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.

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.

I like actually taking the full form weblog and nudging the space we get also 'we blog'.

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.

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.

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)

[1] https://graybeard.ing/llms-are-grep-on-steroids/

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.

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.

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

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.

But I suspect such a blog would not be popular.

"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

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.