I think there is a more important reason to blog besides the 3 reasons listed: to force yourself to slow down, organize your thoughts, fill in the holes, and articulate your points.
That's what I was trying to cover with the "make your newly-acquired knowledge concrete" bit, and was my focus in the previous post. This time around I wanted to look into the aspects that might be impacted by AI (and why I didn't think they would be).
Blogging pushes me to explore things I probably wouldn’t otherwise. That’s been the main reason I’ve stuck with it pretty consistently[1] for the past five years.
Getting attention was never the goal, so the rise of LLMs has mostly been background noise to me. There have been plenty of times when I’ve searched for something on Google, only to land on my own page.
Over the years, though, things picked up. Now, I’m seeing around 30k monthly readers—way more than I ever expected. More than once, I’ve written about something I barely understood, only for the post to hit the front page. Then people corrected me, and I learned a ton in the process. That’s something I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Me too! These last two posts blogging about blogging are unusual for me. I'm working through a book (Sebastian Raschka's "Build an LLM from scratch") and posting about that at the moment. It's likely not a coincidence that I'm procrastination-posting before going through the trickiest bit...
Thank you. One reason I wrote it was to demonstrate how easy it is to spin up a blog where everything is automated and you never have to worry about the infra.
I’ve tried building a static react blog and hosting it on vercel and while it was easy to set up there was just too much styling and configuration to sort through that by the time it came to writing i was pretty much unmotivated. Markdown seems to be the key here, going to try spinning one up tomorrow. Cheers.
I’m glad he goes out of his way to mention that, basically, effective blogging is downstream of accomplishments in a prior arena. It’s about channeling expertise and experience into a narrative, to summarize the core assertion he’s making, and he’s right. It also correlates to high-value Video content, such as the YouTube channel AmmoNYC (car detailing), where the high level of professional knowledge is yoked with high quality production. Very spot on follow-up to his initial post.
Anyone here seen an LLM actually produce a really novel thought that hasn't already been written about ad nauseam?
The well of new ideas, or re-formulation of existing ideas with perspective and prose that LLMs can't match is plenty deep to be worth hoisting the bucket still.
I don't know that I've seen a human blogger on HN produce a really novel thought that hasn't already been written about ad nauseam.
This blog post is itself a good example. It may have the author's voice, but it's just another rehashing of something that a million people have said before already. HN loves upvoting blog posts about why you should blog. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=why+blog
I’ve seen novel thoughts, but typically they are coming from trolls who are taking impossibly contrarian opinions and presenting horrifying morally bankrupt perspectives. Maybe these ideas are common elsewhere though.
All the “good” ideas that can be said have probably been said. Maybe that’s why some people just enjoy trolling: for the novelty.
I don't know which ideas you're talking about, but I bet they are. Humanity has thousands of years of recorded navelgazing (the blog post) and reactions to navelgazing (me) and reactions to reactions to navelgazing (you) and so on.
> Maybe that’s why some people just enjoy trolling: for the novelty.
Novelty is a morally bankrupt reason to enjoy trolling, so maybe you're onto something.
Prompt: Write a totally novel thought about how individuals can prosper in the age of AI. The thought must be truly new and unique. Write your answer like a semi-troll on an internet forum.
*Title: "Start a Personal AI Circus: The Next Frontier in Human-AI Collaboration!"*
Alright, buckle up, folks. Forget the usual "learn to code" or "adapt to the machines" spiel. If you really want to thrive in the AI age, here’s a spicy, totally unique idea: *start your own personal AI circus.*
Hear me out. We’re all aware that AI is taking over mundane tasks and repetitive jobs, but what if you could actually *curate* an ensemble of AIs that each specializes in one quirky "act"? Imagine this:
1. *Ensemble Cast of AI Performers* – You get a chatbot that does stand-up comedy, an AI that can whip up avant-garde digital art, and maybe an AI that can compose catchy jingles. Each AI has its own “act” and you market them together.
2. *Perform Live Shows* – Stream your AI circus on Twitch, TikTok, or wherever the cool kids hang out. Interact with your audience in real-time. Sure, AI can do things fast, but can it handle hecklers?
3. *Crowd involvement* – Use collaborative AI tools like GPT to let your audience write a portion of the comedy script live, or have an AI-driven talent competition where people can pitch their own AI's act. Let’s be real, everyone loves the thrill of unpredictability, and this gives a platform for some experimental creativity.
4. *Monetization Madness* – The revenue streams could come from subscriptions, sponsorships, merchandise (who wouldn't want a plushie of your AI stand-up comic?), and maybe even a VR experience where other AIs perform for people in their own homes.
5. *Building a Community* – This is more than just a circus; it's a community. Teach workshops on how to set up your own act, lead discussions on ethics in AI, and create a digital space where AI enthusiasts can share their journeys.
So, while everyone else is stuck in the grind trying to "adapt," you’re over here juggling your quirky AI acts, creating a spectacle, and engaging people in ways they never expected. You’re not just surviving; you’re thriving in the most entertaining way possible.
Let’s be real, wouldn’t you pay to watch an AI sing opera while your buddy’s AI attempts to juggle data? Welcome to the AI Circus, folks. Step right up!
> Anyone here seen an LLM actually produce a really novel thought that hasn't already been written about ad nauseam?
Personal anecdote. I stopped reading on most subjects that might be regarded as philosophical in nature a long time ago, perhaps in my early twenties.
Most writers have nothing new to offer in terms of our (philosophical) understanding of the world and I think themes are just repeated ad nauseam.
On the other hand when it come to the average Joe, to him it would appear that he is encountering novel/profound thoughts if he keep reading. The same goes for LLMs generated trash, he feels it's novel.
I think that as more people offload understanding to LLMs, being able to deeply understand a topic will make you stand out more and more. Doing things and explaining them are two of the best ways to get that deep understanding.
When I write about a technical topic, I open a new markdown doc and just go. You quickly run up against the limits of your own understanding, which is a valuable exercise.
Exactly, reading and consuming information is one thing but teaching it to someone else is something else entirely. If you're not writing with the goal of self-marketing and content-farming, it's still worth it.
You're conducting multiple parts of a dialogue when writing, but discussing what you've learnt can also be quite a good way of solidifying learning and encouraging further thought.
> You're building up a portfolio of writing about topics that interest you.
This reason resonates with me immensely.
You're not just writing about what you've figured out, sometimes you're actually deepening your understanding as you write! Writing is the thinking process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628196
I have been writing every day at my blog for three years now, and it's been very rewarding for me to figure out what I actually care about and seeing patterns.
I like thinking about it like a bunch of skateboarders lugging the video camera around to capture the moment. (They did this before social media!)
VX1000 was peak camera in skateboarding. The one modern camera that seems somewhat close has been the whatever Lumix that the dudes at April Skateboards use. It's hd but has a 4:3 ratio and looks VX like in my opinion
The main reason I blog is because I work (or am starting out working in) academia and therefore I have to write papers. To write academic papers you have to write terribly, using passive voice whenever possible.
I blog so that I know I am still capable of writing coherently, rather than in horrible academic language.
I checked out his About page just because he mentioned that only 1% do it.
For my writing, the observation that almost everyone moves on is certainly true. But those few who reached out sometimes become new friends. I've never met any of them in person though. It's like a group of friends for whom the connection is that they all read something that I wrote.
Also, funny to now see that when doing research I've gotten AI's citing my own past posts as sources. Maybe this means I need to reread my own writing.
I deeply distrust anyone blames AI for "ruining" their creative hobby, or "creative" career. Mostly because the one absolute, will never ever change, always our trump card, is our individual perspective and creativity. AI is a sorting and statistics machine, it can only reproduce (my personal theory about AI hallucinations is pretty simple. AI has been a well known concept for longer than the Internet has been around, pop-scifi and post apocalyptic books, movies, and shows, and causing a societal immune response... And satire, sarcasm, bad photography, bad art, websites with gibberish or incorrect facts just to game SEO algos (many many many that still have generations old SEO text blocks), all being hoovered up by an AI and the techbros supervising it all are MBA dropouts, and/or marketing bros. All their AI datasets are so poisoned by the human condition, and as universal, AI hallucinations/errors are, it just proves there isn't a single model, or a single person, in the AI space who can identify irony. We may be the most destructive thing this earth has ever encountered, but like.. Causing mayhem and chaos so concentrated and complicated it's impossible (so far at least) to write code that can decypher it.
So yeah, anyways, I left tech almost a decade ago, I'm a photographer now, and if youve put thought into something. Whether it's writing, how a photo is edited/processed, a joke, its a gift you're giving to yourself, and hopefully some of whatever you felt like creating, a few pieces at the least haha, will be gifts to the world :)
There was a good reminder in the Hanselminutes interview with Shaundai Person about blogging for yourself. It was a while since I listened so I'm fuzzy on the details - all I remember is that I enjoyed the interview and there was some relevance to this topic.
Also, blogs are no doubt a major source of AI training, so maybe more worth than before.
I like writing too. Funnily enough, the age of LLMs makes this even better. I wrote a little MCP server (this is trivial with Claude) that interfaces with my blog so it can full-text search for articles and look up articles and look at recent articles and stuff like that and it is pretty good at finding references in what I've written to thoughts I've had. It's a bit trigger-happy when looking up my blog posts (I have to put more in the assistant prompt in the Claude app to get it to stop defaulting there).
The other thing that's nice is that LLMs make the process of writing better. When I cite stuff I can just screenshot the website and ask ChatGPT to write the citation and then check it. Things like that are more painful to write than to check and LLMs shine there.
It really fascinates me how the "other" clientele of HN operates. The world of networking, marketing yourself, creating a resume of sorts through your blogging. I'm just some dude with a decent job occasionally writing blog posts because it amuses me. I'd be pleasantly surprised if a dozen people read them before I die. AI doesn't really factor into the calculus of whether or not I want to continue doing it at all.
I have actually cut back on blogging (partly) because I don't want my hard work to be slurped up and regurgitated by an AI. I write for other people. Not for AI
I don’t think there has to be some practical economic business justification to a) feel bummed out by your creative output getting munged up into something that, for all its better uses, will feed the great fire hoses spraying trillions of gallons of bullshit all over our information landscape, or b) reduce your creative output because of it. It’s weird how entitled people feel to other people’s creative work and get mad when people don’t freely create for and share with them, while simultaneously minimizing the value that work and its authors bring to our society. Despite what many say, the way people receive and interact with your work mentally/emotionally is really important, and all your work being sucked up into these models— often to create commercial products that are openly antagonistic to the people that created the work that made it possible— changes that. It’s sad that AI has devalued creative processes even to the creators themselves.
You could hack the email addresses out of a website, make disposable email addresses and send your writings to everyone including the replies from the previous newsletter with your response to them.
That's no guarantee it won't get slurped up by an AI at some point. Anything that goes into, say, GMail is ripe for plucking. And there's always a good chance your newsletters will get publicly archived on some web page somewhere, whether intentional or not.
I had the same thought. Still, perfect or not, I bet it'll be an attractive option for some.
I guess our gmail content has been fed into an AI of sorts since many years ago. I would surely hope, however, that Google would not use it for any sort of non-private LLM training data.
SV companies have that cycle where they give things for free until peoppe get dependent or until they killed competition. Then they switch to using every trick in a book to make you pay.
Straw man. I can’t imagine how culture could exist without some people being thrown in prison. That doesn’t mean that criticizing a law or law enforcement practice is equivalent to arguing for abolishing prisons.
We can agree that prison and appropriation are both necessary for culture, regardless of their negative effects.
Your problem is the scale at which knowledge and ideas are being appropriated, but my point is that it was already happening a lot but it was far more implicit; now it's just explicit that it's happening because we see the process laid bare.
No, that is not “my problem” with it. It is one facet of it, there are lots of sucky ways to take ideas that have nothing to do with scale, and there are lots of ways that fundamentally mechanically harvesting “ideas” as data is different than just learning quickly, but I’m not interested in re-arguing any of this for the 500th time on HN.
It really is getting tiresome. I guess a lot of HN commenters are directly or indirectly heavily invested in the AI bubble and so cannot / will not argue in good faith because they’re barred by personal interests.
I saw a hint of it with crypto and NFT hype cycles, but this is on another level.
Sounds like that contemptible SJW needs to stop being so judgmental. And it’s definitely rude to imply motives that someone doesn’t directly state, isn’t it?
Do you think you might be being a touch reductive there? Perhaps ignoring factors like context, medium, the economic realities of who makes this “data” and who ends up making money off of it at their expense, the difference between mechanically harvesting data because it’s there and internalizing things through the lens of your mind and existence and making it your own… you know… pretty much everything about it except the razor thin slice of the situation you’re choosing to take into consideration? Any complex and nuanced situation can become cut-and-dried if you ignore enough.
Yeah, and the movie and music industries moved fast to have laws passed protecting their "ideas". The average person has no equivalent protection nor the means to pursue legal action. So opting out of the charade is a perfectly legitimate move.
And in clinging so hard to their 'ideas', the substance has slipped through their fingers and they've mostly reduced themselves to cloning their own movies.
I can't see how it's protecting creative risk; it protects the infrastructure for some to take risks, but that infrastructure isn't being used anywhere near its potential.
I'm no fan of the music/movie industry, but they abide by a set of common rules. If you take a piece of music and use it verbatim or close to it in your song, the original composer must be credited and the royalties shared.
It's still too much of a reach to expect regular people to want to contribute personal knowledge for free, into an opaque corpus that rewrites your words, sends them to someone else and arbitrarily decides whether you are to be credited with them.
I welcome people to steal my ideas. I don't welcome the AI companies. They claim they want me to lose my job. Most people online don't want that for me.
Google gives attribution and maybe provenance, while AI gives you smoke and mirrors. I guess we'll decide if copyright has any legs left to stand on in the modern world, or if it falls as collateral. It's so sad that commercial piracy has hit such an incredible tipping point that even I feel bad for creative people and their bleak economically dead future ahead.
I want to be optimistic, but I suspect what we'll end up with is a legal interpretation which allows LLMs to steal content from creators without the cool side benefit of being permitted to steal content ourselves. It will become legal for an LLM to turn your blog into a part of its library, but you won't be able to apply the same logic to read out-of-print books.
Reading and writing are both intimate activities. The reader holds the writer's thoughts in mind, and the writer knows this and acts accordingly.
Personally, I don't particularly enjoy reading material that was made by an LLM. The fact that so little effort was applied suggests that there is not much reason for this to exist beyond a chance to serve a few quick links.
Since the llm is also running this as a business, I would also point out the social connection between reader and writer does come with some expectation of a reward. Whether it is to be paid in cash or respect is beside the point. People often expect some reward for their efforts and they are not wrong to want that. People are often uncomfortable to put it so bluntly because that would compromise the quality of the relationship, but upending this relationship is really a perversion of logic carried out for purely selfish reasons ("I want what you are making, and I will give nothing in return").
I agree, but its not the only way to use an LLM. I tend to focus my time with ChatGPT on getting it to prompt me on good ways to do things. Like playing cooperative writing games, or coming up with coding training exercises.
>I would also point out the social connection between reader and writer does come with some expectation of a reward. Whether it is to be paid in cash or respect is beside the point. People often expect some reward for their efforts and they are not wrong to want that. People are often uncomfortable to put it so bluntly because that would compromise the quality of the relationship, but upending this relationship is really a perversion of logic carried out for purely selfish reasons ("I want what you are making, and I will give nothing in return").
I often ask Chat GPT to cite anything it comes up with that I want to repeat, and if it cant cite it I ignore it.
I have been reading blogs, books or whatever for free for years often (99%+) of the time without payment or attribution. I have never considered myself to have a relationship with an author, and often wonder about people who have parasocial relationships.
I dont understand how a new tool that can chew on the data for me before presenting it hurts peoples feelings tbh. I would be honored if anything I have ever done was worthy of inclusion.
Sure, but I am the creator of the content. And I'm fine with Google indexing the content. I'm not fine with AI doing it. Especially since many of the AI's monetization goals are to make me, specifically, jobless
>Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.
wow there. You do note the big difference between AI regurgitating someone's content and Google indexing it?
If I put effort into creating something digital and people find it through Google's massive index of the internet, at least they'll see who its by, enjoy it within its context and have the whole thing before them. This is way different from some algorithm mashing what it scraped from a creator's work into its own rehash of a bunch of content.
You can understand why someone might detest the one and appreciate the other?
If I create, I might want you to benefit from it, but I might also want you and others to know it came from me. Not just consume it as an undifferentiated part of some parasitic corporation's AI slurry.
AI doesn’t care, the people using AI care. If you really write for other people, I’d recommend you reconsider blogging again.
Even if you write primarily for yourself (vanity, marketing, client acquisition, there is nothing wrong with that) and not for other people, I’d still recommend you publish your stuff. Not publishing will have always <= effect than publishing, even if AI slurps it up.
JD Salinger took a lot of heat over his reticence to publish any more of his writings after Catcher In the Rye and the Glass family stories. In 1974, he responded to the NY Times, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work."
You'd probably have a better time using something like Cloudflare to block known scrapers than trust companies that pirate terabytes of books to train their models to obey a "please don't" text file.
Is your job super-safe? If so, that's awesome :-) The whole marketing thing only becomes important if you have to get a new one, and then it can become important very quickly.
That's where it turned for me. Originally, I had started a small tech-topic blog with the idea that it would be my portfolio because I really wanted to write for a tech publication, most because I thought I had the chops for it and I want a job where I can travel and work.
Things started off okay, me writing about my projects, etc on a small self-hosted site with zero analytics, keeping things small and manageable in my free time. But the lack of feedback sort of left me I limbo. Was I writing in an engaging way? Were my subjects interesting to more than just me? I had no idea. Eventually, that iteration of the blog got deleted.
And I made another. And another. And so on.
Til I landed on the current version, which is basically me just faffing about with a editorials about tech for fun since I have little time for actual projects anymore, let alone the accompanying writeup.
I still want that writing job, but I realize how much of a pipe dream it is, now. Tech bloggers were already a dime a dozen before I showed up and genAI only saturated that market even further. That, and I still have no interest in working for or hosting a site that is hostile to my reader by being a bloated sludge of scripts and sloppy use of frameworks, which limits my market for a writing career in disappointing and obvious ways.
When I see discussions like this pop up about writing online in today's landscape, it seems to always come down to "write what you find interesting or fun, but keep your eyes expectations near zero" which seems so self-defeating considering how much work it often takes to maintain a blog while you also have to tend to real life. As much as I loath places like Medium or Substack for asking for money up front, I do understand why those writers choose to go there instead of walking my lonely path.
I might be the kind of person that requires external validation, what I noticed is I simply stopped writing online, for the most part. It just feels like writing/tweeting/etc into a cacophony, makes me slightly uncomfortable adding to the noise and discouraged that nobody (no human at least) will read anyway. So I just write what would be blog posts on Notes app and don’t post anywhere…
That said I have also found myself writing less, but not because I think it’s less worthwhile than it was 15 years ago when I started, it’s that the internet feels like it has become less deep. Probably not because the internet has changed but because I’ve learned more so fewer and fewer things tickle that curious part of the brain and feel worth writing about. The things that do feel worth it are so off the deep end that there are fewer and fewer readers who are interested.
Writing on the internet sometimes feels like being a blob of uranium in a reactor where control rods are slowly being inserted at the same time as the reaction chamber is being expanded. There is factually more fissile material out there, but it's no longer as close to critical mass.
I am not a blogger, but was very active on StackOverflow for years -- mostly asking, but sometimes answering. I used it to learn and to create digital footprints, similar to blogging. I blame most of my slow down on experience and age (same-same, but different). After a while, my questions for SO became so hard, they would only get a few views and no answers. I'm no genius, but with enough experience, you will stumble across some never-before-answered problem.
So you actually enjoy writing, without getting anything in return. Sounds like it'd be the good kind of blog (as opposed to content marketing, personal branding and all that hustling). If you were to publish it, maybe one person will come across it and get something out of it.
There's this Spider Man quote I like: "If you help someone, you help everyone". I think it's not comic canon but just from the PS4 game. So getting meta here, that random line a writer for a random video game came up with had a big impression on me.
It's a typical programmer fallacy to avoid redundancy. If somebody else already wrote about something, why would you? Yet in communication, redundancy and repetition is actually quite key. We need to hear ideas multiple times and from different angles before they land.
I used to blog and write a lot and I never cared how many — if any — read it. Purposefully avoided analytics tools etc.
But after the last few years with the proliferation of “AI” tools and the increasing amount of noise on every level I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”. It might be unreasonable but I’ve felt it for over a year now and it’s not going away. Instead I value interpersonal conversations a lot more again. I hang out in discord voice chats with a few people at a time. Text communication feels soulless and low signal to noise in general now.
Anecdotally almost every text chat server I’m on has less active users writing than I’ve ever seen in 25+ years of using the internet. Might be a coincidence but I wouldn’t be surprised if people’s behaviours are changing. Just like knowing you’re being watched changes your behaviour, knowing text content may or may not be fed to or generated by a slop machine algorithm probably changes how you view text as well.
"I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”"
If your voice isn't spoken then it will go unheard. It is of course up to you but I think that blogs and websites run by real people are invaluable (and I'd love to see what AI makes of that word!)
Scraping is a short term anomaly. The hype cycle is already dying which quickly reduces the amount of resources devoted to such efforts.
Where I think that post failed is poisoning the well of anyone ignoring Robots.txt is arguably a moral imperative. That post was concerned with wasting kWh, but ensuring that bad actors don’t profit discourages people from being bad actors.
My «voice» isn’t heard from a trained LLM anyway. Only a vague, blended and remixed imitation at best. As a human I have no interest in feeding that beast.
You wrote your comment in English but used French style quotation marks and made a few minor grammatical errors in your first sentence (won't instead of isn't, by instead of from). Your second sentence beautifully paints a gloomy image with just nine words and your final flourish has just the right level of "fuck it".
If you can deliver that amount of character in a single line in a second language then please do feed the beast. We are all the product of what we eat. The beast needs to eat its greens and suck up some vitamins.
15 years ago felt very different to me as well. Many of us lucked into the conditions that made many online interactions feel worthwhile. The loss of these settings sucks.* But such a creative environment is still attainable and can be found in pockets.
* To be fair, nostalgia around many off these communities can be misleading. Many were never designed to sustain realistic growth nor the inevitable pressures to monetize them. They were naive and ignored human nature, a product of the mentality of their creators or perhaps their participants or both. We know better now. Community building is tricky and worthwhile, rarely a matter of formulaic scaling.
I guess I am in the same boat. I blog because I have this creative urge to write about subjects that interest me, and put it on the web because why not. AI would only accomplish taking away the part that I find "fun" about it, the reason to do it in the first place.
this is the spirit :). i dont mind ppl using AI or not actually. for some it really helps their writing. its what it exists for imho. but i do appreciate a good writer. other then that, blogs are about the topic, not it being written in some uber writing style.
for the writer, id hope like you it gives them joy, because that usually is something which gives it some spirit and joy to read also. its not important at all how things are worded if there was fun to be had!
I’m with you, my blog is a static site with no JS hosted on GitHub pages. Unless I ever see anyone discussing it or linking to it I have no way of even knowing if it’s being read or not. I write for me, mostly.
Yes. I don’t really understand the “you will be replaced” mentality. I do things because I like doing them not because they have some optimum economic value.
Like read the ad copy of old apple or HP or xerox and see how they wanted to help make tools that help you think. Today everyone wants to make tools that help you make money. I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
I love designing posters for thé love of it. AI helps me learn new shortcuts or suggest tools, helps me delete this or that, but essentially - my appreciation for the process comes from actually moving things around myself and having a say myself.
With generative art/writing, well honestly - the author is very very limited in what he can command the NN do and particularly if the author has a string vision.
Same for music - I wouldn’t let AI arrange my Renoise tracks, I’d love to do it myself. Is love to create the VCV patches by carefully tuning each knob. And particularly when I actually know/imagine/envision how it should sound.
It takes understanding of underlying tech and love for the work. Love - very important.
For people lacking vision and creativity, those in a hurry, those under pressure to do shitjobs they hate - it idées may be better to use AI. But not for the real artist.
> I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
This means your are rich, and you can afford the luxury of such mindset.
Exactly. People are trying to make ends meet. They aren't trying to optimize for money making for fun We're trying to eat today, and maybe someday retire, if we're lucky. It's harder than it used to be, so people are looking for strategies.
It's not some morally superior attitude to "engage in peace and happiness" blah blah you're just rich congrats
There is a very large gap between being "rich" and having to turn every moment into money so that you can eat beans and rice. The general point upthread is that for many/most people, not everything they do has to be a "side hustle."
(And there are probably quite a few people here who are pretty comfortable who still look at a lot of activities through the side hustle lens.)
People who are just trying ro make end meets with no hope of improvement do often adopt this thinking. It is that or alcoholism, drug use and gambling.
People need meaning in their life and work that mistreat you is not that.
I suppose I rather appreciate the lot of you who believe I am wealthy and therefore able to find happiness in life. I suppose I’ll have to disappoint you a bit and tell you that I am not wealthy and certainly not wealthy by most standards on HN. I simply accept that it’s my job to create my happiness. Nobody else will do it for me.
> This means your are rich, and you can afford the luxury of such mindset.
The people I know that are focusing on "engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around [them]" are the "poorest" I know of.
They chose to have a part-time job (if they have one at all), they chose to live a simple life (from Western standards)... to do what they care about.
The only luxury they have is living in a society with enough solidarity to allow them to live this way.
I'm not rich and I have this mindset. I make far less than most people on HN do, less than industry average too, but I've been able to live an okay life regardless.
The goal was never to get rich as I realized early on that was improbable and I focused on other things.
I have met a lot of people who live in poverty. They're not all that interested in making money (although they are not necessarily averse but it's definitely never an all-consuming priority). By and large their focus is on human connection.
It's not the default human condition to be consumed by greed any more than it is any of the other deadly sins.
I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
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This hit me hard! Thanks a lot mate for this comment.
> I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
I feel the same way. But I think this is kind of forced on us nowadays. For example, I might want to write a blog post to share my ideas/work/whatever. But it will be used to make money. It will be used to feed my competition. Maybe not necessarily my content, or not necessarily directly compete with me. But as a class of people, by creating more content we are feeding our competition and some minority will make a lot of money out of it.
Maybe I was not doing it for the money in the first place, maybe it was being read by 5 humans in total anyways. But still, I have no escape and I personally find the whole idea disgusting. I will take no part in it.
Yes I agree. But also I just don’t know what to do about it. I mostly try to make things more private. Like I write a newsletter about my thoughts on ai/ml, physics, etc that’s only for my research institute sent through the email listserv. Maybe nobody reads it but also nobody monetises it. And I get an outlet that is hopefully useful to others I’m directly connected to.
It's not that nobody enjoys doing anything just for its own sake—it's the destruction of ways to provide for others, socially. Humans really, really like doing that. The two things may as well be completely different activities, scratching totally different itches. No amount of solo activity will make us feel whole in the same way feeling that our abilities and passions are helpful to and desired by—not just humored by—others we care about will.
This view that you can't just do an activity for your own joy, you have to do it for the approval of other, is the actual dystopia. I wonder how old you are because this seems very much like the attitude of someone who was born in the age of social media.
> I'm just some dude with a decent job occasionally writing blog posts because it amuses me. I'd be pleasantly surprised if a dozen people read them before I die.
That is exactly the right approach. Most of the posts on my blog have low 3 figure hit rates after being up for a decade (the long tail is a joke) - that averages to maybe 20 hits a year. But that is not that point. I enjoyed writing the posts and just maybe somebody, somewhere enjoyed reading my hot take on The Last Jedi or whatever.
I don't really understand the people who blog for "exposure" or money - it seems like such an effort for very little material gain.
While quite a few folks agree blogging is still worth it in the age of AI, please do your bit to support privacy-friendly services (ie. no tracking). Blogs don't /need/ modern web bloat, nor need to resort to adverts / paywalls.
I happen to build a privacy-friendly option https://LMNO.lol (my blog at https://LMNO.lol/alvaro or https://xenodium.com). I'm hoping it's fairly priced at $1.50/month. You pay for hosting and we provide that service (that's the extent of our transation).
There are others services to pick from like Bear, Ghost, Nekoweb, omg.lol...
For me, the #1 reason I don't blog more, especially about tech topics, is that they take too long. Maybe you can bang out a useful blog post in 20 minutes. For me it's more like 4 to 8 hours.
I have to make samples. Since I do mostly web tech I want the samples to actually work, no "here's some code, trust me". I also need diagrams. And, I have to proofread since I'm terrible at getting it right in one or even 5 checks. I write once, add samples, write some more, add images, write some more. Every time I write I add errors, so it always takes multiple passes.
Proofreading is one place that AI can actually be a friend rather than a foe. If you give Claude your draft and tell it explicitly to call out misspellings and grammatical errors only, it does a really good job.
"I started the car and went for a drive on the highway. There were many other cats on the road but it was nevertheless agitating."
Given the correct prompt (that avoids changing your literary style altogether), AI can quickly suggest cats -> cars and agitating -> peaceful, since it's much better at contextualizing.
Proofreading is easily done with an editor. I think AI is much more useful for giving critic and advice on how you write your sentences. Setting the tone, refining the main idea, pointing out redundancies are some of the things that I find very useful.
Sometimes, but you have to be careful. IME Claude and (to my surprise) Grok 3 are really good at understanding your style and adapting their suggestions to match. ChatGPT, by contrast, tries to change everything into some kind of corporate drone.
My drafts usually live for days, weeks, or even months before I publish them. (And sometimes I throw them away after having worked on them for many hours.)
My advice is to "chill": focus on the process instead of the result and let the posta take the time they take.
I've suggested this elsewhere too, but have you considered a mailing list instead?
It ticks the boxes about notoriety—which appears to be the main concern of the OP author—with the added benefit of being more difficult for AI systems to crawl for training data.
Perhaps we'll see more bloggers going the way of a bespoke mailing list.
What upsets me about AI is that the proof-of-value in basically articulate prose has gone to zero. I can still write better than AI, but I’m not sure the remaining margin matters, socially speaking.
That said, AI is less than 2 percent of what has enshittified the internet. It’s a factor, but corporatization and algorithmic optimization have already done plenty of damage even without LLMs in the mix.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] thread"Writing is understanding."
Though admittedly I first heard it from Leslie Lamport and that's who I associate it with.
Getting attention was never the goal, so the rise of LLMs has mostly been background noise to me. There have been plenty of times when I’ve searched for something on Google, only to land on my own page.
Over the years, though, things picked up. Now, I’m seeing around 30k monthly readers—way more than I ever expected. More than once, I’ve written about something I barely understood, only for the post to hit the front page. Then people corrected me, and I learned a ton in the process. That’s something I wouldn’t trade for anything.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/
Love the blog!
So I searched google and lo and behold, my own stuff was among the top 10 results.
https://rednafi.com/misc/dotfile_stewardship_for_the_indolen...
Or maybe you could if you post bangers like https://ciechanow.ski/
Nice blog either way!
The well of new ideas, or re-formulation of existing ideas with perspective and prose that LLMs can't match is plenty deep to be worth hoisting the bucket still.
This blog post is itself a good example. It may have the author's voice, but it's just another rehashing of something that a million people have said before already. HN loves upvoting blog posts about why you should blog. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=why+blog
All the “good” ideas that can be said have probably been said. Maybe that’s why some people just enjoy trolling: for the novelty.
I don't know which ideas you're talking about, but I bet they are. Humanity has thousands of years of recorded navelgazing (the blog post) and reactions to navelgazing (me) and reactions to reactions to navelgazing (you) and so on.
> Maybe that’s why some people just enjoy trolling: for the novelty.
Novelty is a morally bankrupt reason to enjoy trolling, so maybe you're onto something.
Or a most general word 'fun' ? ( yes it's a catch all...)
He’s made quite a living from blogging.
https://blockbuster.thoughtleader.school/p/how-ben-thompson-...
*Title: "Start a Personal AI Circus: The Next Frontier in Human-AI Collaboration!"*
Alright, buckle up, folks. Forget the usual "learn to code" or "adapt to the machines" spiel. If you really want to thrive in the AI age, here’s a spicy, totally unique idea: *start your own personal AI circus.*
Hear me out. We’re all aware that AI is taking over mundane tasks and repetitive jobs, but what if you could actually *curate* an ensemble of AIs that each specializes in one quirky "act"? Imagine this:
1. *Ensemble Cast of AI Performers* – You get a chatbot that does stand-up comedy, an AI that can whip up avant-garde digital art, and maybe an AI that can compose catchy jingles. Each AI has its own “act” and you market them together.
2. *Perform Live Shows* – Stream your AI circus on Twitch, TikTok, or wherever the cool kids hang out. Interact with your audience in real-time. Sure, AI can do things fast, but can it handle hecklers?
3. *Crowd involvement* – Use collaborative AI tools like GPT to let your audience write a portion of the comedy script live, or have an AI-driven talent competition where people can pitch their own AI's act. Let’s be real, everyone loves the thrill of unpredictability, and this gives a platform for some experimental creativity.
4. *Monetization Madness* – The revenue streams could come from subscriptions, sponsorships, merchandise (who wouldn't want a plushie of your AI stand-up comic?), and maybe even a VR experience where other AIs perform for people in their own homes.
5. *Building a Community* – This is more than just a circus; it's a community. Teach workshops on how to set up your own act, lead discussions on ethics in AI, and create a digital space where AI enthusiasts can share their journeys.
So, while everyone else is stuck in the grind trying to "adapt," you’re over here juggling your quirky AI acts, creating a spectacle, and engaging people in ways they never expected. You’re not just surviving; you’re thriving in the most entertaining way possible.
Let’s be real, wouldn’t you pay to watch an AI sing opera while your buddy’s AI attempts to juggle data? Welcome to the AI Circus, folks. Step right up!
Personal anecdote. I stopped reading on most subjects that might be regarded as philosophical in nature a long time ago, perhaps in my early twenties.
Most writers have nothing new to offer in terms of our (philosophical) understanding of the world and I think themes are just repeated ad nauseam.
On the other hand when it come to the average Joe, to him it would appear that he is encountering novel/profound thoughts if he keep reading. The same goes for LLMs generated trash, he feels it's novel.
When I write about a technical topic, I open a new markdown doc and just go. You quickly run up against the limits of your own understanding, which is a valuable exercise.
This reason resonates with me immensely.
You're not just writing about what you've figured out, sometimes you're actually deepening your understanding as you write! Writing is the thinking process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628196
I have been writing every day at my blog for three years now, and it's been very rewarding for me to figure out what I actually care about and seeing patterns.
I like thinking about it like a bunch of skateboarders lugging the video camera around to capture the moment. (They did this before social media!)
P.S., You may also enjoy the similar sentiment in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992159
We sure did! I’ll never forget my first vx1000 with a death lens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXqrq7aMO4
PS: I run skatevideosite.com, if anyone is interested in helping dev the site and skates hit me up!
I blog so that I know I am still capable of writing coherently, rather than in horrible academic language.
Write the post you wish you'd found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43154666
So yeah, anyways, I left tech almost a decade ago, I'm a photographer now, and if youve put thought into something. Whether it's writing, how a photo is edited/processed, a joke, its a gift you're giving to yourself, and hopefully some of whatever you felt like creating, a few pieces at the least haha, will be gifts to the world :)
That said I believe documenting history is important so I'll keep sporadically writing down notable events I've been involved in!
I also blog a fair bit about AI, and there is no hope getting views there without playing the game.
Also, blogs are no doubt a major source of AI training, so maybe more worth than before.
The other thing that's nice is that LLMs make the process of writing better. When I cite stuff I can just screenshot the website and ask ChatGPT to write the citation and then check it. Things like that are more painful to write than to check and LLMs shine there.
I guess our gmail content has been fed into an AI of sorts since many years ago. I would surely hope, however, that Google would not use it for any sort of non-private LLM training data.
So it’s not ok to be bothered by it because it’s been happening a long time?
Your problem is the scale at which knowledge and ideas are being appropriated, but my point is that it was already happening a lot but it was far more implicit; now it's just explicit that it's happening because we see the process laid bare.
I saw a hint of it with crypto and NFT hype cycles, but this is on another level.
I was enjoying the discussion until the parent broke it of with a comment that sounds like a SJW refusing to "educate" us.
ideas are there to inspire and to freely go from one to the next and evolve.
this ownership fantasy people have of knowledge and ideas is a deteriment to human progress.
its a new thing. not an old thing. and its only there for people to take money of others.
do you realy think its a good thing? its a large part of what makes so many people poor and hungry in the world.
This could in theory still apply to machines but I would have to think about it first. It might require a different format.
I can't see how it's protecting creative risk; it protects the infrastructure for some to take risks, but that infrastructure isn't being used anywhere near its potential.
It's still too much of a reach to expect regular people to want to contribute personal knowledge for free, into an opaque corpus that rewrites your words, sends them to someone else and arbitrarily decides whether you are to be credited with them.
Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.
>I would also point out the social connection between reader and writer does come with some expectation of a reward. Whether it is to be paid in cash or respect is beside the point. People often expect some reward for their efforts and they are not wrong to want that. People are often uncomfortable to put it so bluntly because that would compromise the quality of the relationship, but upending this relationship is really a perversion of logic carried out for purely selfish reasons ("I want what you are making, and I will give nothing in return").
I often ask Chat GPT to cite anything it comes up with that I want to repeat, and if it cant cite it I ignore it.
I have been reading blogs, books or whatever for free for years often (99%+) of the time without payment or attribution. I have never considered myself to have a relationship with an author, and often wonder about people who have parasocial relationships.
I dont understand how a new tool that can chew on the data for me before presenting it hurts peoples feelings tbh. I would be honored if anything I have ever done was worthy of inclusion.
wow there. You do note the big difference between AI regurgitating someone's content and Google indexing it?
If I put effort into creating something digital and people find it through Google's massive index of the internet, at least they'll see who its by, enjoy it within its context and have the whole thing before them. This is way different from some algorithm mashing what it scraped from a creator's work into its own rehash of a bunch of content.
You can understand why someone might detest the one and appreciate the other?
If I create, I might want you to benefit from it, but I might also want you and others to know it came from me. Not just consume it as an undifferentiated part of some parasitic corporation's AI slurry.
Even if you write primarily for yourself (vanity, marketing, client acquisition, there is nothing wrong with that) and not for other people, I’d still recommend you publish your stuff. Not publishing will have always <= effect than publishing, even if AI slurps it up.
Just one quick reference: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...
i really dont think its such a big deal. If you enjoy blogging, then enjoy it. Maybe its an excuse, AI, for something that was already in the making.
Things started off okay, me writing about my projects, etc on a small self-hosted site with zero analytics, keeping things small and manageable in my free time. But the lack of feedback sort of left me I limbo. Was I writing in an engaging way? Were my subjects interesting to more than just me? I had no idea. Eventually, that iteration of the blog got deleted.
And I made another. And another. And so on.
Til I landed on the current version, which is basically me just faffing about with a editorials about tech for fun since I have little time for actual projects anymore, let alone the accompanying writeup.
I still want that writing job, but I realize how much of a pipe dream it is, now. Tech bloggers were already a dime a dozen before I showed up and genAI only saturated that market even further. That, and I still have no interest in working for or hosting a site that is hostile to my reader by being a bloated sludge of scripts and sloppy use of frameworks, which limits my market for a writing career in disappointing and obvious ways.
When I see discussions like this pop up about writing online in today's landscape, it seems to always come down to "write what you find interesting or fun, but keep your eyes expectations near zero" which seems so self-defeating considering how much work it often takes to maintain a blog while you also have to tend to real life. As much as I loath places like Medium or Substack for asking for money up front, I do understand why those writers choose to go there instead of walking my lonely path.
That said I have also found myself writing less, but not because I think it’s less worthwhile than it was 15 years ago when I started, it’s that the internet feels like it has become less deep. Probably not because the internet has changed but because I’ve learned more so fewer and fewer things tickle that curious part of the brain and feel worth writing about. The things that do feel worth it are so off the deep end that there are fewer and fewer readers who are interested.
There's this Spider Man quote I like: "If you help someone, you help everyone". I think it's not comic canon but just from the PS4 game. So getting meta here, that random line a writer for a random video game came up with had a big impression on me.
It's a typical programmer fallacy to avoid redundancy. If somebody else already wrote about something, why would you? Yet in communication, redundancy and repetition is actually quite key. We need to hear ideas multiple times and from different angles before they land.
But after the last few years with the proliferation of “AI” tools and the increasing amount of noise on every level I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”. It might be unreasonable but I’ve felt it for over a year now and it’s not going away. Instead I value interpersonal conversations a lot more again. I hang out in discord voice chats with a few people at a time. Text communication feels soulless and low signal to noise in general now.
Anecdotally almost every text chat server I’m on has less active users writing than I’ve ever seen in 25+ years of using the internet. Might be a coincidence but I wouldn’t be surprised if people’s behaviours are changing. Just like knowing you’re being watched changes your behaviour, knowing text content may or may not be fed to or generated by a slop machine algorithm probably changes how you view text as well.
If your voice isn't spoken then it will go unheard. It is of course up to you but I think that blogs and websites run by real people are invaluable (and I'd love to see what AI makes of that word!)
This is the bigger issue at the moment: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1008897/bbe01d846ec5e9cd/
Where I think that post failed is poisoning the well of anyone ignoring Robots.txt is arguably a moral imperative. That post was concerned with wasting kWh, but ensuring that bad actors don’t profit discourages people from being bad actors.
You wrote your comment in English but used French style quotation marks and made a few minor grammatical errors in your first sentence (won't instead of isn't, by instead of from). Your second sentence beautifully paints a gloomy image with just nine words and your final flourish has just the right level of "fuck it".
If you can deliver that amount of character in a single line in a second language then please do feed the beast. We are all the product of what we eat. The beast needs to eat its greens and suck up some vitamins.
I don't feel like giving free inputs to an AI company. They will use it and once they have domination they will abuse their position.
* To be fair, nostalgia around many off these communities can be misleading. Many were never designed to sustain realistic growth nor the inevitable pressures to monetize them. They were naive and ignored human nature, a product of the mentality of their creators or perhaps their participants or both. We know better now. Community building is tricky and worthwhile, rarely a matter of formulaic scaling.
for the writer, id hope like you it gives them joy, because that usually is something which gives it some spirit and joy to read also. its not important at all how things are worded if there was fun to be had!
Like read the ad copy of old apple or HP or xerox and see how they wanted to help make tools that help you think. Today everyone wants to make tools that help you make money. I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
With generative art/writing, well honestly - the author is very very limited in what he can command the NN do and particularly if the author has a string vision.
Same for music - I wouldn’t let AI arrange my Renoise tracks, I’d love to do it myself. Is love to create the VCV patches by carefully tuning each knob. And particularly when I actually know/imagine/envision how it should sound.
It takes understanding of underlying tech and love for the work. Love - very important.
For people lacking vision and creativity, those in a hurry, those under pressure to do shitjobs they hate - it idées may be better to use AI. But not for the real artist.
This means your are rich, and you can afford the luxury of such mindset.
It's not some morally superior attitude to "engage in peace and happiness" blah blah you're just rich congrats
(And there are probably quite a few people here who are pretty comfortable who still look at a lot of activities through the side hustle lens.)
People need meaning in their life and work that mistreat you is not that.
The people I know that are focusing on "engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around [them]" are the "poorest" I know of.
They chose to have a part-time job (if they have one at all), they chose to live a simple life (from Western standards)... to do what they care about.
The only luxury they have is living in a society with enough solidarity to allow them to live this way.
The goal was never to get rich as I realized early on that was improbable and I focused on other things.
It's not the default human condition to be consumed by greed any more than it is any of the other deadly sins.
I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
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This hit me hard! Thanks a lot mate for this comment.
I feel the same way. But I think this is kind of forced on us nowadays. For example, I might want to write a blog post to share my ideas/work/whatever. But it will be used to make money. It will be used to feed my competition. Maybe not necessarily my content, or not necessarily directly compete with me. But as a class of people, by creating more content we are feeding our competition and some minority will make a lot of money out of it.
Maybe I was not doing it for the money in the first place, maybe it was being read by 5 humans in total anyways. But still, I have no escape and I personally find the whole idea disgusting. I will take no part in it.
You can just admit you made a mistake. It's fine.
i think this part gave people the impression that you meant that doing something "for nobody" (eg. for your own joy) was somehow bad/malevolent
You can just admit you communicated poorly. It's fine.
In startup land, the world of innovation accounting for organizations is one attempt to better understand that.
Not even coherent, really. That's not why I write at all. It's also not why I read.
That is exactly the right approach. Most of the posts on my blog have low 3 figure hit rates after being up for a decade (the long tail is a joke) - that averages to maybe 20 hits a year. But that is not that point. I enjoyed writing the posts and just maybe somebody, somewhere enjoyed reading my hot take on The Last Jedi or whatever.
I don't really understand the people who blog for "exposure" or money - it seems like such an effort for very little material gain.
I happen to build a privacy-friendly option https://LMNO.lol (my blog at https://LMNO.lol/alvaro or https://xenodium.com). I'm hoping it's fairly priced at $1.50/month. You pay for hosting and we provide that service (that's the extent of our transation).
There are others services to pick from like Bear, Ghost, Nekoweb, omg.lol...
I have to make samples. Since I do mostly web tech I want the samples to actually work, no "here's some code, trust me". I also need diagrams. And, I have to proofread since I'm terrible at getting it right in one or even 5 checks. I write once, add samples, write some more, add images, write some more. Every time I write I add errors, so it always takes multiple passes.
MS Word would find no qualms in this sentence:
"I started the car and went for a drive on the highway. There were many other cats on the road but it was nevertheless agitating."
Given the correct prompt (that avoids changing your literary style altogether), AI can quickly suggest cats -> cars and agitating -> peaceful, since it's much better at contextualizing.
My advice is to "chill": focus on the process instead of the result and let the posta take the time they take.
It ticks the boxes about notoriety—which appears to be the main concern of the OP author—with the added benefit of being more difficult for AI systems to crawl for training data.
Perhaps we'll see more bloggers going the way of a bespoke mailing list.
The important part of any journalism is to introduce new facts and findings that aren't anywhere else to be found. An AI cannot do that.
That said, AI is less than 2 percent of what has enshittified the internet. It’s a factor, but corporatization and algorithmic optimization have already done plenty of damage even without LLMs in the mix.
It saddens me a lot that people are now relying on AI to fill the gaps in their knowledge.
Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals.
> Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals.
Your message is a bit late. We've had people zoned out in front of their TVs for decades.