One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually. Writing is one of them. Everyone loves a programmer that can explain themselves. An opinion isn't worth having if you aren't able to defend it either. Maintaining a blog therefore seems like a great way of improving your writing skills while also testing your own opinions.
Writing down opinions on things have done wonders for my ability to reason about them, especially when the opinions are built on 10 years of "hunch" and no discussion.
I upvoted but I was not taught this! I have had to slowly figure it out on my own. Writing things down is kind of like augmenting your brain. It's a memory that does not forget. When working through a problem, writing it down tends to point out the holes in your understanding. A corner case is never lost or forgotten when written down, it just stares at you until you write down a solution. The next step after realizing this is to develop the discipline to write things down and to organize your environment so it's effortless to write things down.
Using something like confluence religiously in a team is a big boon. Write docs about everything. Write to get decisions done, to plan, to celebrate, to retrospect, to architect, to help oncall. Everything! Doesnt need to be beautiful prose - just needs to be famn useful and ideally easy/quick to read.
Same, I had to learn this the hard way. In fact, I find that many (younger me included) are arrogant about *not* wanting to deal with writing due to it feeling like waste of time. But after maintaining codebases for 5+ years, you begin to appreciate younger you explaining wtf you were thinking.
And now, being at a point in my career where I have opinions on many things and discuss them with peers, I slowly realized writing about it was actually helping me more than anything.
I agree. But I also think there is an overlap between programming and writing. If you are a good programmer, you have some abilities that can help you explain a subject or argue some point. Especially when it is about something non-trivial.
I write to the computers because sure as fuck wasn't nobody gonna give me no money for writing to the humans. Instead, I am lead to understand that during the formative years of my primary caretakers, what people got for writing was jail time. And the people who put 'em there never actually went anywhere; they just became less visible as they shed the dead weight of the state apparatus.
As a result, computer touchin' is how my entire cohort developed sentience, since computers have the useful property of always responding correctly when asked correctly. Humans, meanwhile, can quite easily become trapped in a permanent low-intensity fight-or-flight state - where they only respond correctly to incorrect statements, and vice versa.
For better or worse, ChatGPT is pretty good at explaining people to you if you describe what you did and what happened and don't leave out the details. Just be aware that you're human too and it'll syncophantically tell you you're right if you leave anything out, which really strokes the ego, but doesn't actually help. Don't fall into that trap. If you're worried about privacy, get a local one instead of ChatGPT.
[Self-promotion warning] My blog that nobody read turned into a published book. An editor for a small publishing firm happened to come across my blog and thought that it might be good as a book. He contacted me and after about a year of work (more than I expected) I finished the book and got it published. It's not that popular, but I'm very happy with it.
My point is that you don't need a massive audience. If you can reach one person and make them laugh, or teach someone something new, or give someone hope when they really needed it, then your writing will be worth it.
It always pleases me to see pictures of NGC 4216, the edge-on spiral galaxy with a star beside its nucleus. I used to use it as a pointer to the short-period contact binary star CC Comae Berenices back when I used observe eclipsing binaries with my Celestron 8.
I have no idea about the journey that atoms of my body took to reach where they are now (as me, myself). I wish them good lucky on their future endeavours. I think we should get acclimatized to similar process about "Ideas and Concepts that we think originates from Us". These concepts will be meat grinded into large LLMs and hopefully help someone in future.
Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.
The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.
I don’t get this town square analogy. My blog is a “permanent” record of the electronics related projects that I’ve done. Things I’ve learned along the way, techniques that I’ve used, stuff that I’ve made.
I’ve given myself a target of 6 blog posts per year. It forces me to complete something every once in a while, and it also makes me study a subject more thoroughly than I otherwise would: I don’t want to make a fool of myself.
It’s nice if a blog post resonates with a few people every once in a while, but that’s just a bonus.
> Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.
An optimist take on your statement is this: we need MORE folks writing/talking in town square. More chances to encounter something valuable (to you).
Otherwise, I first read your statement the other way: too many people communicating into the ether with no audience and no feedback. But I suppose I prefer people practice that communication somehow rather than not...
Is your point that people do not understand how to present themselves and a point of view (on anything) in front of anyone? Work presentation to executive. Writing a coherent email. Running a meeting. Etc.
Related, I think people have stopped.... reacting on the internet? I've been part of the X/Twitter to Bluesky migration and people often mention how 'quiet' Bluesky is.
I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end except waste time? It's only worse with a coin flip's chance of the other person being an LLM. We're all tired.
I wonder if it's just creeping apathy, post-covid, current-AI boom. That we're just tired in life. There's a psych study, Dimensional Apathy Scale (DAS)[0] and one of the questions is basically "How much do I contact my friends?" I think it argues that the more apathy we feel, the less likely we are to reach out to others, and I imagine, the less likely we are to react or reply to comments (or even post).
I'm curious if the decline in reacting is matched by a decline in replying and posting in general.
Anyways, I worry that apathy is on the rise as we get overwhelmed with the rate of change and uncertainty in the 2020s and I'm working pretty hard to fight that apathy and bring more empathy, so if you're interested, please reach out to me the contact info in my bio.
This is relatable. I often find myself starting a reply on here, really thinking it through as I type it out, and then hitting delete on what I just wrote. Sometimes I even hit submit, and then delete a few moments later.
It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time. (A tech readership is always going to veer hard into the well, akshually...) Most likely case, I get fictitious internet points. Which - I won't lie - tickle my lizard brain, just as they do everyone else's. But they don't actually achieve anything meaningful.
Best case is that I learn something. Realistically, this happens vanishingly infrequently, and the signal-noise ratio is much, much worse than if I just pulled a book off my shelf.
I suppose this is all an artifact of time and experience. Maybe I've just picked all the low-hanging fruit, and so I no longer have the patience to watch people endlessly repost the same xkcd strips from fifteen years ago, navel-gaze about tabs or spaces, share thrilling new facts that I have in fact known for many decades, etc. And while I'm very excited for them to discover all these things anew (and anew... and anew...), it's just not a good use of my time and patience to participate.
> It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time.
The three mindset changes I found that really help with this are understanding that:
* You don't have to try and get the last word in.
* Other people are not entitled to your time, especially if they're engaging in bad faith.
* Outside of small and curated communities, there's pretty good odds that you're not interacting with a real and honest person.
So whenever I click into the comment box, I always ask myself "Can I really be bothered with this? Is this really what I want to be spending my free time doing?"
And then I often close the comment box and get on with my life.
Well, if your try and force yourself to engage with multiple people, the site won't let you post that many comments in such a short time period. Which, overall, is a good thing I believe.
I feel this, but also, I am... anxious about reactions? I rarely / never go back on comments I've written on HN. I know it's actually a really bad thing to do because it means I won't allow my views to be challenged, don't engage in debate, just want to get my side out without actively defending it.
Years ago I had a blog and one time I wrote a post in response to another blog post about education vs experience, arguing in favor of formal education. And that one got a link back from the original article, leading people back to my blog. I got engagement, comments, feedback, etc... and it was very uh. Overwhelming? Like suddenly I had to defend my arguments. It made me very uncomfortable, even though it was probably a good thing, all in all.
I don't know how to break that trend. I think I'd rather have realtime communications / chat, but that's another thing that seems to have died, at least in the space I've been at for a long time now.
The simple solution is that whenever you start to write a comment, ask yourself: do I want to have a discussion about this?
If the answer is "yes", then make your comment, check back and interact with the responses (assuming they seem to be in good faith). If it's "no" then just close the comment box and get on with your life.
But then I realise that it's fairly pointless writing this in the first place...
I saw this Carl Jung quote shared on Substack recently.
"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you"."
I'm using writing as an outlet for an active mind these days. Thoughts that seem important to me and need to come out even if there is nobody there to read them.
Precisely why I maintain a diary. It listens to all of my thoughts, sans judgement. One of the best decisions I've ever made. Wish I did this years ago
If you want happiness through writing, write only for yourself. Never check site visitor analytics, comments, shares. Only care if you're enjoying the writing. To make it easier you can also write under a pseudonym.
Some of my worst habits formed seeing early posts go viral and then getting addicted to that endorphin hit. The amount of time I wasted checking analytics and new subs would probably equal the time it would take me to write 10 more posts or read a couple books.
It reminds me of WaitButWhy. [1] The guy had some awesome and insightful writings that eventually culminated in a story about SpaceX and Elon Musk that went way beyond viral. Everything after that went sharply downhill and I think the main reason is that the newfound minor celebrity status really impaired his ability to just sit down and casually shit post without worrying so much about what everybody else would think.
It's quite ironic given this. [2] He simply needs to go mammoth hunting.
Look on the bright side. Firstly, I just read it. Secondly, AI will likely read it, so your thoughts may become part of the great AI world consciousness someday. Finally you're really doing this for yourself; I find writing my thoughts out in a blog or a novel gives me some satisfaction knowing I have tried, and now have something out there forever that you or your friends can look back on someday.
100%. I didn't mean this to be a "woe is me" piece, despite the clickbait-y title. I just wanted to talk about the merits of publishing your writing without any actual readers. And some lessons on writing I've picked up.
I do it. I write[0], because it helps me to understand stuff better (tutorials), or because I work on "gut instinct," a lot, and writing it in a manner that explains it, forces me to "formalize" things.
My stuff is too TL;DR, for most folks, these days.
In 2004 https://paradies.jeena.net/weblog/2004/apr/ersteintrag I started my blog in German. I have a migration background (at 11 years old from Poland to Germany) and that made so I would do a lot of spelling mistakes when writing, even though I could express myself fairly OK. Writing a blog was a way for me to get better at it, and I would encourage my readers to tell me when they found something odd.
Because I moved to Sweden just about a year later, I started a new blog https://jeena.net/something-new where I would write in English, because I thought then both the people from Germany (to a lesser extend) and the people I know in Sweden would be able to read my blog.
It was a good decision to switch to English (which back then I didn't speak fluently at all, but writing was ok), because 5 Years ago I again moved countries, now I'm in South Korea and am still blogging in English.
It definitely helped me to learn English, which now is my main language at work and at home.
“It's redundant to say "I think" at any point in an opinion piece.”
“But is there still value in human produced writing? Subjectively, yes. Objectively? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of personal value in writing though.”
There is value because I felt compelled to engage, but if it turns out you’re a bot then I’ll feel cheated and less likely to read other blog posts.
yea, I'm not saying there's no place for that phrase ever. But overusing it was a bad habit of mine and it ends up being unnecessary filler. My wording there was a bit exaggerated.
how will people sharpen their thinking if they don't write their own words? the value in human writing even with llms remains almost the same. you won't get better stuff without it
Ten years? I've been doing it for over twenty. Readership is something you have to chase, and if that's what you want, that's fine. But for some people, like me, it's the writing that's important.
I for thirty years. But usually only very short blogs about personally relevant events, such as buying books. I am not really interested whether it is read or not.
> My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea.
This is what I'm encouraged by Grammarly as well. To some extent, perhaps the book "Elements of style" encourages this too.
However, I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She writes long (wordy?) sentences that are clear, and even feels beautiful to read. I really enjoyed her writing.
But I'm not a native speaker. A question for the native speakers: what's your take on this? Has Shelly's writing style gone out of fashion, or are these two (Shelley's style and succinctness) different things?
I've self hosted my blog across several platforms (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and now pelican) since about 2007 and the best thing I did was disable comments.
I had a friend message me saying they came across my blog googling how to run home assistant on k3s. And that's a satisfaction no money can buy.
Yeah I’ve occasionally mentioned things at work, and had someone say “I think I read a blog post about that once”. Only to discover they read about it on my blog! Incredibly satisfying.
I’ve also seen screenshots of my blog posts show up in random technical talks I happened to watch. I want to shout at the screen - “That was meeeee!”
When I write in my native tongue I avoid mentionning myself and try to disappear from the text; "I", "me", "my" is forbidden and also I try to compress sentences into the smallest most precise set of words — being precise and concise is the funniest writing game.
I also write blogs for 10 years and few people come to read. Actually I don't want people who I know in real life read my blogs. I don't why. Maybe I'm too much an introvert!
I don't blog because, most of the time, I'm worried about what people might think. Sometimes I speak up in public and people are confused, so - I think - it will only be amplified online. Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention.
But most of all it's putting it all together.
There was this famous kid who only talked in tweets because he had ADHD. Sometimes series of tweets. Like 20 of them. But always in tweets, because that gave him control, and removed - or add, depends on your point of view - constraints.
Anyway - don't be like me. Speak up. Tell people what you want them to hear.
as a junior dev I completely understand the code sharing part: no matter if I write the code myself, or followed some guide about code styling/naming conventions/best coding practices, or assisted myself with an llm, the result is the same; I don't share the code at all, due to the fact of how many times I saw on the internet the "Why did you do it that way, no one does it that way" or some other discouraging comments, so no wonder that Stack Overflow was becoming less and less popular even before llm's if there is more people like me and people who were like me don't need such sites anymore since they upskilled since then. Nowadays only people reading my code (and subsuquently having a normal healthy talk, not a discussion - a talk!) is an LLM and my girlfriend or some random friend that asked what I'm up to nowadays when I was in the process of coding.
I encourage you to still share your ideas and thoughts. It doesn't need to be as a blog, but in general. :)
Don't censor yourself out of fear of what others might think or misunderstand.
Many may get confused and some might not like it, but there may also be a small group of people who understand, which if you fall silent couldn't be reached.
I've been having fun with my blog for many years. And now it's a big source of revenue for me. Still, I treat it almost the same way as before: a place where I get to share my ideas and discoveries.
The sheer act of writing helps me structure my thoughts and helps others grow. Win win!
as someone that also has a blog nobody ever reads, i begin to quite enjoy it - I find it really useful when discussing something specific with someone, as i have a very weird collection of random writings
I notice web searches now hide blogs unless you search through that site specifically. All part of suppressing the democratising effects of the internet... Shame I've found some good info via blogs.
The beginning of this article neatly captures why writing your own thoughts -- as difficult as this can be sometimes -- is so crucial. One of my biggest fears from the unchecked proliferation of AI is society deciding that writing "the old way" should go the way of cursive and mentally calculating tips, that is, into the archives.
> My style has certainly improved since my early days of writing. Reading my old stuff is painful.
I've been blogging since 2006 and I feel the same way. The past few years I blog less, but I do try to write more to the point and use less idioms and spoken writing style.
I felt this. The had the same experience when I blogged some 15 years ago now. Different times, same ghost town, but still had good content and useful information that I could look back on to jog my own memory. So it’s good to keep a diary. It’s usefulness is useful to you if you let it.
It seems like the author wants writing to be a bigger component of their life than it is. I hope the author is able to accomplish that goal. Maybe 100x their output and turn their blog into something a few people read. Hopefully the "20 years of writing a blog nobody reads" is a revelrous experience for the author's handful of readers.
I found Stephen King's On Writing a worthwhile read for anyone thinking about writing, no matter your opinion on King's other works (I am not a fan). A hard lesson well expressed is using fewer words, which King describes as "kill your babies".
I will never not find it insane that in college they have word minimums for essays, instead of maximums. Imo going to college ruins many people's ability to write clearly.
At university in the UK it's almost always maximums rather than minimums. It's damn hard as well, you never get the word count you actually need to fully cover the subject and always end up desperately counting those last few as you trim it down. My university would cap your grade if you went over the count by a certain % as well.
I do think it made me better at writing though, and it certainly made me aware of how much people are actually willing to read.
I definitely had classes in college that had maximums as well (often assignments were supposed to be 7-10 pages, for example), but generally it's unnecessary and most people struggle to meet the minimums.
Cool. I know 1 person read my WEB site, they sent me a email :) But I do not keep track so I have no idea nor do I really care. So now you have 1 more who read it.
But since then I moved it to Gemini, the real Gemini, not google's thing. I find that far easier to maintain.
Have you considered that your thoughts on Writing Well might be wrong, and that's why people don't read your blog? I tuned out after realizing you have no idea what you're talking about.
> But is there a real connection between being wrong and not being read or are you yourself wrong ?
You don’t need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
> Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions.
It’s hard to figure out what readers want because you don’t get direct feedback. But if you spend any amount of time in front of an audience, it becomes incredibly clear that some things work on stage better than others. I truly believe charisma is a learnable skill. By treating it as talent we deprive people who aren’t charismatic the chance to improve. Writing is just the same. Claiming that there’s no “right/wrong” here implies that it’s impossible to learn to write in a more engaging way. And that’s obviously false.
I did a clowning course a few years ago. In one silly exercise we all partnered up. Each couple were given a tennis ball, and we had to squish the ball between our foreheads so it wouldn’t fall. And like that, move around the room. Afterwards the teacher got half the class on stage and do it again, while everyone else watched. Then the audience got to vote on which couple we liked the most. It was surreal - almost everyone voted on the same pair. Those two in particular were somehow more interesting than everyone else. In that room there was a right and a wrong way to wordlessly hold a tennis ball between two people’s faces. And we all agreed on what it was.
> You don't need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
I am not a native english speaker, I don't know anything about humourous form of language in that tongue.
Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one.
"Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.
Your story is interesting, and I don't understand how you could be surprised : people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...
Do you think Baudelaire cared about engagement ? You talked like there were no way taste could dramatically change to the point "ugly" is becoming "good" or vice-versa. Some of the writers and artists I like the most braved the taste™ of the different hegemonic culture of their time, and just trusted their own intuition of what they did want to express, say, create.
Marcel Duchamp is a great example of how a mid level joke can change the art world suddenly (and people's taste with it).
> Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one.
Yes; one of the most aspects of charisma is being sensitive to your audience. Charismatic people watch how their performance is received, and adjust it on the fly. Not too much, but enough to make the audience feel cared for. This is one reason why there's a sort of magic in live performances.
I also think we're talking about two extreme ideas here that are both wrong:
1. Performances are on an objective spectrum from "right" to "wrong"
2. Nothing is good or bad. Everything is subjective.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. There's no such thing as "the objectively best pieces of music (/art / writing / etc)". But some music, art and writing is enjoyed by many people. And some is junk. There is no objective measure of music. But also, nobody would consider my amateur piano playing to be as good as The Beetles or Mozart.
> "Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.
I don't know where to start with this.
Again, there's two extremes that are both wrong: a) As a writer / performer, you should conform exactly to whatever the audience wants. And b) Forget the audience. Write however you want without any regard for them.
Both of these extreme positions will result in bad work. The answer is somewhere in the middle. We don't want a performer to be our slave or our master. We want you to be our friend. Our leader. Our teacher.
In other terms, write however you want. But if you don't care about your audience, don't be surprised if your audience doesn't care about you.
> people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...
I'm Australian. The class was in France, taught by a French clown. There were students from the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, South Africa, NZ, Finland, Germany and more.
Not all art works across different cultures, but clowning does. I think if you showed our performances to a group of monkeys, even they would also find it funny and if they could, they would pick out the same favorites.
Of course everything is subjective. The fact we're social animals creates the feeling that there's some kind of rules, but that's just a bias. We're biased.
There is no absolute junk art-artefact, because humanity potentially extends timewise to so many instances of different humans that you cannot know in advance if something will be considered "good" at some point in time, culture, individusl brain etc...
> Both of these extremes position will result in bad work.
That's absurd, if someone "conform exactly to whatever the audience wants" then everyone in the audience would be pleased, how could it be bad work ?
Side note. Is it really possible for some artist to forget the audience ? I mean "however you want without any regard for them" is possible, but due to the fact you write as you want, it would be an absolute masterclass if you succeeded to be not cared about by anyone.
But yeah, that's not constituent of what is an artwork or not. This discussion is useless to the artist.
> [clown class]
Okay, but mondialization, hegemony of certain cultures etc...
Are we truly different cultures ? I don't think so.
But anyway, that's not the problem.
The problem is that you were using this example to justify the fact that taste is not relative.
I accept that a group of clown students got impressed by the same clowns. But I don't accept that there wouldn't be some differences if the whole humanity (past and future) voted that day.
> There is no absolute junk art-artefact, because humanity potentially extends timewise to so many instances of different humans that you cannot know in advance if something will be considered "good" at some point in time, culture, individusl brain etc...
Look at the number of plays each song gets in Spotify. If everyone had their own, totally unique taste, there would be no mathematical correlation between which songs I enjoy and which songs you enjoy. We would see a uniform distribution of plays of all the songs in spotify. But the distribution is very non-uniform. Some songs get billions of listens. Some songs get essentially none.
However, if we all had exactly the same taste, Spotify would only need a small selection of "the best" songs for everybody to enjoy. This is also not what we see.
Art has fashions. But many of aspects of music and storytelling have remained relevant across culture and across time so far. We like musical rhythm. We enjoy narrative in stories. We enjoy stories about relationships between people. We like some variety, but not too much. And so on. I'm sure tastes will change. But if I just mash my hand on the piano with no skill and upload that to spotify, I doubt even in the fullness of time I'll ever get as many spotify listens as The Beetles.
> That's absurd, if someone "conform exactly to whatever the audience wants" then everyone in the audience would be pleased, how could it be bad work ? [...] This discussion is useless to the artist.
Yes exactly. An artist can't work like this. It wouldn't work. It has the wrong energy.
Its kind of paradoxical, but the audience doesn't want to feel like we're in charge too much. We like it when performers take risks on stage, and show us who they are so we can judge them. Look at the top rated videos on youtube. Or the most popular songs. Or any list of the best movies ever made. All of them will contain a strong, clear point of view of the artist. Stanley Kubrick and Mick Jagger don't ask the audience what we want. They tell us what we want. (And they get it right.)
---
At a broader level, I think this whole discussion is a diversion. You seem to have argued both that all art is subjective. And that creating works of art based on what people want would be submitting to the "current cultural supremacia". Both of these arguments sound like excuses to me. Excuses to not try and become skilled. Excuses to skip being be sensitive to your audience. Excuses that protect from failure. For what its worth, I struggle with this too. My clown teacher told me I need to "try to not die so much" when things don't work on stage. It is very difficult. If human tastes really do change so much across time, then don't create for people in the future. Create for people right now. The people right in front of you, who you can understand.
The most successful clowns, businessmen and writers all care about their audience. But when things inevitably don't work, they acknowledge the failure with lightness and try again.
To me, we're in a difficult position because the only way you have to quantify the value of an artwork (music in this case) is the number of streams it has.
Call me a mad man but it is not rare for me to hate most streamed music and to prefer <none> streamed music.
Yet I seriously doubt I am "musically dumb".
What I find instead is that advertisment, reputation, exposure, a good label, radio streams will get you a long way to become a <most streamed> artist.
And no, that's not "an excuse" to not try and become skilled... What sense does it make to say "Dua Lippa is better skilled than J.S.Bach because she has more streams" (or the contrary) or "AC/DC is better skilled than Alan Vega because they sold more disks" (or the contrary).
> If I just mash my hand on the piano with no skill
Okay, that's pretty sure.
Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".
> Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".
This is where I think we really disagree. If I want to make music people like, I’m pretty sure piano lessons would help me. Theory. Rhythm. Learning to sing. Then I need to practice! Making a smash hit isn’t predictable, but it’s not random either. Luck is a necessary but not sufficient quality. As the saying goes, most overnight successes are 20 years in the making. Watch the early stuff from Louis CK. From Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It’s not as good. They got better over time.
You can learn to write better. To be more charismatic. To connect better to an audience. You’re not in control of whether or not an iOS app is successful. But you can’t make it at all if you don’t know how to code. And if you’re bad at design it probably won’t make it. It’s not simply a coincidence that some blog posts get read and others are ignored. Ask anyone successful. By honestly any metric of success. Practice, skill and hard work won’t guarantee anyone cares about your craft. But if you don’t try? Don’t listen to your audience and improve? Good luck.
I'm happy because there is a misunderstanding of my words here.
I am not saying that the ethos of the artist should be "taste is random".
In fact the act of being an artist is to embrace biases.
I agree with the Kant interpretation of aesthetics as a "teleologic" thing : there is no objective "beauty" yet we perpetually fail to embrace this and instead, when we find something "beautiful" we consider this judgement as if it was universal, absolute and objective (when it is not).
On the other hand, to complete this, I agree with Wittgenstein when he says that "you cannot SAY anything about aesthetics/ethics".
These two ideas aren't forming any paradox.
> Create for the people right now.
I would prefer :
Set your own dogma or not, but do what you feel you want to do, be it creating for others, for yourself (you abominable narcissus), for your cat, for the banana you just eaten, or for whatever supreme being you chose to believe in.
Choose your audience, let an audience choose you, or choose to be alone, whatever fits for you.
> My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea. Everyone's interpretation of words is different, so using more precise language will just muddle your ideas.
It's easy to lose yourself in a sentence if it's not clearly thought out. Something about talking more to mask ones ignorance, or something like that. Forcing yourself to use short sentences a la simple English snaps you out of that.
You do realise there are AI checkers online.
https://www.zerogpt.com/ assesses this content as: 27.49% ChatGPT
While this writer obviously had a lot of input into the model, they even state (or more accurately according to zerogpt, ChatGPT wrote this whole paragraph) "The writing process should be highly iterative", so they have added their own flavour into the writing, but it is still, (probably not for much longer) but still obvious when this is used.
Great observation! Not only does ChatGPT produce seemingly human-authored output—humans can also produce ChatGPT-style output.
If you really want to fly below the radar you can even include instructions to adopt a certain writing style, e.g.: you can tell it to use a Gen-Z style with minimal formatting.
Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.)
Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it best matches the kinds of shifts our brain does when thinking.
It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes jarring.
As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.
For example, in the article we have:
If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:
If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
[edit - putting comma back in to break up the long sentence]
If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
I think this is the only aside formatted like this in the article. The other em-dashes take the place of pauses in sentences, places I would normally use a comma or semicolon, or are used to introduce a list where I would typically use a colon.
Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
I think I took out an extra comma too, which hurts readability.
Personally I write with too many asides, normally done with commas and parentheses. It's a comforting habit to fall into, and makes getting your thoughts out so much easier, at the expense of interrupting the reader's train of thought.
I don't normally notice when I'm writing with asides so the jarring em-dashes were a good reminder to try and edit them out where I can.
It's okay. Give it a few years and every writing style will be being used by AI. We'll then be able to use whatever style we like as no one will be able to tell our writing from AI anyway.
Agreed. I've used the em dash for well over a decade and love it, but am having to train myself to not use it simply to not appear as though my text is written by AI.
At least avoiding the "it's not just that X, it's Y" style that AI loves is easy enough!
Yeah, just writing in Word (and few other) will get your - turned into em dashes. Personally I hate them. Mostly coz of random editors making GNU cmdline options into emdash and so breaking copying but I also think they are ugly, way too long in most fonts
I don't know when the phrase "em dash" got popular. It was probably due to web development, because, unless you were into typesetting, nobody knew what "em" was. We always just called them dashes--two hyphens make a dash.
I would go back to the advent of Desktop Publishing. The early Macintosh + Laserwriter really did a number in bringing esoteric terms like "font" to us commoners.
Some of us found out we were typography nerds and didn't know it until then.
It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.
You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science.
If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't even have to type two hyphens. One will do, and it looks at the grammar and changes to the correct type of dash for you automatically.
Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.
<!-- This is a HTML comment for your reference -->
The compose key and Ctrl+K in Vim both assume the use of Linux, or janky 3rd party software. Compose is the same argument I have already covered with Windows, you need to enter a cryptic key-combination into the keyboard, which is not intuitive.
As for the Vim argument, I'm struggling to work out how to use Vim to type on here? Perhaps you could shed some light? I suppose you could yank-put it, but I fail to see how that is less effort than copy-paste, the other argument I already covered.
If you're writing in MS Word, LibreOffice, or most word processors, typing a word and then two dashes and then a word, without any spaces, like--this will generate an em dash automatically. I learned how to do it in Freshman English in high school. Though I was also taught to double space after a period.
To revise GP's comment: it’s just less computer literate people feeling the need to out themselves.
People aren't likely to pre-type their HN and reddit comments in a word processor though, so when you see them on such sites, it's a good indication that the comment came from an LLM and not a genuine person.
Maybe they are using a Mac (where you type alt-hyphen for a emdash)? Or run Windows and have a numeric keypad (ctrl-minus)? Or they run a browser extension like Grammarly that auto-substitutes?
Pandoc has had "smart" typography[0] which generates em-dash and en-dash for a long time. I found a forum post for 2011 where people were discussing em dashes and such. That thread indicates that John Gruber created a Markdown extension in 2004 which was already handling en and em dashes[2].
The compose key on Linux makes deliberate use much easier (rather than automatic replacement which often triggers when I don't want it). There's a compose key utility for Windows, but has some minor annoyances like many input (mouse or keyboard) macro extender applications.
It's not just less literate, it's also people who feel the need to be amateur prosecutors.
It's the same thing as judging people who wear their hair too long, or wear pajamas on the plane, or who wear pants that are too baggy, or who have children out of wedlock, etc. Some people are deeply convinced that society is on the decline and that they have a mission to ensure everyone else stays in line.
You know how LLMs are trained on basically the whole internet, right? And thus pretty much the whole reason why LLMs favour em-dashes, is that they are super common on the internet (even pre-LLMs)
One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually. Writing is one of them. Everyone loves a programmer that can explain themselves. An opinion isn't worth having if you aren't able to defend it either. Maintaining a blog therefore seems like a great way of improving your writing skills while also testing your own opinions.
Writing down opinions on things have done wonders for my ability to reason about them, especially when the opinions are built on 10 years of "hunch" and no discussion.
I upvoted but I was not taught this! I have had to slowly figure it out on my own. Writing things down is kind of like augmenting your brain. It's a memory that does not forget. When working through a problem, writing it down tends to point out the holes in your understanding. A corner case is never lost or forgotten when written down, it just stares at you until you write down a solution. The next step after realizing this is to develop the discipline to write things down and to organize your environment so it's effortless to write things down.
Using something like confluence religiously in a team is a big boon. Write docs about everything. Write to get decisions done, to plan, to celebrate, to retrospect, to architect, to help oncall. Everything! Doesnt need to be beautiful prose - just needs to be famn useful and ideally easy/quick to read.
Same, I had to learn this the hard way. In fact, I find that many (younger me included) are arrogant about *not* wanting to deal with writing due to it feeling like waste of time. But after maintaining codebases for 5+ years, you begin to appreciate younger you explaining wtf you were thinking.
And now, being at a point in my career where I have opinions on many things and discuss them with peers, I slowly realized writing about it was actually helping me more than anything.
I agree. But I also think there is an overlap between programming and writing. If you are a good programmer, you have some abilities that can help you explain a subject or argue some point. Especially when it is about something non-trivial.
I write to the computers because sure as fuck wasn't nobody gonna give me no money for writing to the humans. Instead, I am lead to understand that during the formative years of my primary caretakers, what people got for writing was jail time. And the people who put 'em there never actually went anywhere; they just became less visible as they shed the dead weight of the state apparatus.
As a result, computer touchin' is how my entire cohort developed sentience, since computers have the useful property of always responding correctly when asked correctly. Humans, meanwhile, can quite easily become trapped in a permanent low-intensity fight-or-flight state - where they only respond correctly to incorrect statements, and vice versa.
For better or worse, ChatGPT is pretty good at explaining people to you if you describe what you did and what happened and don't leave out the details. Just be aware that you're human too and it'll syncophantically tell you you're right if you leave anything out, which really strokes the ego, but doesn't actually help. Don't fall into that trap. If you're worried about privacy, get a local one instead of ChatGPT.
I'm definitely in the "for worse" camp on that one, and doing my part.
Likewise with marketing skills.
[Self-promotion warning] My blog that nobody read turned into a published book. An editor for a small publishing firm happened to come across my blog and thought that it might be good as a book. He contacted me and after about a year of work (more than I expected) I finished the book and got it published. It's not that popular, but I'm very happy with it.
My point is that you don't need a massive audience. If you can reach one person and make them laugh, or teach someone something new, or give someone hope when they really needed it, then your writing will be worth it.
Looking forward to post about writing a book nobody reads ;)
I am now intrigued in your blog, if it's still online?
It was my old astrophotography blog: https://neurohack.com/Astrophotography/index.html
And the book it led to is 101 Amazing Sights of the Night Sky: https://www.amazon.com/101-Amazing-Sights-Night-Sky/dp/15919...
Neither is very popular, but it was a lot of fun.
Did not expect to see a book about night sky in this post. The book looks great. I'm getting one for my sons.
It always pleases me to see pictures of NGC 4216, the edge-on spiral galaxy with a star beside its nucleus. I used to use it as a pointer to the short-period contact binary star CC Comae Berenices back when I used observe eclipsing binaries with my Celestron 8.
Picked it up :) The look inside was great, it reminds me of an old astronomy book that I was obsessed with a long time ago.
Its probably the Archive if you follow the link
congrats! fun little story. how much did you make from it?
The scraper bots probably read it and now it is ever so slightly altering the weights in some massive AI model. That's not nothing.
After all we said and done, we will be only a memory in some future AI model. And maybe it will answer the meaning of the number 42.
The answer is: let there be light.
I have no idea about the journey that atoms of my body took to reach where they are now (as me, myself). I wish them good lucky on their future endeavours. I think we should get acclimatized to similar process about "Ideas and Concepts that we think originates from Us". These concepts will be meat grinded into large LLMs and hopefully help someone in future.
Writing a blog nobody reads is called a diary.
Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.
The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.
I don’t get this town square analogy. My blog is a “permanent” record of the electronics related projects that I’ve done. Things I’ve learned along the way, techniques that I’ve used, stuff that I’ve made.
I’ve given myself a target of 6 blog posts per year. It forces me to complete something every once in a while, and it also makes me study a subject more thoroughly than I otherwise would: I don’t want to make a fool of myself.
It’s nice if a blog post resonates with a few people every once in a while, but that’s just a bonus.
> Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.
An optimist take on your statement is this: we need MORE folks writing/talking in town square. More chances to encounter something valuable (to you).
Otherwise, I first read your statement the other way: too many people communicating into the ether with no audience and no feedback. But I suppose I prefer people practice that communication somehow rather than not...
Is your point that people do not understand how to present themselves and a point of view (on anything) in front of anyone? Work presentation to executive. Writing a coherent email. Running a meeting. Etc.
Related, I think people have stopped.... reacting on the internet? I've been part of the X/Twitter to Bluesky migration and people often mention how 'quiet' Bluesky is.
I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end except waste time? It's only worse with a coin flip's chance of the other person being an LLM. We're all tired.
I wonder if it's just creeping apathy, post-covid, current-AI boom. That we're just tired in life. There's a psych study, Dimensional Apathy Scale (DAS)[0] and one of the questions is basically "How much do I contact my friends?" I think it argues that the more apathy we feel, the less likely we are to reach out to others, and I imagine, the less likely we are to react or reply to comments (or even post).
I'm curious if the decline in reacting is matched by a decline in replying and posting in general.
Anyways, I worry that apathy is on the rise as we get overwhelmed with the rate of change and uncertainty in the 2020s and I'm working pretty hard to fight that apathy and bring more empathy, so if you're interested, please reach out to me the contact info in my bio.
[0]: https://das.psy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SelfDAS....
This is relatable. I often find myself starting a reply on here, really thinking it through as I type it out, and then hitting delete on what I just wrote. Sometimes I even hit submit, and then delete a few moments later.
It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time. (A tech readership is always going to veer hard into the well, akshually...) Most likely case, I get fictitious internet points. Which - I won't lie - tickle my lizard brain, just as they do everyone else's. But they don't actually achieve anything meaningful.
Best case is that I learn something. Realistically, this happens vanishingly infrequently, and the signal-noise ratio is much, much worse than if I just pulled a book off my shelf.
I suppose this is all an artifact of time and experience. Maybe I've just picked all the low-hanging fruit, and so I no longer have the patience to watch people endlessly repost the same xkcd strips from fifteen years ago, navel-gaze about tabs or spaces, share thrilling new facts that I have in fact known for many decades, etc. And while I'm very excited for them to discover all these things anew (and anew... and anew...), it's just not a good use of my time and patience to participate.
> It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time.
The three mindset changes I found that really help with this are understanding that:
* You don't have to try and get the last word in.
* Other people are not entitled to your time, especially if they're engaging in bad faith.
* Outside of small and curated communities, there's pretty good odds that you're not interacting with a real and honest person.
So whenever I click into the comment box, I always ask myself "Can I really be bothered with this? Is this really what I want to be spending my free time doing?"
And then I often close the comment box and get on with my life.
I feel this, but also, I am... anxious about reactions? I rarely / never go back on comments I've written on HN. I know it's actually a really bad thing to do because it means I won't allow my views to be challenged, don't engage in debate, just want to get my side out without actively defending it.
Years ago I had a blog and one time I wrote a post in response to another blog post about education vs experience, arguing in favor of formal education. And that one got a link back from the original article, leading people back to my blog. I got engagement, comments, feedback, etc... and it was very uh. Overwhelming? Like suddenly I had to defend my arguments. It made me very uncomfortable, even though it was probably a good thing, all in all.
I don't know how to break that trend. I think I'd rather have realtime communications / chat, but that's another thing that seems to have died, at least in the space I've been at for a long time now.
The simple solution is that whenever you start to write a comment, ask yourself: do I want to have a discussion about this?
If the answer is "yes", then make your comment, check back and interact with the responses (assuming they seem to be in good faith). If it's "no" then just close the comment box and get on with your life.
But then I realise that it's fairly pointless writing this in the first place...
Participating? Or reacting? The internet I look seems plenty full of reactions despite the migrations you mention.
Maybe to YT or Threads instead.
I like Bsky but I don't think the userbase supports much large-scale communication (not a bad thing, frankly)
Spot on. Ten or fifteen years ago, participating in the internet was something I got excited about, now I just get excited about getting away from it.
[dead]
What if having an audience isn’t the goal?
I saw this Carl Jung quote shared on Substack recently.
"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you"."
I'm using writing as an outlet for an active mind these days. Thoughts that seem important to me and need to come out even if there is nobody there to read them.
Precisely why I maintain a diary. It listens to all of my thoughts, sans judgement. One of the best decisions I've ever made. Wish I did this years ago
If you want happiness through writing, write only for yourself. Never check site visitor analytics, comments, shares. Only care if you're enjoying the writing. To make it easier you can also write under a pseudonym.
Some of my worst habits formed seeing early posts go viral and then getting addicted to that endorphin hit. The amount of time I wasted checking analytics and new subs would probably equal the time it would take me to write 10 more posts or read a couple books.
But congrats at sticking to it for 10 years!
It reminds me of WaitButWhy. [1] The guy had some awesome and insightful writings that eventually culminated in a story about SpaceX and Elon Musk that went way beyond viral. Everything after that went sharply downhill and I think the main reason is that the newfound minor celebrity status really impaired his ability to just sit down and casually shit post without worrying so much about what everybody else would think.
It's quite ironic given this. [2] He simply needs to go mammoth hunting.
[1] - https://waitbutwhy.com/
[2] - https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-op...
Look on the bright side. Firstly, I just read it. Secondly, AI will likely read it, so your thoughts may become part of the great AI world consciousness someday. Finally you're really doing this for yourself; I find writing my thoughts out in a blog or a novel gives me some satisfaction knowing I have tried, and now have something out there forever that you or your friends can look back on someday.
100%. I didn't mean this to be a "woe is me" piece, despite the clickbait-y title. I just wanted to talk about the merits of publishing your writing without any actual readers. And some lessons on writing I've picked up.
I do it. I write[0], because it helps me to understand stuff better (tutorials), or because I work on "gut instinct," a lot, and writing it in a manner that explains it, forces me to "formalize" things.
My stuff is too TL;DR, for most folks, these days.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany
In 2004 https://paradies.jeena.net/weblog/2004/apr/ersteintrag I started my blog in German. I have a migration background (at 11 years old from Poland to Germany) and that made so I would do a lot of spelling mistakes when writing, even though I could express myself fairly OK. Writing a blog was a way for me to get better at it, and I would encourage my readers to tell me when they found something odd.
Because I moved to Sweden just about a year later, I started a new blog https://jeena.net/something-new where I would write in English, because I thought then both the people from Germany (to a lesser extend) and the people I know in Sweden would be able to read my blog.
It was a good decision to switch to English (which back then I didn't speak fluently at all, but writing was ok), because 5 Years ago I again moved countries, now I'm in South Korea and am still blogging in English.
It definitely helped me to learn English, which now is my main language at work and at home.
Blogs have been good for minority languages. At one point most of the best sites in Gaelic were blogs.
“It's redundant to say "I think" at any point in an opinion piece.”
“But is there still value in human produced writing? Subjectively, yes. Objectively? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of personal value in writing though.”
There is value because I felt compelled to engage, but if it turns out you’re a bot then I’ll feel cheated and less likely to read other blog posts.
I think it is not redundant - it gives emphasis for a guess, to make sure reader won't mix it up with other things that may be verified to be truthy.
yea, I'm not saying there's no place for that phrase ever. But overusing it was a bad habit of mine and it ends up being unnecessary filler. My wording there was a bit exaggerated.
how will people sharpen their thinking if they don't write their own words? the value in human writing even with llms remains almost the same. you won't get better stuff without it
Shameless plug: Submit your blog to https://indieblog.page and you'll get the occasional random reader who might even become a RSS subscriber.
And/or submit it to: https://powrss.com/
Same idea, maybe with a bit more focus on RSS
Ten years? I've been doing it for over twenty. Readership is something you have to chase, and if that's what you want, that's fine. But for some people, like me, it's the writing that's important.
I for thirty years. But usually only very short blogs about personally relevant events, such as buying books. I am not really interested whether it is read or not.
completely agree
> My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea.
This is what I'm encouraged by Grammarly as well. To some extent, perhaps the book "Elements of style" encourages this too.
However, I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She writes long (wordy?) sentences that are clear, and even feels beautiful to read. I really enjoyed her writing.
But I'm not a native speaker. A question for the native speakers: what's your take on this? Has Shelly's writing style gone out of fashion, or are these two (Shelley's style and succinctness) different things?
Succinct to share ideas. Florid to share feelings.
I've self hosted my blog across several platforms (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and now pelican) since about 2007 and the best thing I did was disable comments.
I had a friend message me saying they came across my blog googling how to run home assistant on k3s. And that's a satisfaction no money can buy.
Yeah I’ve occasionally mentioned things at work, and had someone say “I think I read a blog post about that once”. Only to discover they read about it on my blog! Incredibly satisfying.
I’ve also seen screenshots of my blog posts show up in random technical talks I happened to watch. I want to shout at the screen - “That was meeeee!”
I don't want to break his streak, what it is about ?
It even has comments so you won’t be breaking the streak if there ever was any.
Appropriately enough, it’s about writing.
When I write in my native tongue I avoid mentionning myself and try to disappear from the text; "I", "me", "my" is forbidden and also I try to compress sentences into the smallest most precise set of words — being precise and concise is the funniest writing game.
Good idea. This strengthens your position and forces you to be more creative with how it's expressed.
I also write blogs for 10 years and few people come to read. Actually I don't want people who I know in real life read my blogs. I don't why. Maybe I'm too much an introvert!
I didnt read it, but keep it up.
Totally random rant.
I have a lot to say. About lot of things.
I don't blog because, most of the time, I'm worried about what people might think. Sometimes I speak up in public and people are confused, so - I think - it will only be amplified online. Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention.
But most of all it's putting it all together.
There was this famous kid who only talked in tweets because he had ADHD. Sometimes series of tweets. Like 20 of them. But always in tweets, because that gave him control, and removed - or add, depends on your point of view - constraints.
Anyway - don't be like me. Speak up. Tell people what you want them to hear.
as a junior dev I completely understand the code sharing part: no matter if I write the code myself, or followed some guide about code styling/naming conventions/best coding practices, or assisted myself with an llm, the result is the same; I don't share the code at all, due to the fact of how many times I saw on the internet the "Why did you do it that way, no one does it that way" or some other discouraging comments, so no wonder that Stack Overflow was becoming less and less popular even before llm's if there is more people like me and people who were like me don't need such sites anymore since they upskilled since then. Nowadays only people reading my code (and subsuquently having a normal healthy talk, not a discussion - a talk!) is an LLM and my girlfriend or some random friend that asked what I'm up to nowadays when I was in the process of coding.
I encourage you to still share your ideas and thoughts. It doesn't need to be as a blog, but in general. :)
Don't censor yourself out of fear of what others might think or misunderstand.
Many may get confused and some might not like it, but there may also be a small group of people who understand, which if you fall silent couldn't be reached.
I've been having fun with my blog for many years. And now it's a big source of revenue for me. Still, I treat it almost the same way as before: a place where I get to share my ideas and discoveries.
The sheer act of writing helps me structure my thoughts and helps others grow. Win win!
https://dsebastien.net
What I did a while ago was splitting notes and articles: https://notes.dsebastien.net
Publishing unpolished notes is a great way to remove needless pressure
as someone that also has a blog nobody ever reads, i begin to quite enjoy it - I find it really useful when discussing something specific with someone, as i have a very weird collection of random writings
I notice web searches now hide blogs unless you search through that site specifically. All part of suppressing the democratising effects of the internet... Shame I've found some good info via blogs.
The beginning of this article neatly captures why writing your own thoughts -- as difficult as this can be sometimes -- is so crucial. One of my biggest fears from the unchecked proliferation of AI is society deciding that writing "the old way" should go the way of cursive and mentally calculating tips, that is, into the archives.
> My style has certainly improved since my early days of writing. Reading my old stuff is painful.
I've been blogging since 2006 and I feel the same way. The past few years I blog less, but I do try to write more to the point and use less idioms and spoken writing style.
I felt this. The had the same experience when I blogged some 15 years ago now. Different times, same ghost town, but still had good content and useful information that I could look back on to jog my own memory. So it’s good to keep a diary. It’s usefulness is useful to you if you let it.
The act of writing itself is the payoff.
I am not so sure about the "keep all that pondering to yourself buddy" point. The world would be a better place with a little more epistemic humility.
It seems like the author wants writing to be a bigger component of their life than it is. I hope the author is able to accomplish that goal. Maybe 100x their output and turn their blog into something a few people read. Hopefully the "20 years of writing a blog nobody reads" is a revelrous experience for the author's handful of readers.
I found Stephen King's On Writing a worthwhile read for anyone thinking about writing, no matter your opinion on King's other works (I am not a fan). A hard lesson well expressed is using fewer words, which King describes as "kill your babies".
Remember the days when people actually made money out of writing blog posts?
People still do.
But it's not the people who write them, but those who sell the LLMs trained on those blogs.
Shameless plug of my own blog
https://www.rxjourney.net/
blogs made sense before social media.
good times.
your statement suggest they might not make sense after social media (otherwise it's redundant) Why do you imply they don't make sense now?
If you want to become a better writer, write comments, not blog posts. And if you engage with others, it becomes more fun.
I will never not find it insane that in college they have word minimums for essays, instead of maximums. Imo going to college ruins many people's ability to write clearly.
At university in the UK it's almost always maximums rather than minimums. It's damn hard as well, you never get the word count you actually need to fully cover the subject and always end up desperately counting those last few as you trim it down. My university would cap your grade if you went over the count by a certain % as well.
I do think it made me better at writing though, and it certainly made me aware of how much people are actually willing to read.
I definitely had classes in college that had maximums as well (often assignments were supposed to be 7-10 pages, for example), but generally it's unnecessary and most people struggle to meet the minimums.
Why?
Cool. I know 1 person read my WEB site, they sent me a email :) But I do not keep track so I have no idea nor do I really care. So now you have 1 more who read it.
But since then I moved it to Gemini, the real Gemini, not google's thing. I find that far easier to maintain.
Have you considered that your thoughts on Writing Well might be wrong, and that's why people don't read your blog? I tuned out after realizing you have no idea what you're talking about.
But is there a real connection between being wrong and not being read or are you yourself wrong ?
Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions.
> But is there a real connection between being wrong and not being read or are you yourself wrong ?
You don’t need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
> Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions.
It’s hard to figure out what readers want because you don’t get direct feedback. But if you spend any amount of time in front of an audience, it becomes incredibly clear that some things work on stage better than others. I truly believe charisma is a learnable skill. By treating it as talent we deprive people who aren’t charismatic the chance to improve. Writing is just the same. Claiming that there’s no “right/wrong” here implies that it’s impossible to learn to write in a more engaging way. And that’s obviously false.
I did a clowning course a few years ago. In one silly exercise we all partnered up. Each couple were given a tennis ball, and we had to squish the ball between our foreheads so it wouldn’t fall. And like that, move around the room. Afterwards the teacher got half the class on stage and do it again, while everyone else watched. Then the audience got to vote on which couple we liked the most. It was surreal - almost everyone voted on the same pair. Those two in particular were somehow more interesting than everyone else. In that room there was a right and a wrong way to wordlessly hold a tennis ball between two people’s faces. And we all agreed on what it was.
> You don't need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
I am not a native english speaker, I don't know anything about humourous form of language in that tongue.
Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one. "Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.
Your story is interesting, and I don't understand how you could be surprised : people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...
Do you think Baudelaire cared about engagement ? You talked like there were no way taste could dramatically change to the point "ugly" is becoming "good" or vice-versa. Some of the writers and artists I like the most braved the taste™ of the different hegemonic culture of their time, and just trusted their own intuition of what they did want to express, say, create.
Marcel Duchamp is a great example of how a mid level joke can change the art world suddenly (and people's taste with it).
> Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one.
Yes; one of the most aspects of charisma is being sensitive to your audience. Charismatic people watch how their performance is received, and adjust it on the fly. Not too much, but enough to make the audience feel cared for. This is one reason why there's a sort of magic in live performances.
I also think we're talking about two extreme ideas here that are both wrong:
1. Performances are on an objective spectrum from "right" to "wrong"
2. Nothing is good or bad. Everything is subjective.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. There's no such thing as "the objectively best pieces of music (/art / writing / etc)". But some music, art and writing is enjoyed by many people. And some is junk. There is no objective measure of music. But also, nobody would consider my amateur piano playing to be as good as The Beetles or Mozart.
> "Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.
I don't know where to start with this.
Again, there's two extremes that are both wrong: a) As a writer / performer, you should conform exactly to whatever the audience wants. And b) Forget the audience. Write however you want without any regard for them.
Both of these extreme positions will result in bad work. The answer is somewhere in the middle. We don't want a performer to be our slave or our master. We want you to be our friend. Our leader. Our teacher.
In other terms, write however you want. But if you don't care about your audience, don't be surprised if your audience doesn't care about you.
> people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...
I'm Australian. The class was in France, taught by a French clown. There were students from the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, South Africa, NZ, Finland, Germany and more.
Not all art works across different cultures, but clowning does. I think if you showed our performances to a group of monkeys, even they would also find it funny and if they could, they would pick out the same favorites.
> The truth is somewhere in the middle
Of course everything is subjective. The fact we're social animals creates the feeling that there's some kind of rules, but that's just a bias. We're biased. There is no absolute junk art-artefact, because humanity potentially extends timewise to so many instances of different humans that you cannot know in advance if something will be considered "good" at some point in time, culture, individusl brain etc...
> Both of these extremes position will result in bad work.
That's absurd, if someone "conform exactly to whatever the audience wants" then everyone in the audience would be pleased, how could it be bad work ?
Side note. Is it really possible for some artist to forget the audience ? I mean "however you want without any regard for them" is possible, but due to the fact you write as you want, it would be an absolute masterclass if you succeeded to be not cared about by anyone.
But yeah, that's not constituent of what is an artwork or not. This discussion is useless to the artist.
> [clown class]
Okay, but mondialization, hegemony of certain cultures etc... Are we truly different cultures ? I don't think so. But anyway, that's not the problem.
The problem is that you were using this example to justify the fact that taste is not relative. I accept that a group of clown students got impressed by the same clowns. But I don't accept that there wouldn't be some differences if the whole humanity (past and future) voted that day.
> [Australia]
Greetings from europe !
(Hi from Australia!)
> There is no absolute junk art-artefact, because humanity potentially extends timewise to so many instances of different humans that you cannot know in advance if something will be considered "good" at some point in time, culture, individusl brain etc...
Look at the number of plays each song gets in Spotify. If everyone had their own, totally unique taste, there would be no mathematical correlation between which songs I enjoy and which songs you enjoy. We would see a uniform distribution of plays of all the songs in spotify. But the distribution is very non-uniform. Some songs get billions of listens. Some songs get essentially none.
However, if we all had exactly the same taste, Spotify would only need a small selection of "the best" songs for everybody to enjoy. This is also not what we see.
Art has fashions. But many of aspects of music and storytelling have remained relevant across culture and across time so far. We like musical rhythm. We enjoy narrative in stories. We enjoy stories about relationships between people. We like some variety, but not too much. And so on. I'm sure tastes will change. But if I just mash my hand on the piano with no skill and upload that to spotify, I doubt even in the fullness of time I'll ever get as many spotify listens as The Beetles.
> That's absurd, if someone "conform exactly to whatever the audience wants" then everyone in the audience would be pleased, how could it be bad work ? [...] This discussion is useless to the artist.
Yes exactly. An artist can't work like this. It wouldn't work. It has the wrong energy.
Its kind of paradoxical, but the audience doesn't want to feel like we're in charge too much. We like it when performers take risks on stage, and show us who they are so we can judge them. Look at the top rated videos on youtube. Or the most popular songs. Or any list of the best movies ever made. All of them will contain a strong, clear point of view of the artist. Stanley Kubrick and Mick Jagger don't ask the audience what we want. They tell us what we want. (And they get it right.)
---
At a broader level, I think this whole discussion is a diversion. You seem to have argued both that all art is subjective. And that creating works of art based on what people want would be submitting to the "current cultural supremacia". Both of these arguments sound like excuses to me. Excuses to not try and become skilled. Excuses to skip being be sensitive to your audience. Excuses that protect from failure. For what its worth, I struggle with this too. My clown teacher told me I need to "try to not die so much" when things don't work on stage. It is very difficult. If human tastes really do change so much across time, then don't create for people in the future. Create for people right now. The people right in front of you, who you can understand.
The most successful clowns, businessmen and writers all care about their audience. But when things inevitably don't work, they acknowledge the failure with lightness and try again.
That is what the audience actually wants.
--- part2
> [spotify streams]
To me, we're in a difficult position because the only way you have to quantify the value of an artwork (music in this case) is the number of streams it has.
Call me a mad man but it is not rare for me to hate most streamed music and to prefer <none> streamed music.
Yet I seriously doubt I am "musically dumb".
What I find instead is that advertisment, reputation, exposure, a good label, radio streams will get you a long way to become a <most streamed> artist.
And no, that's not "an excuse" to not try and become skilled... What sense does it make to say "Dua Lippa is better skilled than J.S.Bach because she has more streams" (or the contrary) or "AC/DC is better skilled than Alan Vega because they sold more disks" (or the contrary).
> If I just mash my hand on the piano with no skill
Okay, that's pretty sure.
Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".
> Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".
This is where I think we really disagree. If I want to make music people like, I’m pretty sure piano lessons would help me. Theory. Rhythm. Learning to sing. Then I need to practice! Making a smash hit isn’t predictable, but it’s not random either. Luck is a necessary but not sufficient quality. As the saying goes, most overnight successes are 20 years in the making. Watch the early stuff from Louis CK. From Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It’s not as good. They got better over time.
You can learn to write better. To be more charismatic. To connect better to an audience. You’re not in control of whether or not an iOS app is successful. But you can’t make it at all if you don’t know how to code. And if you’re bad at design it probably won’t make it. It’s not simply a coincidence that some blog posts get read and others are ignored. Ask anyone successful. By honestly any metric of success. Practice, skill and hard work won’t guarantee anyone cares about your craft. But if you don’t try? Don’t listen to your audience and improve? Good luck.
I'm happy because there is a misunderstanding of my words here. I am not saying that the ethos of the artist should be "taste is random". In fact the act of being an artist is to embrace biases.
I agree with the Kant interpretation of aesthetics as a "teleologic" thing : there is no objective "beauty" yet we perpetually fail to embrace this and instead, when we find something "beautiful" we consider this judgement as if it was universal, absolute and objective (when it is not).
On the other hand, to complete this, I agree with Wittgenstein when he says that "you cannot SAY anything about aesthetics/ethics".
These two ideas aren't forming any paradox.
> Create for the people right now.
I would prefer :
Set your own dogma or not, but do what you feel you want to do, be it creating for others, for yourself (you abominable narcissus), for your cat, for the banana you just eaten, or for whatever supreme being you chose to believe in.
Choose your audience, let an audience choose you, or choose to be alone, whatever fits for you.
> My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea. Everyone's interpretation of words is different, so using more precise language will just muddle your ideas.
What?
It's easy to lose yourself in a sentence if it's not clearly thought out. Something about talking more to mask ones ignorance, or something like that. Forcing yourself to use short sentences a la simple English snaps you out of that.
1000 words, and 8 em-dashes, me thinks they are no longer writing the blog nobody reads.
I clicked on some random post from 2020, 19 em-dashes.
You do realise there are AI checkers online. https://www.zerogpt.com/ assesses this content as: 27.49% ChatGPT
While this writer obviously had a lot of input into the model, they even state (or more accurately according to zerogpt, ChatGPT wrote this whole paragraph) "The writing process should be highly iterative", so they have added their own flavour into the writing, but it is still, (probably not for much longer) but still obvious when this is used.
You do realize (god I hate that phrase) it’s impossible to definitively classify something as AI- or human-produced?
Great observation! Not only does ChatGPT produce seemingly human-authored output—humans can also produce ChatGPT-style output.
If you really want to fly below the radar you can even include instructions to adopt a certain writing style, e.g.: you can tell it to use a Gen-Z style with minimal formatting.
Why do you hate it? Daddy ChatGPT doesn't use it enough?
It's a terrible side effect of AI that regular people using em dashes in honest writing are labelled as AI.
I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt.
My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI.
It's not that hard.
Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.)
Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it best matches the kinds of shifts our brain does when thinking.
It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes jarring.
As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.
For example, in the article we have:
If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:
[edit - putting comma back in to break up the long sentence] I think this is the only aside formatted like this in the article. The other em-dashes take the place of pauses in sentences, places I would normally use a comma or semicolon, or are used to introduce a list where I would typically use a colon.Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
IMO the em-dash version is way easier to read in this example, FWIW.
I think I took out an extra comma too, which hurts readability.
Personally I write with too many asides, normally done with commas and parentheses. It's a comforting habit to fall into, and makes getting your thoughts out so much easier, at the expense of interrupting the reader's train of thought.
I don't normally notice when I'm writing with asides so the jarring em-dashes were a good reminder to try and edit them out where I can.
I would have used parenthesis for that example, since it departs and returns to the main line of thought so cleanly.
When you feel the need to dive in with a dash (m, n or otherwise), why not stop ... think for a while: consider going in with a colon instead?
Emdashes are useful for an embedded appositive phrase, which a colon can't handle the same way.
Quite - horses for courses. However: you should pick your weapon with some care.
It's okay. Give it a few years and every writing style will be being used by AI. We'll then be able to use whatever style we like as no one will be able to tell our writing from AI anyway.
Agreed. I've used the em dash for well over a decade and love it, but am having to train myself to not use it simply to not appear as though my text is written by AI.
At least avoiding the "it's not just that X, it's Y" style that AI loves is easy enough!
Yeah, just writing in Word (and few other) will get your - turned into em dashes. Personally I hate them. Mostly coz of random editors making GNU cmdline options into emdash and so breaking copying but I also think they are ugly, way too long in most fonts
Ha ha, now labeled as old — when on a typewriter it was common to use two dashes as a fake em dash.
I don't know when the phrase "em dash" got popular. It was probably due to web development, because, unless you were into typesetting, nobody knew what "em" was. We always just called them dashes--two hyphens make a dash.
I would go back to the advent of Desktop Publishing. The early Macintosh + Laserwriter really did a number in bringing esoteric terms like "font" to us commoners.
Some of us found out we were typography nerds and didn't know it until then.
Typographical fun fact: An em-dash is approximately the width of the letter "M", and an en-dash is the width of a lowercase n!
The latter is barely used, but is the right way to indicate dates like 2023-25.
The more you know!
It’s just less literate people feeling the need to out themselves.
It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.
You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science.
If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't even have to type two hyphens. One will do, and it looks at the grammar and changes to the correct type of dash for you automatically.
Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.
<!-- This is a HTML comment for your reference -->
As a hacker, you should have heard of the Compose key, or maybe of Ctrl+K in Vim.
The compose key and Ctrl+K in Vim both assume the use of Linux, or janky 3rd party software. Compose is the same argument I have already covered with Windows, you need to enter a cryptic key-combination into the keyboard, which is not intuitive.
As for the Vim argument, I'm struggling to work out how to use Vim to type on here? Perhaps you could shed some light? I suppose you could yank-put it, but I fail to see how that is less effort than copy-paste, the other argument I already covered.
If you're writing in MS Word, LibreOffice, or most word processors, typing a word and then two dashes and then a word, without any spaces, like--this will generate an em dash automatically. I learned how to do it in Freshman English in high school. Though I was also taught to double space after a period.
To revise GP's comment: it’s just less computer literate people feeling the need to out themselves.
On Mac you type opt-shift-hyphen — like this — and on Win/Linux you use a compose key.
A lot of people who care about typography/grammar have spent a moment to learn to do this. Once learned, you can use it for the rest of your life.
Many (most?) WYSIWYG editors automatically convert two hyphens (--) to em dash, no need to specifically look out for it.
People aren't likely to pre-type their HN and reddit comments in a word processor though, so when you see them on such sites, it's a good indication that the comment came from an LLM and not a genuine person.
Maybe they are using a Mac (where you type alt-hyphen for a emdash)? Or run Windows and have a numeric keypad (ctrl-minus)? Or they run a browser extension like Grammarly that auto-substitutes?
Pandoc has had "smart" typography[0] which generates em-dash and en-dash for a long time. I found a forum post for 2011 where people were discussing em dashes and such. That thread indicates that John Gruber created a Markdown extension in 2004 which was already handling en and em dashes[2].
[0] https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/7.1-typography.html
[1] https://pandoc-discuss.narkive.com/PHmQaAgM/en-dashes-vs-em-...
[2] https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/
The compose key on Linux makes deliberate use much easier (rather than automatic replacement which often triggers when I don't want it). There's a compose key utility for Windows, but has some minor annoyances like many input (mouse or keyboard) macro extender applications.
It's not just less literate, it's also people who feel the need to be amateur prosecutors.
It's the same thing as judging people who wear their hair too long, or wear pajamas on the plane, or who wear pants that are too baggy, or who have children out of wedlock, etc. Some people are deeply convinced that society is on the decline and that they have a mission to ensure everyone else stays in line.
It's been that way throughout history.
The article didn't read at all like AI-generated text.
I wrote with em-dashes before it was cool, and I’m certainly not going to stop due to our robotic overlords (who I welcome wholeheartedly).
You know how LLMs are trained on basically the whole internet, right? And thus pretty much the whole reason why LLMs favour em-dashes, is that they are super common on the internet (even pre-LLMs)