21–30 of 138 posts
> 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…
> 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…
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…
There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that needs to know how to use the different smart pointers in C++ or how to properly care for a cast iron pan.
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.
LLMs won’t always do this well. The best ideas in my backlog are the ones where the LLMs won’t finish my thoughts because they’re contrary to what 1000 people said on a forum somewhere. Or because I’m relaying an original personal experience.
But even if LLMs can finish your thoughts, it’s probably good to post anyway. Because in five years LLMs, maybe two commercialized, or their trained opinion may shift. A dated blog post is a nice Ebeneezer, a memorial to the Zeitgeist it hails from.
There's ten thousand people new people each day, and someone has to be the first time they run into something :)
Improving articulations is a helpful skill for use with AI too.
> 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 res…
Not self-aggrandizing. There are very few things that I consider myself "(among the) most capable" of explaining, and most of them are not interesting to people. There are many more things that I'm somewhat competent in explaining, but those suffer the intimidation of the eyes.
> Maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
Not sure how you mean "style," but it is some sort of inferiority complex or insecurity. I do not claim it is a good or rational feeling.
> 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.
Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual. Are those rituals a good thing on the whole? Even if they are, why dress it up with all these theological truth propositions and elaborately fraudulent mythologies? Why do we have to be so verbose and repetitious, and pretend there's really 10,000 books' worth of depth to the Serenity Prayer?
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!