for myself.
I'm also a firm believer that personal blogging should feel fun, not demanding.
Write often, preferably daily, but don't feel like every piece of writing needs to be a blog post. At the same time, don't hesitate to publish something because a stupid, lying voice in your head is trying to convince you it's "not good enough".
That balance is the hardest part. Not only when it comes to blogging, and not only in modern times. People were talking about the "middle way" over two thousand years ago.
In an attempt to gently boost blogging in yet another way, I've created a new add-on. Say hello to Bearlytics.
It's a widget that displays writing stats for your last 10 posts. Words written, average words per post, longest post, and a couple of other things. No comparing arrows, no rings to close, and no badges to collect.
Just a fun and simple little thing that hopefully encourages you to blog. And if it doesn't, that's perfectly fine.
Happy blogging!
2026-04-03 22:55:00
Heya! So, as you might know, I host and maintain guestbooks.kamiscorner.xyz, a guestbook service for indie web blogs (specifically bearblog ones, though it can be used on any website).
Now, it's been a while since i initially started working on the thing, and it's been pretty stable for a good while now, so i thought I'd talk a bit about the process of making the thing, my thoughts on indie web services like this and "trusting the little guy", as ava put it in one of her blogposts a couple months ago.
So, first of all, why did i make the thing? Well, at the time guestbooks.meadow.cafe was experiencing a pretty long outage, due to the maintainers Microsoft azure account getting suspended. And while i personally don't have a Guestbook, a couple of my friends do, and had also been annoyed at some limitations of the service when it comes to data exports and account deletion.
So, if you know me, you might be aware that i can't stand unsolved tech problems. Most of the scripts on this blog were created because i saw someone else complaining about a problem they had and immediately got nerd-sniped trying to figure out the solution for them. The same thing applies here. I had some freetime at the time due to being on vacation, so i immediately made a new laravel project and got to work.
The goals were the following:
Getting the core functionality in place was the easy part. About 2 days in, and you could do pretty much anything that you'd realistically want to do on a Guestbook website.
But here's the thing: I wasn't making this for myself to use. I was making it for other people. And, sadly, other people occasionally have a tendency to suck. So, i needed moderation features. And UI to go with them. And captchas. All of this probably took up a good 40% of devtime. As it turns out, decent moderation tools take a while.
So, what are the other 60%? Implementing the core features? Well... No, actually. As I said, all the user facing functionality was mostly good to go after two days.
About 10% was fighting with docker to get the damn thing hosted properly.
The rest, was data protection and accessibility. As it turns out, writing a privacy policy, getting the infrastructure set up to notify users, having everything be sufficiently transparent... That takes a lot of time. And effort. It's not a matter of "just" writing the thing. Getting emails sent out whenever you update your privacy policy requires you to have a way of knowing when your privacy policy gets updated. You need a history of changes, you need to edit this stuff serverside with a submit button, or have a github action that sends out emails automatically when the file changes and then deal with all of the pain that comes with CI workflows. Not to mention actually sending out emails!
Basically, it's a lot of work. Doing "the bare minimum" of just having a privacy policy is quite difficult. Doing moderation features in a way that collects a minimal amount of data while still having a somewhat effective system for banning people and stopping bots is also surprisingly hard. Even figuring out what data you collect can take some time, with frameworks doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to backend stuff. And I'm still not an expert at these things. I'd say I did a pretty good job. ...but I'm also not a lawyer.
This is all to say one thing, basically: This stuff is hard. It's actually really difficult to do this properly, and to be sufficiently transparent, and to be somewhat trustworthy.
Getting moderation, and data protection, rule-enforcement and licensing right turned this whole thing from a weekend project to the equivalent of a month of full-time work.
And when it comes to discourse around indieweb services, people tend to forget that sometimes, i think. These are hobby projects. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to do this much work. I'd like everything to work this way. It would be nice. But i don't think you can expect it of people.
And, crucially, i don't think you should have to.
Because, here's the thing, i don't think it's a good idea to set up a project like this in a way that requires people to trust you - or for you to have to trust people.
I don't collect any data besides the stuff that's shown publicly on your guestbook, and your account name and password. If you delete something, it's gone permanently, i don't retain it. The code is open source, you can take a look at it, or host it yourself.
Even if the database were to get leaked tomorrow, you wouldn't really find anything of note in there. Some encrypted passwords, i guess. You could try brute-forcing my admin password using the hash. You wouldn't be able to, laravel uses a good hashing algorithm. But you could try. That's about it.
Now, this sort of thing doesn't work for a commercial service.
I'll never add premium accounts, because i don't want to interface with people's payment information in any way. Because that means you'd have to trust me to get it right, and i don't want to be responsible for that. I'll never add ads or really in-depth analytics either. Same reason. I don't want your data.
And i think this sort of thing is a much more reasonable expectation to have of indie web services. Put the code out there, don't collect any data. You don't need financial information to run a guestbook. You don't need legal names. You don't even need to store IP adresses.
Treat hobby projects as hobby projects. You shouldn't need to trust me, and you shouldn't need to trust my software either. Get ublock, block tracking scripts and don't give me any info you wouldn't want the public to know about you.
That's my take on this sort of thing at least, after having the experience of trying my best to get all this stuff right.
It was fun, sure. But it was also a lot of work. So, personally, I'd say we need to be more charitable when it comes to this, and instead build and use things that don't require you to trust others in this way. It's quite easy if you're making a public, non commercial service.
2026-04-03 20:41:00
I recently found out that public universities in Germany are free (aside from the semester fee) which was really surprising.
Germany sounds like a pretty nice place to study and live in, therefore, I'm studying German since most of the classes in the universities are taught in German (and also because it's easy to get a job and I want to fit in). I've been studying German for 2 days and so far, I struggle with pronunciation since German has a lot of sounds that are not used much in the languages I'm fluent in (Khmer and English). I will now begin writing in German. Please do note that, I haven't studied the grammar yet so it will be extremely wrong. So if you know German, you might die from reading this.
Hallo! Ich heiße Leanghok. Ich bin 14 Jahre alt und Ich komme Cambodia. Ich lerne Deutsch und Ich will studere Informatik in Göttingen oder Aachen (RWTH Universitat). Danke und Tschüss.
I know this is terrible. I'd love to come back next month with better German. Oh and I know "Scheiße".