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Blogging can just be stating the obvious

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#11

Post by applfanboysbgon »

godelski wrote: post #7

I avoid substack because of this. It's totally fine to email people about new posts, but at least let me read your post first. Make me interested. I'll follow you not because one good post (maybe if it's really good) but because several good ones. If your post is good I'll go look at others before leaving. If it looks good, then, and ONLY then will I subscribe. But I can tell you there's a strong correlation between…

My favorite thing about substack is that it completely doesn't work in my 3-year-old browser. They managed to fuck up serving static pages with text via some ungodly JS bloat, I suppose. Blogging, of all things! It's the simplest form of web content possible!

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#12

Post by ggm »

I read a lot of beginner/tute FP stuff. A mistake they make is doing 2 sentences of "here's how to conceptualise this new notation and what Int -> Int -> Boolean means"

And then they get bored and just go full bore ¿ conjunctivitis applique to unbound ¤ variable 》》-> is a Mongolian {....} ... forgetting they were in tutorial mode. Or, showing examples which embed syntax which is apparently the same as before but "oh shit, I forgot a : means something else in this context" so having explained syntactically what a : means.. confusing you again.

Or showing REPL prompts without explaining if the # is a prompt or part of the command. The list is frankly endless.

Decades ago, this was C programmers trying to explain basic imperative syntax and then using a "compute prime" with a recursive function call or a ternary operator or bitshift.

So my next blog maybe will be "seven cardinal sins of blogs about basics" which will have only one sin: forgetting the job, the only one job you had (or apparently set yourself)

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#13

Post by Gualdrapo »

pkaler wrote: post #9

I was never a prolific blogger. I do write a LOT internally at work and I write very long messages in group chats. With the advent of LLMs, I've felt even less need to publish publicly. It's as if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored to the reader's context in a shorter period of time. Or the topic I write would be so niche that it should just be in a group chat.

Happens to me too. I don't think I could spit out words about random topics on a constant basis that happen to be interesting to someone else. On the other hand I know I could write a whole book easily, but I just don't know what it would wirte about.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#14

Post by zephen »

Paracompact wrote: post #6

> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!” As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted in…

> it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.

This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing, and maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?

> Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.

Languages are themselves redundant, because it aids in comprehension.

Sometimes people need to hear the same thing over and over before it sinks in.

Sometimes it needs to be said in different ways, before it sinks in.

Sometimes it can be short and pithy, and other times it can fill a short book.

How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell.

tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#15

Post by winter_blue »

Paracompact wrote: post #6

> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!” As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted in…

One way AI can help here is identifying prior art. Write a quick sketch of you idea, and ask an LLM with uncapped long-running web search capability to find if any prior art exists!

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#17

Post by Ozzie-D »

The most useful blogs I read aren't the ones with novel ideas. They're the ones where someone took something I vaguely understood and wrote it down clearly enough that I could explain it to someone else. That's surprisingly rare and valuable.

Most knowledge lives in this awkward middle ground where everyone sort of knows it but nobody has written a clean version. The person willing to write the obvious version usually ends up being the reference.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#18

Post by krrishd »

nate wrote: post #4

A couple other versions of this that have always stood out to me: 1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

Reminds me of this tweet thread from Emmett Shear (cofounder of Twitch):

"I used to struggle w needing to be “creative” or “original” in my work. At some point I had a breakthrough that really helped me: I cannot repeat an idea, no matter how basic or common, without imparting some of my worldview into it.

Even by choosing which basic ideas to amplify, I impart some small amount of myself into each output. It’s literally impossible for a given tweet to be “unoriginal”. Equally impossible to be Truly Original too of course, since you’re always remixing others thoughts.

This POV does put a premium on cultivating and developing one’s worldview, since that is the underlying originality simmering under the surface of each “basic” thought. The best writing is rewriting, including of other people’s words, and the lens is your whole mind."

from: https://x.com/eshear/status/1539393474612498434

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#19

Post by joshuamcginnis »

Paracompact wrote: post #6

> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!” As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted in…

How the information is shared can be as important as the act of sharing it in the first place. You might have a particular voice and style for communicating these ideas, but your audience may have otherwise passed it over without your unique approach.
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