Popularity is not quality, and quality depends on the audience and your own value system, not internet randos.
One of the signs that you're writing really great or really bad is if people ignore it. You're not popular so if it's really good nobody cares, and if it's really bad? Well, it's bad.
The problem comes when you write a really good essay that's just a point or two less than perfect. It's flawed enough to gain readers. It's insightful enough to help people. But guess what? Now you're in a popularity war with all the other bozos who want to create content around your topic.
That's why the greatest compliment you can receive is "Well, heck, that's been done before. There's nothing new here."
Everything has been done before. Don't sweat it. I am reminded of a great scene from the TV show Third Rock From The Sun where John Lithgow's character accuses another professor of plagiarism. His line is roughly "It's obviously shabby and repeats things done before. Take a look at the text. (he then holds up a book) Have you ever heard of the _Dictionary_??"
Write for yourself. Use writing to learn stuff. Done.
I just finished my third run through the series. There have been a lot of movies and shows about how tech "grew up" in the 80s and 90s, but this one feels closest to home for me. It was an incredible time to live through. Everybody was trying all kinds of stuff, fundamental stuff not stuff around the edges, and nobody knew what would hit and what wouldn't. Some kid in East Minnesota had the same shot as some guy in Stanford. There was very much a Wild West feel to it.
With apologies for going all old-guy, today it seems that whatever you do, you end up in some walled garden along a pre-programmed path. Can you write an independent iOS app without spending a lot of time screwing around with Apple? I don't know. It does not look like a worthwhile thing to spend my time on.
Everything you do today, it's like you automatically end up on some set of train tracks somebody else has made. Maybe they let your train run, maybe not. Maybe they like what you're doing and let your train run like the wind so that they can copy it all.
HCF reminded me that there was a time before all of this. Good memories.
Agentic coding may be an even bigger change, and it might kick off a new time like that. Too soon to tell. I sure hope so. I can't help but notice there are a lotta folks looking to get their hooks into the system.
I'm about ten years ahead of the author. I felt this a long time before AI arrived. I went from solving problems for people to everything I tried to ending up in an endless grind of yak-shaving.
I worked my way through it, though. It made me both give up programming, at least in the commercial sense, and appreciate the journey he and I have gone through. It's truly an amazing time to be alive.
Now, however, I'm feeling sucked back into the vortex. I'm excited about solving problems in a way I haven't been in a long time. I was just telling somebody that I spent 4-6 hours last night watching Claude code. I watched TV. I scratched my butt. I played HexaCrush. All the time it was just chugging along, solving a problem in code that I have wanted to solve for a decade or more. I told him that it wasn't watching the code go by. That would be too easy to do. It was paying attention to what Claude was doing and _feeling that pain_. OMG, I would see it hit a wall, I would recognize the wall, and then it'd just keep chugging along until it fixed it. It was the kind of thing that didn't have damned thing to do with the problem but would have held me up for hours. Instead, I watched Pitt with my wife. Every now I then I'd see a prompt, pop up, and guide/direct/orchestrate/consult/? with Claude.
It ain't coding. But, frankly, coding ain't coding. It hasn't been in a long, long time.
If a lot of your job seems like senseless bullshit, I'm sad to say you're on the way out. If it doesn't, stick around.
I view AI as an extinction level threat. That hasn't changed, mainly because of how humans are using it. It has nothing to do with the tech. But I'm a bit perplexed now as to what to do with my new-found superpowers. I feel like that kid on the first Spiderman movie. The world is amazing. I've got half-a-dozen projects I'm doing right now. I'm publishing my own daily newspaper, just for me to read, and dang if it's not pretty good! No matter how this plays out, it is truly an amazing time to be alive, and old codgers like us have had a hella ride.
I hate to be terse, but this subject has been covered many times before. Let me phrase the contrapositive: why blog only for people to read?
I see a lot of people (I'm looking at you, pg) that go on at length about how important it is to be precise, plain-spoken, come to a point clearly and then move on.
Sure, when you've reached the point you have nothing new to say, regurgitate it, chew it up good again, think it over, make an insightful, pithy, extremely useful and precise essay.
Congrats. You've now reached AI/LLM status of intelligence. Nothing wrong with that, of course, many times society needs the same point made over and over again in different words until they finally take effect. But the real meat of essay writing is thrashing about semantically until you finally reach a conclusion that you probably knew to some degree all along but didn't really understand all the implications. That means your essays should be thoughtful, researched, messy, creative, self-contradictory, etc.
Guess what? Nobody wants to read that stuff. They all want 2-minute videos on how to lead a meaningful life. I get it: life's short. But you can consume pithy, terse, useful fact-bombs all your life and not know a damned thing aside from how to parrot back others. Writing for others is fine. You might make a difference. Good luck. But if you're not creating refining, and recasting content that nobody reads? You're not getting any personal value from it. Don't expect to write for others and actually make yourself a better person. Most of the time you end up becoming a popular grifter (and this time I'm most definitely talking about pg).
Decide whether you want an audience or not. Unless you're truly that one-in-a-million person with tremendous important insight, I recommend against it. Still, for your own good, please write.
The generalized answer is layered curation versus tagged curation. In my VHS scenario, there are several layers involved. First, I'm taking the video because I think there's something important going on. Many times I'll be in the background explaining why I'm recording this for the future. When the tapes and DVDs were made, there's a general summary of the topic, ie "Children Christmas plays and grandma's house, 1993" Finally, when I'm scanning/ripping, I'm also adding information and filtering as desired.
My next project is exactly what you mention: using takeout. This project is involving going through hundreds if not thousands of videos with names like "45437905_521345565468507_6881371949495794958_n_10156232738427354.mp4" all stuck in one big folder. 10-30% of these are probably memes or other throwaway stuff, mostly because there is little to no curation going on (until now). Even if I sort keep from delete, there's still the issue of generalized topic. (FB Takeout, for instance, gives all the files the same date) Assuming I could go through them all in some automated fashion, I'd still only end up with categories an automated system could provide. That's far too reductionist to actually work, eg who wants pictures of the dinners you ate, but that one time they made the 17-layer cake, oh yeah, don't want to forget that. These edge cases are part of what makes the curation so personalized and special.
Feed-based sharing is not the same activity as recording for the future. There are different goals, audiences, situations, etc. More specifically, I'm probably going to end up with 4-7 huge hunks of hundreds of impenetrable filenames from different services, each with their own nuances -- and that's after going through takeout.
Starting in on that next project today, yikes, the last thing I want is thousands of small randomized videos from my life. You could conceivably do that by wearing a GoPro around and coding a bit. That would be a terrible (and egocentric) thing to inflict on house guests.
I lost all of my photos (along with everything else) when growing up, so taking pictures and videos was important to me as I became an adult.
I'm 59 now. In the 1990s I started taking VHS videos of family events. Sometimes I would walk around "interviewing", sometimes I would walk around and try to normally talk to people while holding that huge recorder. (That didn't work). I even set it up on a tripod and just let the recorder run while my parents and others visited.
This past year I've ripped a couple of dozen DVDs out of all of those tapes. In the past two weeks I've then ffmpeg'ed them to mp4s and loaded on an SD drive and put in a e-picture frame.
Now we have 30-40 hours of "family memory TV" playing constantly in our living room. It is one of the most amazing things I've done with technology. I can't describe the feeling of looking back 30+ years to see folks who are long gone -- or now adults with their own kids!
God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.
Best videos? The "family interview show", where I ask questions and everybody performs some kind of art. Wish I'd done one of those every year. Second best? Just setting the cam up and letting it run. Third place are videos of family members doing things that'll never happen again, like watching a sonogram of a new baby on the way.
Worst videos? As I know (and knew at the time!), a bunch of videos and pictures of things we were looking at that were interesting to us at the time but stuff you could find online in a couple of seconds. Unless it has audio commentary, it was a pointless exercise.
Related: People wonder why English has so many weird spellings. It's a complicated answer. The Vikings seem to show up way too often (grin). One of the reasons, though, is that several hundred years ago we all thought that Latin was the bees knees. The Greeks and Romans were the model. So took words that were perfectly-well phonetically-spelled and "fixed" them, returning them to some kind of bastardized form that was "better".
For some words it didn't work -- people went back to the old ways. But for some it did.
This chaotic priggish churning in society is not new, as pg points out. I love how language, manners, idioms, and cultures interact. It can be a force for good. It can also be extremely destructive, usually in tiny ways and over centuries.
While I love these intricacies, I also always fall back on the definition of manners I was taught early on: good manners is how you act around people with poor manners. Add complexity as desired on top of that. The form of communication and behavior can never replace the actual meaning and effects of it. (There's a wonderful scene in "The Wire" where they only use the f-word. Would have worked just as well for their job to have used the n-word. 100 years ago, the n-word would have been fine and the f-word beyond the pale. Draw your lessons from that.)
ADD: I always try to be polite and abide whatever traditions are in place in any social group. One thing I've noticed, though: the more people express their politics, their priggishness, their wokeness, etc -- the crappier they seem to be in their jobs. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because this is such as easy social crutch to lean on and gain social advantage that it becomes kind of a "communications drug". Scratch a loud prude or moralizer, you find a dullard or slacker. Conversely, people who produce usable advances in mankind tend to be jerks. I suspect this relationship has held up over centuries. cf Socrates and the Sophists, etc. (A good book among many along these lines is "Galileo's Middle Finger")
Understanding CCL is both critically important and will sink you into deep professional despair once you realize that the coding community has deep-set standards and social mores that prevent serious adoption.
I feel both strong agreement and strong disagreement with your comment.
Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read. Before that, in my opinion most folks aren't ready for it. You need to both accept ultimate uncertainty and also deliberately create your own certainty in your life. That's a tough ask even for many older people.
I've come to believe that an important part of any society is creating a series of positive narrative myths that are increasingly-detailed and nuanced. Why positive? Because introducing negativity in any form early in the education process turns the kids off to receiving anything more on that topic or from that viewpoint. We need optimistic learners, not pessimistic curmudgeons.
So yeah, we're going to lie to you about the number line. We're going to lie to you about history. We're going to lie to you about damned near everything, and a simple search online will prove the lie. But we lie in order to encourage you to rebel, not to indoctrinate. Find the problems and fix them. It's not our business to tell you what they are. Hell, we don't know ourselves. We're in the same boat you are.
This is not a declarative, literal topic. Already comments here decry the big words. So while I agree with you, epistemology is just like any other intellectual super-power: you gotta be able to deal with the repercussions or you shouldn't dive in. The water's deep.
You lose all of that googling around for Wikipedia articles. Long-form books are the only way forward, along with the confidence and intellectual curiosity needed to eventually make a difference.
Just to clarify, I'm asking where to host a static page that would be a modified introduction, addendum, errata, "if you like this try these", "The author died by wooden badger attack", etc
Not the entire book. I wouldn't have to copyleft the entire thing, right?
My current static page is just an "I like this book, please give me this free thing and put me on a mailing list" kind of thing. But that's not really the point. The point is "how can I use static pages, presumably the thing the internet was built for, to put a few pages of extra material on the book and perhaps give links for folks to follow if they're interested in the topic?"
Traditionally, you'd issue a new edition with such information, but that seems like a hella work and expenditure, and small stuff like this should be the kind of thing you'd be able to stick somewhere online, if nothing else as a parking spot until you eventually publish a new edition.
I wonder if the Internet Archive would be interested in this kind of archival.
Anna Karenina. Nothing mind-blowing. I didn't see a light in the sky.
I read a lot, fiction and non-fiction. When I read Tolstoy, I remember thinking "What sort of dark magic is this?" He drew characters in a way I haven't seen since. I _knew_ these people.
I remember this book, decades later. I remember a lot of what I've read, but Tolstoy was the man. I have no idea how or why his magic worked.
"Most drama today sucks" --- "This is called write-to-market"
Yes. I doubt you disagree, but I needed to point that out. These two, along with writing-by-formula, are intricately related. There's nothing wrong with writing being a racket.
If you want to feel depressed and lack a sense of optimism in humanity, spend some time learning about the publishing industry. Woof. It's nothing but formulaic conservative market-driven darkness all the way down. AND all the players are well-established, they've driven out inefficiencies, and they've got plenty of tricks to keep the riff-raff out. They've been doing that for centuries.
I don't like joking on HN, but this is a personal joke I've used for some time and seems appropriate: Want to start a new streaming series? Throw together a bunch of marketing-driven adjectives and end with "and they solve crimes."
"She's a gay little person goth time-traveling alien, he's an autistic left-handed incel Quaker. They live in Portland, and together they solve crimes."
My opinion is that people are going to eventually get sick of this stuff, much the same as they got tired of the B Monster Movies in the 50s, but who knows. Detective and True-Crime novels are perennials. Not my circus, not my monkeys. Working like this sounds to me like having a job I hate.
I completely agree with the author and yet I have taken up the profession of writing books.
There are, as we know, two different kinds of books: fiction and non-fiction. There's actually only two flavors of books as well: polemic and exploratory. With a polemic, you're expected to have your own internal theme song and the produced work will conform to it. With exploratory books, you're on an adventure with the reader and the only bullshitting you add is the minimum amount necessary to make the exploration fun for both of you.
Polemics have become quite popular lately, and I suspect anybody taking a set of blogs or essays and "sticking them together into a book" would only have this avenue available. I took a lot of essays and material I'd collected over the years and wrote some non-fiction books on programming. They were exploratory: the theme emerged as I condensed the work together. (My guess is that exploratory fiction and non-fiction is very tough to do and sell; people like a book that they already know the gist of and are familiar with the author much more than they feel like spending many hours on a lark)
After I finished a few non-fiction books on coding and performative teams, I was done. It was fun, I learned stuff, I think it's critically important stuff, nobody cares, and I'm okay with that. Because it wasn't a polemic, I felt no need to rant or self-promote. There was no movement I wanted to lead. Time to move on to something else.
Books suck. Books change the way you think. All writing does that. Books especially change you because they draw you into some sort of self-created cosmology that you've now adopted.
I write because I'm a writer. I've always been a writer. I simply got honest about it as I grew older. I don't think you choose whether to write or not. I think you choose the fashion in which your writing interacts with your subconscious. A book is just a deployment bundle. It's not the point.
Apologies for being Mr. Negative Guy. I hate folks that do that.
But as somebody who is extremely technical and loves tools and coding, moving to long-form fiction writing, I find that every minute I spend on tooling is _not_ writing. It might be good and necessary, and tools can do some amazing things, but it's not writing.
Fiction writing, at least for me, is a bit of organized struggle with my subconscious. My brain would much rather be coding, writing build scripts, creating a huge cross-layered tagging system, commenting on HN, and so forth. That's because "struggling with your subconscious" is not something we teach or emphasize.
There's a really strong allure of tools, process, and tooling that calls to us when our minds don't want to do the work. Buy the product, learn the tagging, follow the recipe, etc -- it's all about hey, don't do the work, have the tool do the work. Don't be a dummy!
But since I don't know the work myself until I create it, there's no tool or process that's going to do anything but distract. Love my tools, spent a lot of time with them. I spent all day yesterday re-creating and re-factoring my build pipeline from markdown to about a dozen different formats. But that wasn't work, not really. It was avoiding work by doing (hopefully) very useful tangential things.
I'd love to write a tooling/process essay or book. I will not. This is why.
It occurs to me that most content creation jobs don't exist anymore, that is, 99% songwriters, essayists, and so forth can't make a living. A few do very well and are promoted as examples for others to follow, but practically speaking it's more of a lottery than a career, and most people involved in content creation are never going to support themselves no matter how much they know or how well they create their art.
Platforms are luring millions of people to jump from one get-rich-scheme to another. Each platform has its own technical ways of getting ahead of other creators and locking in content creators and consumers. It feels very much like a serfdom or tenant farming situation, only for entertainment.
If being a content creator means mastering some technical platform or jumping through a bunch of social hoops unrelated to your art, if you spend all of your time feeding the machine, are you really an artist? What happens to art in general?
My first Obsidian project was a research project for an upcoming non-fiction book. It's not academic, but I believe the synthesis/citing issue is generally the same.
I just looked at it. It has a little over 1,000 files in it, so I've been filing a lot.
I only have dataview, PDF to markdown, templater, and a couple other community plugins enabled. My decision was to dump everything, kit-and-kaboodle, into a Reference folder. No processing, no tagging, just dump it in there. Then I created a Topic Summaries and a Synthesis folder. The idea here is not to start categorizing and synthesizing until you're absolutely forced to.
Between Topic Summaries and Synthesis I create a book outline. Note that the folder names are things that are set in concrete. Then I created a tag system. As I begin teasing out ways to organize my research, simultaneously I create a tagging system. So one research item may eventually get referenced in several Synthesis Notes. I may go back and create a Topic Summary based on the syntheses or just ad-hoc. The tagging system links to that layer, not the data dump layer.
This allows me to continue dumping data, then join it up in various creative ways later. I don't even hook my synthesis into an outline directly. That's a separate and also creative step. Once joined and I've committed to an outline, I can chase down the original research and provide whatever footnotes or links I feel are appropriate.
Hope that helps. My big lesson was not to categorize my research as I gathered it. Usually my first guess is wrong. Instead use an abstraction layer and continue to churn through synthesizing many docs into new ideas. Then join those ideas into an outline.
It's not an IDE, heck no. It's just notepad with some bells and whistles coders could use (but only when necessary.)
Yeah, folks show off online. Ignore those wankers.
ADD: Good grief, reading these comments. You folks aren't building a spaceship, you should be just taking notes and organizing them into something greater than the individual note. Every second you spend in CSS or trying to get a batch process to do your taxes or whatnot? You're doing it wrong. You're going the wrong way.
One of the signs that you're writing really great or really bad is if people ignore it. You're not popular so if it's really good nobody cares, and if it's really bad? Well, it's bad.
The problem comes when you write a really good essay that's just a point or two less than perfect. It's flawed enough to gain readers. It's insightful enough to help people. But guess what? Now you're in a popularity war with all the other bozos who want to create content around your topic.
That's why the greatest compliment you can receive is "Well, heck, that's been done before. There's nothing new here."
Everything has been done before. Don't sweat it. I am reminded of a great scene from the TV show Third Rock From The Sun where John Lithgow's character accuses another professor of plagiarism. His line is roughly "It's obviously shabby and repeats things done before. Take a look at the text. (he then holds up a book) Have you ever heard of the _Dictionary_??"
Write for yourself. Use writing to learn stuff. Done.
ADD: Here's the scene I was referring to. John Lithgow had far, far too much fun chewing up the furniture on that series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIN4tC5Zwx0