81–90 of 138 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe society just rewards the first penguin to jump into the sea.
tangentially related: https://youtu.be/4PwDFddpo4c This is one of my favorite videos. After the first penguin jumps the crowd follows till then they confused. Regardless the sight of penguin jumping is breathtaking.
Thanks for the video!
I never imagined my blogs to be useful to anyone. For me, they're mostly just things I felt like sharing but with no particular audience in mind. Over the years though, I find myself receiving email from people who I helped. I even googled quite a few things in the past years only to find the first answer to be a blog of mine. So I unblocked myself a few times. Blogging is fun. What's obvious for you isn't for everyo…
but even if i had zero readers, i would still enjoy the act of writing and putting it out there. i can go back to my blog and look through the years, and see how my outlook on things has changed, how i've grown over time. and the process of writing itself is just cathartic, at the same time.
and as you mentioned, it's fun! :)
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…
Most search results nowadays are SEO farms. Posts I read are also mostly just someone debugging a weird bug for endless hours only cause they were mad, just grep output and the fix. personal domain blogs survive faster than medium.
Most search results nowadays are SEO farms. Posts I read are also mostly just someone debugging a weird bug for endless hours only cause they were mad, just grep output and the fix. personal domain blogs survive faster than medium.
Google has been aggressively de-indexing websites in the last few months
> 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…
I think this is some sort of modern academia bias. What you say it is true in academia, most things have already been thought and studied and that's why any academic book or paper has a citation in every sentence. I understand why this rigor is important in academia, but is it in the rest of the world? If I have an interesting thought about a topic and I share it with an audience that is not PhDs, to them it might be…
"Relevant" needs disambiguation. It does not make your thoughts less valid in any moral sense that you should feel ashamed of them or anything, but IMO, it does mean that they are less worthy in the attention marketplace. If these thoughts are not competing in the attention marketplace, and rather being shared amongst acquaintances, or offered up in the aim of constructive criticism, then it does not risk turning the attention marketplace into a competition of hustling mediocrity.
> Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?
Most (continental) philosophy is closer to art in my opinion than scientific inquiry. If you accept it as art, then you at least open the door to there being many valuably different ways of saying "love is good" or "reality is complicated" or what have you. And if you consider it as something beyond art, well, then it has some very pointed questions to answer.
I've felt the "chilling effect" way too often when considering if I really want to put an idea out there that might later turn back to haunt me (even for things I would not consider controversial). I am very aware of the irony that oddly enough, psychologically I don't perceive the same level of danger from random HN comment threads though.
Plus let's be honest, there are a surprising number of topics where the obvious hasn't actually been documented in any real way, or where finding an answer to certain questions is near impossible. In those cases, just having an answer publicly available rather than say, on Discord or Google Docs can be a huge help.
I don't think i ever went past the 5-blog count on any of my attempts.