Remedial education
I failed to complete my second attempt at a review of my summary. It took me all told roughly 4 hours including the abortive attempt earlier in the week that resulted in a blog post with just questions in it. Most of what I got out of this was not the result, which is just a small number of paragraphs, but the answers to the questions I was forced to ask along the way such as for example how to structure a review. I was able to get more insight into the general structure of a text as well by seeing specifically how in at least one case the paragraphs of my summary were completely disjointed. I also found a list of things I don’t know and need to learn, such as how to summarize but not eliminate or change crucial information, namely sentence subjects, how to know when I have enough context to summarize a text.
Going forward, before I attempt another summary, I need to:
- Read a lot more of hanbot’s posts
- Find out how to deal with sentence subject when condensing a text.
- Find out how to properly link paragraphs together.
IRC Takeover
This task was on hold this week due to the necessity of getting my blog up and running again and many key republican sites not being available for reference to any even modestly curious IRC Network administrators who might click on a link.
Growing China Contacts
Mia figured out how to get me invited to a couple of WeChat groups. I had asked for Bitcoin focused blogs and chat groups. She couldn’t find any blogs, and the chat groups turned out to be “crypto” groups. I even got an invitation to apply for a Blockchain scholarship in Australia! (I’m being sarcastic here). Nevertheless I made some lemonade out of the lemons and got some good information from a girl who run’s one of the groups (Aria Tang, Singaporean, based in AU) on how to find Bitcoin related blog posts on WeChat. From what I’ve found so far independent blogs don’t exist in China – everything is on a platform, and mostly WeChat/qq.
I was able to use WeChat’s blog search to find this interesting post from 2018, by some guy in Hangzhou. I am awaiting a decent translation from Mia, but my understanding at this point is that in it he recounts his somewhat interesting experiences attempting to sell Bitcoin to randos in some public space. After I get the translation, I intend to contact him and see if he’s interested in talking.
Why don’t you write an actual post with “I went to those crypto chats and here’s what I found”? Document stuff, that’s the point. This is not about “publishing only what worked” but quite on the contrary.
Comment by Diana Coman — October 13, 2019 @ 9:18 pm
I will do that. That said, I’m not yet certain what the criteria for “worked” and “failed” is. Probably the highest bar for success would be that I find someone in Mainland China that registers a key and regularly participates in tmsr and even recruits. I might also be able to better judge success and failure if I could prioritize what kind of contacts are of use to tmsr. So as of now I have a translator under my saddle, and although I find that personally very interesting and potentially very useful for understanding what’s actually happening in China, it’s not clear to me that that is of much direct use to tmsr. Perhaps someone in manufacturing would be good to have in the network, but I believe asciilifeform already has contacts in that field from his work on fg. It also might be good to have contacts in mainland china willing to buy BTC. I would be grateful for any guidance you could provide.
Comment by Adam Thorsen — October 14, 2019 @ 1:13 am
That’s the thing re worked and failed: you can’t really know *upfront* just what will turn out useful and in what way, at a later time. Hence my “document stuff”, regardless of how it turned out, just put it there so you can reference it later if/when needed. From experience, ~anything you actually do *will* be in some way of use at some later point.
Re contacts, the point at the moment is to make as many as possible in order to (hopefully) reach at some point some actual humans too ie people that can come, register a key and do something useful. It’s still a filtering type of thing but the crucial aspect to understand is that *they* will filter themselves, you shouldn’t bother much with it: you just reach out to as many and as diverse as possible at this stage and invite them over. Only some will come, fewer will talk, even fewer will perhaps register a key and so on. You offer there too this opening and this chance but let them fret/work on figuring out why they should follow.
As to “what sort” – honestly, as long as they are actually competent people, quite all sorts are welcome and I would much rather see more diversity than “programmers only” or some such. That being said, there is the search for a local secretary basically and otherwise for technical contacts (and no, Stan does not actually have any contacts as I can’t see any in chan and he’ll be the first to complain that “if only”. So don’t you worry about that, just cast the net as large as you can make it currently and only if we ever end up with the deluge here, we’ll set more stringent filters, that’s how it goes.
Comment by Diana Coman — October 14, 2019 @ 6:37 am
Ok that makes sense.
Comment by Adam Thorsen — October 15, 2019 @ 4:07 am