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Blogging can just be stating the obvious
51–60 of 138 posts
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#52Problem with getting old is that you’ve seen it all. A bright eyed 25 year old blogging about this thing called a “Unix pipe operator” gets boring the 200th time it shows up on the front page of HN.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#53> 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!
Sorry, I don't mean to single you out in any way, but why does AI/LLMs have to get shoehorned into every discussion here? It's getting exhausting.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#54> 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!
The added value of the LLM here is probably zero. Just type a search propmt in a search engine. If the top 5 results don't cover the same ground your article is covering, at the very least, your article will expose new knowledge to people using that search term.
Typing up LLM instructions and reading the output is probably more work.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#55Something obvious to others may not be obvious to you - and to be fair it was a key ingredient in blogging.
I find it extremely sad that blogging shifted from personal writing to a performative act - we can feel ashamed stating something obvious because the expectation is to get approvals and shares, rather than us writing something we find intriguing, interesting or worth writing down.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#56Commenting on Hacker News is often just stating the obvious, but people still upvote! ;)
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand HN comments. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical commenters's head.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#57There's also a social component to blogging, right? When you post something it tells me about who you are. It helps establish my (probably parasocial) relationship with you.
And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say.
I think that human communication is about pure relationship socialization as much or more than it is about actually communicating information or ideas.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#58This is obvious? Am I stating the obvious?
It's why I follow Scott Manly or PBS Space Time specifically. There's lots of the same content on other channels/mediums. But I like them specifically, so why not?
Continuing to state the obvious, this is why you specifically should write if you have opinions you'd like to get out.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#59> 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…
> Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain
You have an audience willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to learn something they’re unfamiliar with.
It’s specifically the fact that you chose to highlight a topic that makes your audience pay attention. Perhaps nobody else could have gotten their attention and adjusted their perspective the way you can. Not necessarily because you’re intrinsically better, but because they’ve chosen to pay attention to you.
I’m scrolling Hacker News and this post happened to be on the front page. Your comment happened to be the first comment. Im in the audience for OP and for you. If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But it is different. The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#60https://sive.rs/obvious "Obvious to you. Amazing to others."