> 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 into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"
All this to say, on a statistical level, 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.
If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
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.
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!
"I know this" is different from "I know you know this", which is different from "You know I know this", which is still different from "you know I know you know this"
> 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.
> This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing.
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?
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/Curse_of_knowledge
2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with.
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."
When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was.
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.
And link rot. A lot of sites from back when are straight up gone, sadly. Maybe you get lucky on archive.org. Or in your pan case, affiliate farming where the bias or technical expertise is suspect.
(Aside, for a lot of cooking I’ve gone back to dead trees and I realized one day I have so many cookbooks, why am I looking at some lifestyle recipe blogger?)
Or the information actually goes out of date and best practices change. There’s been like 25 years of standard revisions since I first learned C++.
ha. speaking of the devil. for the "curse of knowledge" mention i made above i had a link that google served me up to a post that was totally rotten now. so i went back in to include the wikipedia version.
I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”
I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.
At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.
Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.
My father, who worked as a market research analyst, said that the trick to the job was "point out the obvious before anyone else does".
Web sites and web content are trending towards being enshittified until it just barely becomes worth wading through all of the shit to get to what you actually wanted to consume.
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.
> if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored
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.
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.
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)
Hahaha, this is so accurate. I do this so often because I start off with a certain mindset and then when I get maybe 10% of the way through I find that I won't finish the post in any time if I write at this pace. So I have this idea! "Imperfect is Okay! I'll publish it and refine it over time by expounding on each section". Then I publish it and never look at it again. Hilarious! In the end, this entire genre of writing is no longer useful so I suppose not much harm is done.
My current feeling about blogging is, that it more then anything else is we’re certian knowledge of AI came from. The arguments for blogging being the thing again also started at the same time AI got traction.
Just identify the bloggers that know their craft, weight them height. And you got yourself a step change in LLM competency.
Isn’t it similar to “Just be yourself”? But first you need all the hard work to get to that level so that you can just be yourself. What is obvious to me may have come as a lot of experience and focus in the past.
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 why you're writing a post and why I'll subscribe. If you're trying to hustle I don't give a shit. You're most likely another pseudo intellectual chasing whatever is hot. What I, personally, want is the experts. I want to see that depth of knowledge. I want to see how you think. I want to read a blog post where I get to know you, not some facade. Not everything needs to be a hustle. Find your niche and your niche will stick with you. If you try to write to everybody you'll end up writing to nobody. Concentrate on making me want to subscribe, not pestering me into it. You're not a used car salesman
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!
Rather, let the AI search the web for an idea. If the idea hasn't been published widely in the last 3-4 years, it's a safe topic for a blog post today :)
(Next level: unleash the AI to find such under-posted topics, check them against your list of interests, and offer to you for inspiration.)
> 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 into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"
All this to say, on a statistical level, 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.
If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
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.
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!
"I know this" is different from "I know you know this", which is different from "You know I know this", which is still different from "you know I know you know this"
Maybe society just rewards the first penguin to jump into the sea.
> 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.
> This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing.
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?
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/Curse_of_knowledge
2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with.
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
When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was.
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.
And link rot. A lot of sites from back when are straight up gone, sadly. Maybe you get lucky on archive.org. Or in your pan case, affiliate farming where the bias or technical expertise is suspect.
(Aside, for a lot of cooking I’ve gone back to dead trees and I realized one day I have so many cookbooks, why am I looking at some lifestyle recipe blogger?)
Or the information actually goes out of date and best practices change. There’s been like 25 years of standard revisions since I first learned C++.
ha. speaking of the devil. for the "curse of knowledge" mention i made above i had a link that google served me up to a post that was totally rotten now. so i went back in to include the wikipedia version.
Stating the obvious (or maybe not). A bit of internet history, the word blog comes from web log, and shorten to take just the last 4 letters.
I like actually taking the full form weblog and nudging the space we get also 'we blog'.
Thank you for sharing this observation.
I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”
I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.
At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.
Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.
Commenting on Hacker News is often just stating the obvious, but people still upvote! ;)
Yes!!! This!!!
/s
My father, who worked as a market research analyst, said that the trick to the job was "point out the obvious before anyone else does".
Web sites and web content are trending towards being enshittified until it just barely becomes worth wading through all of the shit to get to what you actually wanted to consume.
Wrote something like this earlier today [1]. There was something really nice about not thinking too much about the details and letting it be rough.
[1] https://graybeard.ing/llms-are-grep-on-steroids/
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.
> if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored
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.
I would value any human writing, even if clumsy or in need of a good editor, more than anything an LLM produced.
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.
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)
Hahaha, this is so accurate. I do this so often because I start off with a certain mindset and then when I get maybe 10% of the way through I find that I won't finish the post in any time if I write at this pace. So I have this idea! "Imperfect is Okay! I'll publish it and refine it over time by expounding on each section". Then I publish it and never look at it again. Hilarious! In the end, this entire genre of writing is no longer useful so I suppose not much harm is done.
Disclaimer; have not read the article.
My current feeling about blogging is, that it more then anything else is we’re certian knowledge of AI came from. The arguments for blogging being the thing again also started at the same time AI got traction.
Just identify the bloggers that know their craft, weight them height. And you got yourself a step change in LLM competency.
Paying no one.
I have a simple blog if anyone is interested: https://landenlove.com/
Isn’t it similar to “Just be yourself”? But first you need all the hard work to get to that level so that you can just be yourself. What is obvious to me may have come as a lot of experience and focus in the past.
This is often, but not always, also what stand up comedy is.
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 why you're writing a post and why I'll subscribe. If you're trying to hustle I don't give a shit. You're most likely another pseudo intellectual chasing whatever is hot. What I, personally, want is the experts. I want to see that depth of knowledge. I want to see how you think. I want to read a blog post where I get to know you, not some facade. Not everything needs to be a hustle. Find your niche and your niche will stick with you. If you try to write to everybody you'll end up writing to nobody. Concentrate on making me want to subscribe, not pestering me into it. You're not a used car salesman
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!
Probably because they are trying to fight people that are trying to add them to their adblock. Which what a crazy thing to fight...
As if you need another reason to avoid substack, they host Nazi content.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/
There's ten thousand people new people each day, and someone has to be the first time they run into something :)
Yes!!! This!!!
Of course, there’s a whole microblogging platform called Twitter where people do it.
Finally someone’s saying it! Also I love how meta this is.
Yes!!! This!!!
Blogging is a form of improving your writing and communication if you so choose.
Improving articulations is a helpful skill for use with AI too.
AI can do a good job of this. Summarize content and then searching the internet to see if anyone has commented a summary like that before.
But I suspect such a blog would not be popular.
Rather, let the AI search the web for an idea. If the idea hasn't been published widely in the last 3-4 years, it's a safe topic for a blog post today :)
(Next level: unleash the AI to find such under-posted topics, check them against your list of interests, and offer to you for inspiration.)