Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog • Hacker News Board

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#21

Post by lazyant » Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 12:55 AM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #13

The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out." I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve. I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like bette…

yes; quantity leads to quality

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#22

Post by AndrewStephens » Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 12:58 AM UTC

aradox66 wrote: post #15

langsoul-com wrote: post #14

Advice to use substack, medium and a few others similar. No point hosting a blog or anything of the sort, unnecessary effort in the beginning when you don't know if you'll continue.

OTOH setting up a static blog site is a great way to procrastinate on actually writing blog posts

Hey, no need to call me out specifically like that.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#23

Post by RajT88 » Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 1:20 AM UTC

This is good advice! I had a personal blog for a while which nobody read, but lately my Medium articles have gathered hundred of reads (writing down stuff I figured out in side projects nobody else bothered to write down).

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#24

Post by semking » Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 1:24 AM UTC

Serious question, as someone who recently started writing:

• How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI models?

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#25

Post by narag » Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 1:25 AM UTC

A colleague gave me the best advice when I was teaching programming courses: you haven't learned from books but from professional experience (actually both, but anyway) just tell them what worked and what didn't. And why.

I applied the same method when writting my long defunct blog. Nobody was really interested in my opinions, but my experience both positive and negative was somehow valuable.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#26

Post by a-priori » Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 1:33 AM UTC

semking wrote: post #24

Serious question, as someone who recently started writing: • How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI models?

You can’t worry about it. It’s the world we live in now. The alternative is to not write anything of significance on the internet, which would be of no benefit to anyone.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#27

Post by fritzo » Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 1:38 AM UTC

semking wrote: post #24

Serious question, as someone who recently started writing: • How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI models?

Pleased. One of my main motivations in writing open source software is to create training data for future sentient things. I felt that way decades before LLMs. I am as proud to know my code ended up in training datasets as I am to know that my human students took a little away from the classes I've taught.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#28

Post by unyttigfjelltol » Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 1:39 AM UTC

semking wrote: post #24

Serious question, as someone who recently started writing: • How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI models?

Don't care, although in the old days I declared a CC BY (attribution) license[1] on my blog. The fact many of these models cannot do basic attribution-- this is a very serious shortcoming, that potentially may affect the availability of fair use.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#29

Post by nemomarx » Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 1:39 AM UTC

a-priori wrote: post #26

semking wrote: post #24

Serious question, as someone who recently started writing: • How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI models?

You can’t worry about it. It’s the world we live in now. The alternative is to not write anything of significance on the internet, which would be of no benefit to anyone.

I wonder if any noticeable group of people are retreating to paper journals or letter circles again. Probably not, but you never know.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#30

Post by heelix » Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 1:50 AM UTC

aradox66 wrote: post #15

langsoul-com wrote: post #14

Advice to use substack, medium and a few others similar. No point hosting a blog or anything of the sort, unnecessary effort in the beginning when you don't know if you'll continue.

OTOH setting up a static blog site is a great way to procrastinate on actually writing blog posts

Ouch... that actually hits a bit close to home. After having a couple of blogging homes fold out from under me, I've kicked around the idea of coding up my own blog - which usually was in whatever framework/language I was getting ramped up in. I realize I've probably ported/built something a half a dozen times in the last decade, and never bothered to take the final step to deploy it before starting the next rewrite.