How often do you consume the stuff you pirate? How do you avoid "hoarding"?
Asking mostly because I have fuckloads of video courses, plus a number of movies, that I have yet to even check if the content is as good as their titles imply and I really feel like I'm mostly hoarding this stuff because I have no fucking clue.
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I have a lot of ebooks that I download for university research, hobby learning and friends who ask for help sourcing books. I put everything in my calibre library, which is great for metadata management (tip: I have it set so new books that I've just imported get a tag of "new", which I remove when I have processed their metadata. This allows me to chip away at ensuring the metadata is correct and good, even if I don't do it at time of import).
Anyway, at one point I found myself at risk of becoming overwhelmed by books, because if I'm wanting to learn some category theory, for example, I'd have multiple books that seem to be relevant. Some of them were recommended by programmers, some of them assume a higher level of maths background knowledge, some of them are more fun to read — once upon a time I might've known which was which, but if there's a significant gap between me downloading stuff and using it (which is often the case, I'm quite opportunistic with book recommendations), I may forget. Making a note of why I downloaded a particular book is something I've been trying to do more, so I can identify the useful things at the right time — the calibre notes field can work for that, but I'm still figuring out how to manage this in a wider sense because I do a lot of reading and it's easy to forget why I'm reading a particular thing. I think I have a calibre plugin to show which things I've read also.
Another related thing is that I will take a cursory look over a book when I download it, and I may delete it and not put it into my calibre library. This feels significant because downloading a book doesn't make it one of my books, 'taking it home' and putting it away on my 'bookshelf' makes it mine. In short, I try to be mindful in my curation activities, recognising that doing it in big clumps with my whole collection doesn't really work and that pruning little and often helps more.
hey you mentioned category theory, any math community on the fediverse? r/math is sometimes gold but most of the time cringe, because... reddit
Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don't know of any communities, perhaps because I'm a scientist who loves maths rather than a mathematician.
However, I will use this opportunity to share some fun stuff from people I like.
https://youtu.be/H0Ek86IH-3Y by Oliver Lugg on Youtube is great. His channel is very eclectic though, and there isn't much pure maths. I love his shitposting tone though, and he has a discord community that were pretty mathsy when I was in it.
A blog-type site that I enjoy is Tai-Danae Bradley's https://www.math3ma.com/about, largely because I've discovered many other cool researchers through her site.
I also really enjoy Eugenia Cheng's books, especially as someone who is interested in understanding how to write good scientific communication that is accessible without "dumbing things down". I recently finished "The Joy of Abstraction".
Apologies that this isn't what you actually were looking for. I share your distaste at Reddit: I have used Reddit occasionally for those niche communities that aren't available elsewhere (yet!), but the atmosphere is increasingly toxic. I fear that smaller communities that flee are congealing in harder to discover places, like Discord.
thank you
Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don’t know
relatable lool, "I can't do it rn cuz I still don't know how to perfectly"