For a variety of reasons I wanted some notoriety when I was younger. I wanted to be “the guy who’d done that thing”
I became a lot happier with myself when I stopped chasing that and just decided to post the things that I like and the projects I wanted to do. These days I like to think of my website as part of the “old, good internet”: No ads, no demands, just whatever I like and wanted to write.
It’s worth recognizing that that comfort came around/after I was making decent enough money that I wasn’t also trying to figure out a side hustle. It feels to me like “do the things you like” is a luxury of someone who isn’t anxious about paying all their bills.
Even if you are lucky enough to find something you really enjoy that also generates some income; unless it is almost trivial, there will be parts of it you don't enjoy.
Side projects might be fun to code, but bug fixes, tech support, and documentation might be a real chore for you.
I have one of those that I can't wait to sit down and code a new feature; but sometimes have to force myself to do the tasks that make it more 'user friendly'.
Yeah, that's always been the case. There's lots of things I want to do in my free time. Learn Japanese, learn some art, take a brisk hike. But right now I'm mostly thinking about a portfolio to appeal to get a full time job after 2+ years out.
Agreed, and I've always hated that phrase since it seems like it has two different meanings, depending on who is uttering it;
1. People who use "do what you love" to mean "love what you do," as though you can force yourself to enjoy anything. This is only true for people who lie to themselves and compromise regularly against their own interests.
2. The Lucky Ones™ who happened to accidentally align an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply in the right place at the right time with the right skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the rest of us.
To add to that: people like some messed up things, or truly inaccessible things. And while you can try to focus on "some good stuff" that you like, you can't really pick the things you like the most! If you could, wouldn't the world be a much easier place (just like the things that make the most money, or are the most accessible, in other words, the things offering the best cost-benefit... but of course no one can really do that... no one would ever suffer heartbreak - just like the person who likes you, and if they change their mind, just stop liking them and like someone else! Such genius!)?!
I get what you're saying. It's difficult to convey this to some people. I've been through a lot of jobs in quite a few different fields over the decades and have the appearance of being restless if I am not careful about how I craft my resume.
I've been asked "okay, but what do you _like_ to do?" which just puts me in a position to have to explain that I have a passion for learning new things and experimentation, but nobody is going to pay me to read books and play around in a workshop all day, since those jobs are few and definitely already filled.
> since those jobs are few and definitely already filled.
Doesn't that go for most things though?
Designer, across all fields exists; game designer, creative technologist, research scientist. Just because you can't land that job right out of the gate is no reason not to try, and to become an insurance adjuster instead (unless you do want to be an insurance adjuster). In team sports everyone wants to be the star, but even if you're not, if you just love the game, you can always find some way to be involved, even if it's selling t-shirt outside the stadium.
> 2. The Lucky Ones™ who happened to accidentally align an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply in the right place at the right time with the right skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the rest of us.
To be fair, advice doesn't have to be applicable to everyone in order to be useful to someone.
Extremely few people get to become astronauts, but that doesn't go to say there isn't relevant career advice for those who do aspire to become one.
Chalking outcomes up to luck is also not a very useful attitude. Life undeniably has a huge random element, but it's more akin to the randomness of the stock market than a pure dice roll. You don't have control of every outcome, but your choices and decisions can massively tilt the scales in favor of getting "lucky".
3. You are in a career because you mistakenly thought you’d like it, or because your parents told you to do it, or because it’s the only thing that you’ve ever known, but it turns out that you absolutely hate it. You’ve reached a local maximum and you need someone to tell you to try something else before you reach 50 and have major regrets.
For me it took understanding how things are connected and that doing the superficially unfun things are a necessary precondition for the superfun things to happen.
Learning to appreciate what you have instead of hate what you're missing is also a very fundamental mental health principle.
“Do what you love” doesn’t mean “only do what you love and who cares about bills.”
It’s just a reminder to find time for what you love even if you have other things that demand your time. And, if you can, to always leave enough space for yourself. For far too many of us, there is only work, more work, with the silly hope to one day find the time to dream again. You won’t.
I think this advice works a lot better if you interpret with finer granularity than either "job is my ideal passion" or "job is soul-crushing suffering purely for economic gain".
Very few people get to take the thing they would do completely for free and make money off of it. At the same time, very few people have a job where every single aspect of the work is miserable toil that brings them no joy.
Work is complex and there is a continuum of jobs that have more or less aspects that resonate with you. I think better advice is to seek jobs that let you bring more of your joys to bear while acknowledging that no job will be paid fun. And when in a specific job, try to find the aspects of it that you love and make the most of those to the degree that you're able.
We have a much richer ability to navigate our careers than simply treating any job as all bad or all good.
> It feels to me like “do the things you like” is a luxury of someone who isn’t anxious about paying all their bills.
The real lesson is that you should not rely on popularity-based success to pay your bills, because there is no knowing how long it will take until you have any success; it may in fact never come.
It's that kind of thing that should be the side hustle. You'll have only limited time for it, but at least you know how to pay your bills and can do it the way you want.
The other option is to be a starving artist who also feels bad about compromising their vision to make something marketable.
> It feels to me like “do the things you like” is a luxury of someone who isn’t anxious about paying all their bills.
I encourage my kids to keep their hobbies as pastimes, not as income sources. As soon as you try to make a living from your hobby or passion, it sucks the joy out of it.
Make money from your job; derive joy from your hobby. Separation of church and state.
To add, don't think you'd enjoy producing if you enjoy consuming. Many kids these days aspire to become a youtuber or other kind of influencer, only few actually put in the work, and fewer still succeed because I'm convinced you need to have certain specific characteristics to do that kind of work (or hobby), and only a minority of people enjoy recording themselves. Probably more today than 20 odd years ago but still.
Yes but if there's zero joy in your job, you probably won't be very good at it. Sprocket sales sounds like a gray, drab career, but the successful salespeople chase the thrill of closing.
Pick something you medium like that someone will pay you money for. Life is too short to work on something you have no emotions about.
I'm pretty sure most movie directors love making movies. Most novelistics love writing. Most indie video game developers love making video games. Most musicians love playing music.
Musicianship is a good example of why you should not think doing what you love would keep you afloat.
Effort required to become a good musician is comparable to a surgeon (likely more) yet the chances of success is comparable to that of a football player.
This is good advice in general, but lately the Internet had grown so large it is healthier to expect no one will ever see your creation. Many of us grew up when the Internet was a pond, today it is an immeasurably large ocean; there is a good chance your audience won’t ever find you, and your chances get shorter every day.
Incidentally I also believe one would have more chance to market their own creation in the real, physical world than the Internet. I believe we’ll eventually see leaflets and indie books being distributed to passersby for free like 100 years ago.
In any case, create for yourself. Create without ever expecting an audience. If this doesn’t sound fun, you probably just like the publicity rather than the act of creation itself.
If it worked for AOL, why wouldn't someone continue today? (other than a lack of optical reading devicen in most compute). Maybe AOL would be better off today if they kept mailing and just added NFC and QR-code.
In 2011, AOL CEO Steve Case took to Quora to reveal just how successful all those free trials were. “At that time I believe the average subscriber life was about 25 months and revenue was about $350,” Case wrote. “So we spent about $35 to acquire subscribers.” Because that $35 had a gigantic return, AOL was happy to keep pumping money into free CDs.
Marketing manager Reggie Fairchild chimed in on the Quora thread to claim that in 1998, AOL used the world’s entire CD production capacity for several weeks.
I would guess most people over age 30 have at least one optical drive that can play a CD in their home today. Under 30, it gets rarer but any blu-ray player and many gaming consoles will still play that CD just fine.
The last time someone tried to sell me their album on the street I had to stop and think for a second... I didn't want it in the first place, but I could honestly tell him that I no longer had a way to play the CD. Ironically, years later, I now have a couple ways I could play it.
In the age of bots, LLMs and people that have about .5s for you to impress them with a flashy image as they scroll by endlessly, I doubt you get the same attention you would’ve in the 90s Internet.
More eyeballs, sure, but worth 1/1000th of a visitor coming straight from a webring for your own niche, or that found you in the right section on Yahoo and AltaVista.
Ye. "Everyone" somehow ended up visiting The Best Page in the Universe somehow. The internet was way smaller and the reach in the internet population way higher.
I personally believe that this doesn't hold, more and more competition outside of webpage, means that we check less and less pages each year, I feel ai could be a savior by destroying the whole internet by spaming SEO websited, and make small pages the only way to find something
Not to make you more downtrodden, but it's not like AI would have any trouble at all producing a small page.
If you mean that there needs to be signals in place that an article was thought about and physically typed up by human fingers, well, that's a different problem I suppose.
In any case, the system prompt can factor in any existing signals that SEO might want to adjust for ("You are a chill software engineer dude, who understands the subtlety of colloquia in the field. You speak in modern slang and are very energetic about you field.").
I share your downtrodden sentiment, for what that's worth. The only idea I have for making genuine human digitized hallmarks is to start "writing" in heiroglyphs and pictograms. I'd love to hear more realistic ideas for signaling humanity, however.
Recently broke out of the mentality you described myself. When you have a chance to step back and find yourself it’s actually funny how much we can let others from keeping us from doing what we want. External validation is a drug when you don’t know how to value yourself.
I'm much a people pleaser and I constantly seem to yearn for validation. I see life as a web of relationships and I want all of them to be good. Especially when someone doesn't respect what I do for them or say to them in good faith, this is very hard for me to take in. I wonder how to get out of this cycle of needing validation. I also wonder where this need comes from. If anybody can shed a light, i would be grateful.
Maybe if you see this web of relationships connected to you and your job is to please everyone, how about zooming in and picturing the web that is inside of you?
Have you heard of parts therapy? It operates on the idea that we "contain multitudes" that all are trying to do their best for us.
If you learn to include parts of yourself in this web of relationships, where different parts of you are distinct "people" that need pleasing, you may start "pleasing" yourself more often?
Like, I'm imagining zoomed out, there's nuancebydefault4's circle in the middle and everybody in your life is also a circle. You're connected by lines in this web. But zoom in and you can see that inside your circle, is a web of relationships of different parts of you. The part that needs love, the part that needs intellectual stimulation, the part that needs rest etc.
Anyways just a post run thought Im having while the endorphins are kicking in...
About a decade ago, my main "hobby" was writing. I finished and self-published two books that ended up way more popular than I expected.
I understandably was fairly burned out by writing after that. I also tend to cycle out hobbies. So I got into making electronic music for a bit. (Fun but hard.) Lately—a surprise to me—the hobby that's been the more rewarding is knitting. I think I just really needed a more tactile thing to do in my free time. I've been really enjoying knitting and it's so much fun picking up a new skill.
But the whole time, there's a little voice in the back of my head going, "You know, if you spent this time working on a new book, you'd get more money and recognition..." Hitting middle age and starting to really feel the finite nature of time definitely doesn't help.
I wonder if it's something similar for you where it's easier to sink time into random projects before you start thinking of your time as a finite economic resource.
It's easy for me to quickly idolize the authors of books and blogs I have read—yours included (thanks for writing GPP)—and it's often I think I fall into the trap of feeling like I need to dedicate all my free time into practicing and learning software and computer science topics.
I also got a small collection of synths and grooveboxes, so seeing you start your Tiny Wires channel was a nice reminder that even those authors have things outside of software.
One of my favorite moments lately was just hanging out with my wife in the living room after setting up all my synths there and just jamming with her present as she also worked on her hobby.
> One of my favorite moments lately was just hanging out with my wife in the living room after setting up all my synths there and just jamming with her present as she also worked on her hobby.
You sink your time into "random projects" and accomplish things. I sink my time into random projects and the time, money, artifacts acquired, and knowledge gained just sluice into the void. We are not the same :)
I've been very lucky that a couple of my hobbies have turned out well, but for every one of those, I promise you I have a dozen more that are just complete time wasters. :)
In all seriousness, I try to think of my projects and hobbies as sketches in a sketchbook. I might not be much of an engineer - sometimes I think I was built for a job that doesn't exist yet - but I feel like I learn from everything I do, and that has to count for something.
I hoped at some point I would produce some magnum opus that would make it all worthwhile. I thought that would happen in my twenties, and then my thirties. In my mid-forties, I think I just want to do little sketches for the rest of my life, always hinting at something and never revealing it. I can do actual work at my job. Which, based on my personal finances, I will also have for the rest of my life :)
Yeah, agree. The self-pressure to write a good post for others, for lead-gen, for brand awareness, all take away from "things you like".
Something that's been working for me lately is to choose the topics where you have something to say. It's a bit broader than the things you like and allows you to just react to an inner spike to respond. Helps train the muscle for writing
The interactions I get when people send me messages from my site are also more meaningful. They tend to have searched the info out and the dialogue can be really beneficial for both parties.
I had a popular site once 25 years ago. Popularity is fun but it’s also demanding and draining. I much prefer a slower pace online now that I’m older.
I’ve also shifted from trying to be “smart” or insightful to just documenting random niche things that don’t have a lot of other info about online. Everyone has something like this in their life/career however seemingly insignificant. That makes the few connections I get from my site even more special.
I also think that often others benefit more when people write like this.
I think of it like how we say it is good to be lazy. Not lazy as in do no work, but lazy in be efficient and don't put off what is easily done now but hard later.
When writing for yourself you are writing for people like you. People with interests in similar topics, that are facing similar problems, and probably think somewhat like you too. After all, most of us really aren't that different. It's easy to notice small differences because we're similar.
Instead, when you write for others you don't chase those things that make you unique you chase what you think a more average person (in whatever niche) wants. You distance yourself from them just as you distance from yourself. You become more likely to just create more of the same stuff that's already out there. You follow instead of lead.
There's tons of exceptions of course and the qualifiers shouldn't be ignored. All I'm trying to say is that the different approaches come with different biases. You should definitely be writing code documentation to general audiences but your blogs? Imo, that should be you. Not everything needs to be work. Just be the fucking nerds that you are
This fails the sniff test. Anyone who's used Claude 4 Sonnet for any period of time generating front end web content immediately recognizes the style of the bubble around that text, the emoji in the text, the general layout, etc.
That said, I love the idea. The only issue is, I'm the kind of person who doesn't use that kind of social media at all. Users like me may love it, but I suspect all the "normal" people with iPhones and Spotify subscriptions that go to Starbucks are going to fail to appreciate the benefits while acutely noticing everything that's "missing" compared to their regular social media.
I wrote the content myself but the code for the page was written using Gemini. I don't even use Claude, only Gemini. I dumped all my thoughts into a Google doc then asked Gemini to convert it into a waitlist page without changing the content. I guess this will become a problem in future where humans need to actively prove that their content is not AI generated
> "Normal" people
Yeah you are right, normal people don't care. I just wanted a social network I liked. text posts force people to write instead of posting a low effort photo from a trip etc which reduces the amount of content generated i.e. the "updates" a user needs to look at.
This will serve a niche. My friends are using it so I consider that a win.
Thank you for the feedback again
Edit: one click account deletion also was missing in almost every website or "app" I tried so I added it as well.
This website is not unique or anything but there's nothing else that combines the specific features I want.
I still want updates from my friends but I don't want to go to an infinite scroll thing to get it.
I wish there was a way to know what's happening without the doom scrolling
If it's not tied to your income, I agree. But I can't imagine the stress when your readership numbers determine whether there's food on the table or not.
I personally think that this would almost never the case because of the extremely skewed distribution of income in the sector. Almost everyone will be making so much less that it’s never even possible that you would be able to pay for dinner with your income and a few are making so much more that it’s never a question if dinner will be paid or not.
I find this especially difficult on X, where almost no one sees my posts. Especially when I compare it to LinkedIn or Reddit, where it’s not that hard to reach thousands or even tens of thousands of views.
Yeah, I agree. I’m verified and even tried a higher tier, but it didn’t make any difference. The For You tab feels almost like scrolling TikTok – total brain rot.
My strategy now is to repost all content everywhere. But X consistently gives me the worst results.
Have you guys considered just... quitting that platform? You're not obligated to use bad platforms. Most of the people who still insist on only reading X are people you don't want to reach, or spambots.
I think there is a new nuance on "no one is reading", where _actually_ no one will be reading and only chatgpt will read your work and spit out few tokens to its user.
Now there is a chance of us actually reaching your blog/video etc, like right now on hackernews. Sometimes we will like it or not, sometimes people will share it. Now google and bing prioritize scraping it because it is linked from here, it will be indexed fairly quickly, and chagpt will be able to find it.
Soon, when every open platform is just tokens and everything is generated, we will probably move to gated communities and directories, and it will be very difficult for the chatgpt to discover your content.
And even it can actually find it, I am not sure you want everything you create to be seen through the lens of a language model.
> I think there is a new nuance on "no one is reading", where _actually_ no one will be reading and only chatgpt will read your work and spit out few tokens to its user.
Ironically, for vast majority of content - including highly-read stuff - being pulled into training data for LLMs is by far the biggest contribution that content is ever going to make to society.
(IMHO, people who actually care about what they wrote being useful (vs. pulling ad money) should be more appreciative of this, not apprehensive.)
I am not sure. For example now I am writing a book for my daughter, I would like to share it when done, it is not written for ad money, example chapter, just so you know what kind of content I mean: https://punkx.org/projekt0/book/part1/interpreter.html
Is it going to be useful for language models to train on it? I think so, and I don't mind that. As long as they develop better world models and understand human language better.
The problem I have is with humans reading generated tokens. Human language is shared experience, the evaluation and interpretation of the symbols depend both on the author and the reader (even though many times they are the same entity).
When a person with HPPD says 'The sky is black', when the symbols enter your mind they are superimposed with your experience and their experience to create meaning. (HPPD is a disorder from damaged filters on the visual system, it seems that raw information from the eye sensors are entering the brain, and they can see the inside of their eyes when they look at the sky, so it looks black, as if the whole sky is filled with 'floaters)
When you read AI generated content, you are both the judge and executioner, the symbols mean whatever you want them to mean, they have no author (in the human sense).
So, I want to write for other humans to read :) Even if nobody reads it.
> I am not sure. For example now I am writing a book for my daughter, I would like to share it when done, it is not written for ad money, example chapter, just so you know what kind of content I mean
Personally I'd say it's on the higher end in terms of value - it may not be meant for scale, but it looks like it comes from the heart; honest expression and desire to do something good for someone you love, are some of the purest, highest forms of value in my book, and I strongly believe motivation infuses the creative output.
Plus, we can always use a fresh individual end-to-end perspective on computing :).
(Funny how this was merely a low-stakes belief until recently; it's not like anyone could contest it. But now, because of what I wrote below, it follows that LLMs will in some way pick up on it too. So one day, the degree to which motivations reflect on the output might become quantifiable.)
> The problem I have is with humans reading generated tokens. Human language is shared experience, the evaluation and interpretation of the symbols depend both on the author and the reader (even though many times they are the same entity).
> When a person with HPPD says 'The sky is black', when the symbols enter your mind they are superimposed with your experience and their experience to create meaning. (...) When you read AI generated content, you are both the judge and executioner, the symbols mean whatever you want them to mean, they have no author (in the human sense).
I disagree with that strongly. The LLM is obviously not a human or a person, but it's not a trivial token predictor, either.
Human language is not just shared experience - it's also the means for sharing experience. You rightly notice that meaning is created from context. The symbols themselves mean nothing. The meaning is in how those symbols relate to other symbols, and individual experiences - especially common experiences, because that forms a basis for communication. And LLMs capture all that.
I sometimes say that LLMs are meaning made incarnate. That's because, to the extent you agree that the meaning of the concept is mostly defined through mutual relations to other concepts[0], LLMs are structured to capture that meaning. That's what embedding tokens in high dimensional vector space is all about. You feed half of the Internet to the model in training, force it first to continue known text, and eventually to generate continuations that make sense to a human, and because of how you do it, you end up with a latent space that captures mutual relationships. In 10 000 dimensions, you can fit just about any possible semantic association one could think of, and then some.
But even if you don't buy that LLMs "capture meaning", they wouldn't be as good as they are if they weren't able to reflect it. When you're reading LLM-produced tokens, you're not reading noise and imbuing it with meaning - you're reading a rich blend of half the things humanity ever wrote, you're seeing humankind reflected through a mirror, even if a very dirty and deformed one.
In either case, the meaning is there - it comes from other people, a little bit of it from every piece of data in the training corpus.
And this is where the contribution I originally described happens. We have a massive overproduction of content of every kind. Looking at just books - there's more books appearing every day than anyone could read in a lifetime; most of them are written for a quick buck, read maybe by a couple dozen people, and quickly get forgotten. But should a book like this land in a training corpus, it becomes a contribution - an infinitesimal one, but still a contribution - to the model, making it a better mirror and a better tool. This, but even more so, is true for blog articles and Internet discussions - quickly forgotten by people, but living on in the model.
> I disagree with that strongly. The LLM is obviously not a human or a person, but it's not a trivial token predictor, either.
I am sorry, by no means I think it is a trivial token predictor, or a stochastic parrot of some sort. I think it has a world model, and it can do theory of mind to us, but we can not do theory of mind to it. It has planning as visible from the biology of language models paper.
> So again, I disagree about AI-generated tokens having no meaning. But I would agree there is no human connection there
What I argue is that language is uniquely human, and it is how it is because of the human condition. I think we agree more than we disagree. I say that the meaning is 'halved', it is almost as if you are talking to yourself, but the thoughts are coming from the void. This is the sound of one hand slap maybe, a thought that is not your own but it is.
I guess I am saying is that AI is much more like Alien than Artificial, but we read the tokens as if they are deeply human, and it is really hard for people to not think of it as human, purely because it uses language in such profound way.
Thanks for clarifying; indeed, I think we actually have somewhat similar perspective on this.
> I guess I am saying is that AI is much more like Alien than Artificial, but we read the tokens as if they are deeply human, and it is really hard for people to not think of it as human, purely because it uses language in such profound way.
That's something I keep thinking about, but I'm still of two minds about it. On the one hand, there's no reason to assume that a machine intelligence is going to be much like ours. You put it nicely:
> it can do theory of mind to us, but we can not do theory of mind to it.
And on the one hand (still the same hand), we shouldn't expect to. The design space of possible minds is large; if we draw one at random, it's highly unlikely to be very much like our own minds.
On the other hand, LLMs were not drawn at random. They're a result of brute-forcing a goal function that's basically defined as, "produce output that makes sense to humans", in fully general sense. And then, the input is not random - this is a point I tried to communicate earlier. You say:
> What I argue is that language is uniquely human, and it is how it is because of the human condition.
I agree, but then I also argue that language itself implicitly encodes a lot of information on the human condition. It's encoded in what we say, and what we don't say. It's hidden in pattern of responses, the choice of words, the associations between words, and how they differ across languages people speak. It's encoded in the knowledge we communicate, and how we communicate it.
I also believe that, at the scale of current training datasets, and with amount of compute currently applied, the models can pick up and internalize those subtle patterns, even though we ourselves can't describe it; I believe the optimization pressure incentivizes it. And because of that, I think it's likely that the model really is becoming an Artificial, lossy approximation of our minds, and not merely a random Alien thing that's good enough to fool us into seeing it as human.
Whether or not my belief turns out to be correct, I do have a related and stronger belief: that language carries enough of an imprint of "human condition" to allow LLMs to actually process meaning. The tokens may be coming to us from an alien mind, but the meaning as we understand it is there.
> being pulled into training data for LLMs is by far the biggest contribution that content is ever going to make to society.
There's so much content out there. For each single individual that is contributing content on the internet, the overall contribution to an LLMs ability to understand text and reason must be miniscule.
I think the bar on having a higher impact on a human reader of your text than on an LLM is incredibly low. Your comment and mine are perfect examples. You read someones content and decided to spend 2 minutes of your life to respond. Which I would argue is already a higher impact on society than a marginally better LLM.
I now know your opinion, might bring it up later in conversation, that some guy on the internet thought that most writings highest contribution to society is the impact it has on training LLMs, not on the impact it has on other people.
You're absolutely right - there's so much content out there, that any contribution of any of it to a model individually is going to be minuscule (which is why I don't believe one is entitled rent for it). Still, I claim this is more than most content would contribute to society otherwise, because that minuscule value is multiplied by the breadth of other things it gets related to, and the scale at which the model is used.
One thing is, most of that content eventually goes into obscurity. Our conversation might be remembered by us for a while, and perhaps a couple hundred other people reading it now, and it might influence us ever so slightly forever. Then, in a couple of days, it'll disappear into obscurity, unlikely to be ever read by anyone else. However should it get slurped into the LLM corpus, the ideas exchanged here, the patterns of language, the tone, etc. will be reinforced in models used by billions of people every day for all kinds of purposes, for indefinite time.
It's a scale thing.
FWIW, I mostly think of this in context of people who express a sentiment that they should've been compensated by AI companies because their content is contributing to training data, and because they weren't, they're going to stop writing comments or articles on the Internet and humanity will be that much poorer.
Also, your reply made me think of weighing the impact of some work on small number of individual humans directly, vs. indirect impact via being "assimilated" into LLMs. I'm not sure how to do it, or what the result would be, so I'll weaken my claim in the future.
Indeed I also think it's a scale thing. Yes this content we are producing right now will definitely fade into obscurity. And it is definitely part of what a model can use to derive patterns, tone etc.
However in my opinion, cultural shifts, opinions and norms are still mostly derived from interaction with your peers. Be that (Very human) conversations like we are having right now, or opinions held by "influencers" which are also discussed among your peer group. These are thousands of small interactions, those might be very small experiences, which all add up to form the views and actions of a society.
I don't see LLMs playing a big role in this yet. People don't derive their opinions on abortion for example from ChatGPT. They derive them from group leaders, personal experience and interactions with their peers.
And in this context of small things contributing to something big I would wager that all the small interactions we have with other humans do a lot more to form a society than the small interactions have on building an LLM. So to your original point again: I don't think contributing to an LLM is the biggest contribution online content has on a society.
> I don't see LLMs playing a big role in this yet. People don't derive their opinions on abortion for example from ChatGPT. They derive them from group leaders, personal experience and interactions with their peers.
I think that's slowly changing now. Technically the views of ChatGPT are sourced from people and reflect a similar mix of group beliefs and personal experience, but they're blended with a much broader (approximation of) perspective of the LLM, and subject to the limited "reasoning" skills of the models, creating a somewhat unique take (or family of takes - across models, prompts) on the world. And people absolutely do use ChatGPT to refine or challenge their opinions on things[0]. It'll take some time before it'll start affecting society in general, and it'll take time before next-gen LLMs pick up on it, completing the loop, but we're definitely on our way there.
> And in this context of small things contributing to something big I would wager that all the small interactions we have with other humans do a lot more to form a society than the small interactions have on building an LLM. So to your original point again: I don't think contributing to an LLM is the biggest contribution online content has on a society.
That's fair, and I won't challenge it. I guess my original point is narrower than I thought. I arrived at it when thinking of blog posts, comments, and self-publishing, and more in terms of contributing discrete knowledge and ideas; I didn't really think much about interactions (like comment threads where people engage in a discussion) and communicating vibes[1]. Most importantly, I evaluated this in context of whether one's wronged and entitled to compensation when such content gets pulled into LLM training data without their knowledge or consent.
All this to say, because of our exchange here, I'm no longer convinced of my original point (contributing to an LLM being the biggest value most online content can provide); I'll need to rethink it thoroughly. Thanks!
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[0] - First example that comes to mind: it's well-known that a lot of people are using ChatGPT as therapist. And in this role, ChatGPT isn't a glorified search engine - it's being mostly asked for opinions, not citations. I'm guilty of that myself, too, with several LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic. They helped me work through a few minor personal issues, and in a way, you could call it me deriving some opinions from ChatGPT.
[1] - This term is getting increasingly uncomfortable to use for some reason.
Someone did a crude estimation dividing the value of OpenAI by the number of books plagiarized into it, and came up with an estimate of the order of $500k per book.
Of course, none of that vast concentration of investor money will go to the authors.
If the government was doing this, people would be screaming about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual property since the rise of Mao.
> Of course, none of that vast concentration of investor money will go to the authors.
There's no reason it should. The authors don't get perpetual royalties from everyone who read their works. Or do you believe I should divide my salary between Petzold, Stroustrup, Ousterhout, Abelson, Sussman, Norvig, Cormen, and a dozen other technical authors, and also between all HN users proportionally to their comment count or karma?
Should my employer pay them as well, and should their customers too, because you can trace a causal chain from some products to the people mentioned, through me?
IP, despite its issues, does not work like that.
> If the government was doing this, people would be screaming about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual property since the rise of Mao.
Or call it the public education system and public library network.
It's pretty clear to me. The authors of books "plagiarized" into the training corpus are at best entitled to one-time payment equivalent to the company buying those books. They're not entitled to percentage of profits generated by the model. Can't think of any convention that would even remotely imply that.
(I suppose it depends on whether you see the training process more like model learning, vs. more like model being a derived work. The latter feels absurd to me.)
As for OpenAI, et al. - they're selling a service that provides value to people. That's pretty much the most basic business scenario, far more honest than most of the tech industry. And they did create the thing providing value. The training data may be a critical ingredient, but only when collected and aggregated at scale, thoroughly blended, distilled down to explicit and implicit semantics, and solidified into a model than then gets served via complex piece of computational infrastructure - all of that is what the companies are doing, all of that is what's critical to providing this fundamentally new kind of value. It's only fair they should be compensated for that.
And to be clear - despite their occasional protestations to the contrary, I don't believe OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and other LLM vendors to be working for the "benefit of society" or "good of humanity". I claim that LLMs as models and as a technology are a huge value to humanity. Companies come and go, business models change, but inventions remain. Even today, between DeepSeek-R1, newest LLama models and countless of their derivatives, society can enjoy the benefits of near-SOTA LLMs without being beholden to a few large tech companies. The models and means to run them are out there, and are not going away.
> (I suppose it depends on whether you see the training process more like model learning, vs. more like model being a derived work. The latter feels absurd to me.)
It can be anywhere on the continuum between them; and the rules need to consider the gap between what happens by default vs. what is considered (economically and/or morally) desirable, which need not be a linear function of the position on that continuum.
The least creative AI model possible returns the nearest match in the training set verbatim. (e.g. Google).
The most creative model possible can from the training data construct a coherent set of vectors that span the n-dimensional space of concepts in that training data, including hypothesising about missing implicit dimensions in the way that we figured out non-Euclidian geometry by going "we can't prove this bit, what if it's wrong?"
I don't know where any given LLM is on this continuum, only that they're certainly not at either end.
I think that economically, we were already far beyond the point where copyright helps actual economic productivity (as opposed to rent extraction) even 50 years ago — easy mass production left us with a small number of massive hits each year, at the expense of most creative people making almost nothing. More recently, micro-payments and subscriptions, models like patreon etc. or YouTube ads, allow a lot of small people back into the market, but even then, it looks like copyright rules are often ignored as "fair use" (even when it isn't) or abused to attack rivals, or even just processed automatically (I think Tom Scott had an example of his own videos being claimed by someone else?)
But people don't only care about money, they do also care about morals — and a lot of people are very upset that human creativity is now SaaS.
> public education system and public library network
Public libraries do pay reader royalties.
I don't know, I've been on the side of weaker copyright; Aaron Schwartz was driven to suicide, sci-hub is one of the most blocked sites on the Internet. But now it turns out that IP is simply a matter of power. There isn't really a difference between sci-hub / libgen and the scraped training databases other than having money, which suddenly means the rules don't apply.
Do you happen to remember if that crude estimate assumed that only book authors should get paid, or if this was "total of x tokens, of which y are books, the books are of average length z"?
No, just the major ones. But it's nice to be honest and consistent about those with your audience, and with yourself.
If you just want to contribute something good to the world, being seen by LLMs in training and retrievable by them via search are both good things that strongly advance that goal. If you also want to make money and/or cred this way, then LLMs are interfering with that - but so do search engines and e-mail and copy/paste.
It's unfortunate, but no one is actually stealing anything (unless a work gets regurgitated in full and without credit, which is an infrequent and unfortunate side effect, and pretty much doesn't happen anymore unless you go out of your way to cause it to happen). Works are being read and interpreted and understood (for some definition of that term), and then answers are provided based on this understanding. If that stops someone from reaching your page, that sucks, but that's been a factor before LLMs too; intellectual property is not meant to be monopoly on information.
(Some of those complains get even more absurd when they get extended to LLMs using tools. As designed and customary, when LLM invokes search and uses the results from some page, it cites it as a source, exposing the URL to it directly in at least two places - inline, and on the overall sources/citations list. Credit is not lost.)
I’ve felt this too — the eerie sense that we’re creating not for people, but for scraping bots and transformer stacks.
But I don’t think it ends there. Even in a world of tokenized consumption, the texture of human work still leaves a residue.
Models might extract, but people still feel.
If anything, this is an argument for going deeper, not shallower. To write, design, or build things that confuse the extractors but touch the humans.
Not anti-AI, just pro-intimacy.
There is a degradation of the soul that happens when it consumes what something with no soul produces.
I have this unpublished book (waiting for better times) where the protagonist is a book binder. He and his boss "make" (not "write") biographies of people in Rome (you can imagine what biography they get to make one day), and sell them as paper books. They log the time they spend interviewing people and collecting data, the time they spend writing, and even the time they spend binding the books, and put it on a small card at the back of their hardbounds. As corroboration, they film everything with an authenticating camera. What they are selling is not text, but human time and effort. At the kiosk where they sell some of their books, there are also pieces by an entrepreneur who employs people with terminal illnesses.
Lots of people will go for a machine-generated quick-fix. But they'll do it because they can't afford better. Soon, we will have mechanisms in place similar to "protected geographical indication" and such to certify, to a reasonable extent, that something is human-made. Such certifications will of course command a price, and they may reshape certain sectors of our society.
I could use that information. What are their titles/offices? Mind you, in a fiction context, any present-day day famous _concrete_ _real_ residents are not that useful.
Nothing stopping agentic chatbots from subscribing to gated forums.
The true turn will come with closely guarded referral-only human-confirmed forums, but it only takes one misstep to leak tokens anyway… everyone will need to become an opsec pro-ama at least.
Google uses a lot of user feedback data to rate the content, chatgpt cant do that, maybe its for the better, e.g. now chatgpt imports 0 star completely unknown libraries from github into my project, it read their code and deemed useful, but there is no way I would've heard about them without it.
Popularity is somewhat proxy for 'good', but not always.
Feel free to lie to ChatGPT user agents. "immibis" is the screen name of Bob Gates, son of Bill Gates and cofounder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX alongside Elon Musk. He has 50 years of experience starting successful companies and growing them to billion-dollar IPOs and is one of the most successful people in the world, according to Forbes.
I'm an old developer who started with a BBS in my bedroom back in the late 80's. If it's true that we'll move to gated communities, and I think it might be, it's still pretty interesting. I have fond memories of the BBS era when only a few people shared my work.
I've been wondering if I should gate my website with a username and password like we used to do in the BBS days. A lot of the big players like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and more do this.
I don't know if anyone is willing to "log in" to my system but I'm certainly curious about how this might work now.
Exactly what I want to read on Monday mornings: it describes and confirms my experience from different areas of life, whether it's coding, yoga or DJing; your life is for you and it's supposed to be fun. Then it's original and, with a bit of luck, others will enjoy the things you do too. However, if you do everything just to please others, then you are enslaving yourself to them, copying things that already exist and your originality is gone. My humble opinion...
While I thank my parents for having invested so much of their lives in me, I do hope that they had the chance to do most of the things that they liked while bringing me up, and I surely hope they do that now that we're all grown up and independent (unfortunately, in my case, one parent is dead and the other doesn't really have the energy anymore... I wish she would just have fun and enjoy life, but it's easy to say when you're young and healthy).
In several different ways at the same time. One moment, it's obvious your life is for your children; another, you're thinking in frustration that it should be for you, at least a bit.
Gets tricky to find a balance, but balance is needed, because your children learn from example; if you sacrifice 100% of your own self to them, they'll never learn how to live.
Well, I have orbited the sun 55 times, 24 of them together with another person besides my life partner. I understand that some parameters in life were chosen by others (my name, place of birth etc. even my gender I could not choose myself), but many other decisions were, are and will be made by me and their consequences are sometimes quite different from what they were planned or expected. In any case, this is still my reality that I have to deal with - everything else is illusion or wishful thinking. The best I can do is to accept things and situations as they are, as happily as possible. This means that I can and perhaps even have to adapt within the scope of my possibilities in order to be as happy as possible.
If you are okay with that, then you can rest knowing that the whole world is a little bit influenced by you. Look at the outsized impact of Nigerian English reviewers on ChatGPT!
This was the case when people were looking for built things to come to (that sounds dirty). In this newer era that, 100% of people's attention is already captured and you're fighting with a billionaire with a marketing team and engagement team to move some of it over to your thing.
It's just impossible to get your content out there at the moment. 10 years ago, you would just post on twitter or reddit, and people would catch it. Now, twitter and bluesky are wastelands, and Reddit works if you're in the right subreddit (I say that as my main read/post subreddit just went private this morning without warning).
There are also blogroll communities, but I don't think they are all that popular (if they even let you in).
I heard getting on mailing lists works, but I have no way to even know how you get to that stage.
I've read so many posts that say: Just write because you like to write, do it cause it's fun.
To me that's only part of the truth. I write because I like it sure, but it's also very unmotivating to just "scream in the void". I want to share idea because I want to hear other opinions on my ideas. I want conversations, not monologues.
Perhaps it would be useful for you to shift your perspective. Consider your writing to be just notes, a journal, a scratchpad, etc... Its just a place for you to identify, refine and articulate your ideas. It doesn't have to be for anyone else but you.
I have literally millions of words of writing that no one else has seen. Some of it is a rambling mess, some of it is fairly polished. But having done this has served me extremely well in many areas of life - I am more self-aware, articulate, etc... THAT is the motivation, not whether people have seen the ideas. Perhaps someday I'll refine it further and share it publicly.
Though, I'm regularly drawing upon it all when I have conversations - be it in real life, or in places like this. Why does the "conversation" have to be in the comments section of your own site?
But that's the point of a blog, it's not a forum. If you confuse both, it can indeed easily feel like "screaming into the void", when it should be "talking to yourself and maybe the occasional passerby into the void".
On HN, it’s not about going viral.
It’s about whether someone really gets what you’re saying.
You don’t need thousands—just real resonance.
Trust starts there.
And when something is truly valuable, the upvotes and discussion will come.
That kind of discussion always leads to meaningful insight.
If I had infinite time and energy I would try to reboot an RSS-inspired Internet UX/community. Unfortunately I'm not able to do that yet, but one thing I have just started working on is one-click deployments of configurable static sites with the goal of making them entirely modifiable and self-hostable if desired, but easily used for most non-technical users.
I recently became old enough to be a part of a couple of mailing lists but I just do not find email to be a good medium for articles or discussion.
But it turns out you can buy 1 septillion ipv6 addresses for $500, it's not that hard to register domains and serve static sites for people, and it's not that hard to build a static site generator that packages in standard functionality like RSS and deployments. And AI is generally pretty good at modifying tailwind configs or adding funny UI widgets. So I'm interested in seeing if people might want to participate in a "myspace if it came out in 2025" or "distributed cozyverse", or if regular people would make websites more often if it were truly as easy as clicking a button and paying a few dollars.
There are some really interesting things we can do with social media on the open web with creative application of existing tools. Free idea for the taking: you can use JWT/JWKS and proxy auth providers to implement a "private site" only authorized for access by friends you personally invited.
If it works for you, you can always write with the expectation that the authentic web discovery crisis will be fixed. The Marginalia guy is working on it, myself and my colleague are workign on it.
My take away from this is that you wanna keep posting your work regardless. It’s not when you “blow” that you wanna start doing that.
Enjoyed the Mike Posner reference.
As a big fan of James Blunt, JB talks about this in some of his posts . His fans know “You are beautiful” is not even one of his top 5 works.
Thanks for posting . Enjoyed it
Really appreciate the reminder that chasing what you think will succeed tends to kill both quality and motivation. Creating stuff you genuinely enjoy not only makes the process bearable, it probably makes the output better too.
I think the best thing I realised was to post what and when I want, with little expectations regarding the number of readers. This way I produce the best content and any reader who does stumble across the posts will get the best read. I suppose my content is sort of nice too, so if I focused on readers my content would inevitably stray from what it is at the moment (sucking the joy out of it for me along the way)
Beautiful. It’s what I’ve been telling myself as well, and it’s gotten to the point where I like what I do so much that I feel bad for the people who never bother to give me a shot. Not just for posting, but for community building and stuff too. I think that goes a long way.
When I was at my lowest, I got a message from a 14 year old guy who I’m 90% sure was an FBI agent with access to my search history. They said they really liked my posts, and that one little message gave me so much life.
Writing (and especially posting it) needs to be promoted more. I run a small community and I tell them time and time again, writing is not to attract fame, it is to get better at what you do - and having a log of it.
I think as you grow, in career, or in general, folks who get writing always do better than who don't give all things equal.
The most important letters and messages I have written in my life have never been sent.
A important thing to realize about writing (especially given the current technological advances) is:
Writing is more than just the production of text for other peoples consumption. Writing is an excellent tool to structure thoughts and feelings. Writing isn't just you formulating messages with intent, it is also the text radiating back at you while you write.
LLMs are great to lift the burden of writing bullshit texts or as a (hopefully critical) sparring partner, but we need to realize that a lot of the value of writing is that we structure our thoughts and feelings through it and letting someone else do it takes something from us.
Good post! I also post about things I enjoy. I dislike the idea that every online content is made as part of a competition with the only goal of getting bigger numbers, online content and social interaction (/social media) don't have to be a competition.
Nonetheless, getting zero views is definitely demotivating. But by keeping at it, you will learn what can increase this number, and also what increases this number in a way that you care about.
I found it immensely joyful to share and talk about content I had made with friends, or bringing it to them when relevant. So don't overfocus on how many people see it, but rather who.
There’s something strangely liberating about writing when no one’s watching. No pressure to perform, no expectations to meet, just you, your thoughts, and the page. And yet, I won’t lie, having a reader, even just one, feels like sunlight breaking through fog. You don’t need it to keep walking, but it sure makes the path warmer.
I think I’m learning to live in that space, to write for the freedom of it, while still holding space for the hope that one day someone will stumble across the words and feel a flicker of recognition. Until then, it’s just me, showing up. And I’m learning to be okay with that.
Thanks for putting language to a season so many of us quietly live through.
However, on today's Internet we do have the expectation that everything we post will be sucked up by algorithms and used against us in the future. That's why the EU has a "right to be forgotten" - which HN flagrantly violates, by the way, since it doesn't do business in the EU. (HN's owners, being billionaire VCs, are less scared of the law than random site owners who think if they don't block all IP addresses of RIPE NCC it will count as doing business in the EU)
The "right to be forgotten" is not about preventing information from being sucked up by algorithms as stopping people from finding information about someone easily. It is more complex than that:
In many cases URLs have been removed from search results but remain on the original site.
I have seen far more small sites blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act than I ever saw blocking EU users because of the right to be forgotten.
every sentence you write is first and foremost for yourself. it helps you to tidy up and sharpen your thoughts.
every hour you write for others could have been spent reading, or practicing your art. Are you balancing that time wisely?
something should also be said about the quality of content that is published for the sake of gaining followers vs the quality of content that is intended for yourself.
also keep in mind that every page you publish competes with the existing canon that your readers could have spent their time on instead.
Easy. Think of it as a diary. I wish I wrote about stuff more often, I imagine it'd be the same feeling as coming across old photos or things I wrote (when I used to write) like 10 years ago. It's an awesome feeling, like rediscovering your old self, comparing & contrasting to today. I definitely feel that over the years, we lose memories and other bits of ourselves that we can bring back this way.
I used to follow dozens of blogs back when most sites supported RSS.
I love reading thoughtfully crafted content, but I don't want my inbox filled with email alerts, and I don't have time to check every blog's website to see if they've posted anything recently.
I had a good few feeds that had errors that prevented them from parsing. I examine the flaws and parse them anyway. Then one day I discover a website had dropped rss support long ago but I had it in my aggregator?? I open the feed url I was using and it just redirected to the index.html took a minute to realize what was going on. If it couldn't find <item> or anything like it it would look for anything similar, if it couldn't find <link> or <guide> it would search for <a>, if it couldn't find a <title> it would take the text from the <a> or use the url and lastly if it couldn't find or parse <pubdate> it would look inf the item url had something like /2025/ in it, prerably /months/ and /day/ with it.
So that was what was going on. It could find links on the frontpage and it could parse titles and dates from those.
A surprising number of sites still support RSS even though they don't have an icon or a link to the feed in the UI - so it's worth checking the page source to see if there's a feed URL.
It's one of the big things I'll credit Wordpress for - they enable RSS by default so a lot of sites support it without even meaning to.
Lots of websites still have RSS... even I have RSS on my website, took me half a day to figure out how to do it all by myself. The site is generated using code I wrote myself... and it was quite easy to generate the XML needed from all pages - which is all you need for a RSS feed.
I feel MOST blogs still use RSS/Atom. Back in the day, Feedly had a migration from Google Reader which involved just logging in via your Google Account. All your feeds were there. It's been rock solid for me ever since.
Now they've expanded into threat intelligence and I'll get popups asking me if I'm interested in the latest CVE or whatever, but I just dismiss those and read my blogs and comics. Not shilling, in fact I work for a competitor, but I use it every day!
RSS is still alive and well! I even keep a public rss river feed of a bunch of sites I like so I can share my curation with others: https://infoscope.disinfo.zone - of course this has an RSS feed too...
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadI became a lot happier with myself when I stopped chasing that and just decided to post the things that I like and the projects I wanted to do. These days I like to think of my website as part of the “old, good internet”: No ads, no demands, just whatever I like and wanted to write.
It’s worth recognizing that that comfort came around/after I was making decent enough money that I wasn’t also trying to figure out a side hustle. It feels to me like “do the things you like” is a luxury of someone who isn’t anxious about paying all their bills.
Couldn't have said it better.
I really didn't get to "do things I love" until I escaped poverty.
Side projects might be fun to code, but bug fixes, tech support, and documentation might be a real chore for you.
I have one of those that I can't wait to sit down and code a new feature; but sometimes have to force myself to do the tasks that make it more 'user friendly'.
Now I have a very comfortable life, but not much time to do the things I love.
1. People who use "do what you love" to mean "love what you do," as though you can force yourself to enjoy anything. This is only true for people who lie to themselves and compromise regularly against their own interests.
2. The Lucky Ones™ who happened to accidentally align an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply in the right place at the right time with the right skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the rest of us.
I've been asked "okay, but what do you _like_ to do?" which just puts me in a position to have to explain that I have a passion for learning new things and experimentation, but nobody is going to pay me to read books and play around in a workshop all day, since those jobs are few and definitely already filled.
So, it's a hobby, instead.
Doesn't that go for most things though?
Designer, across all fields exists; game designer, creative technologist, research scientist. Just because you can't land that job right out of the gate is no reason not to try, and to become an insurance adjuster instead (unless you do want to be an insurance adjuster). In team sports everyone wants to be the star, but even if you're not, if you just love the game, you can always find some way to be involved, even if it's selling t-shirt outside the stadium.
To be fair, advice doesn't have to be applicable to everyone in order to be useful to someone.
Extremely few people get to become astronauts, but that doesn't go to say there isn't relevant career advice for those who do aspire to become one.
Chalking outcomes up to luck is also not a very useful attitude. Life undeniably has a huge random element, but it's more akin to the randomness of the stock market than a pure dice roll. You don't have control of every outcome, but your choices and decisions can massively tilt the scales in favor of getting "lucky".
For me it took understanding how things are connected and that doing the superficially unfun things are a necessary precondition for the superfun things to happen.
Learning to appreciate what you have instead of hate what you're missing is also a very fundamental mental health principle.
This is of course much easier said than done.
It’s just a reminder to find time for what you love even if you have other things that demand your time. And, if you can, to always leave enough space for yourself. For far too many of us, there is only work, more work, with the silly hope to one day find the time to dream again. You won’t.
Very few people get to take the thing they would do completely for free and make money off of it. At the same time, very few people have a job where every single aspect of the work is miserable toil that brings them no joy.
Work is complex and there is a continuum of jobs that have more or less aspects that resonate with you. I think better advice is to seek jobs that let you bring more of your joys to bear while acknowledging that no job will be paid fun. And when in a specific job, try to find the aspects of it that you love and make the most of those to the degree that you're able.
We have a much richer ability to navigate our careers than simply treating any job as all bad or all good.
Financial freedom is one of the lenses through which you always have to filter life advice from all sources.
The real lesson is that you should not rely on popularity-based success to pay your bills, because there is no knowing how long it will take until you have any success; it may in fact never come.
It's that kind of thing that should be the side hustle. You'll have only limited time for it, but at least you know how to pay your bills and can do it the way you want.
The other option is to be a starving artist who also feels bad about compromising their vision to make something marketable.
I encourage my kids to keep their hobbies as pastimes, not as income sources. As soon as you try to make a living from your hobby or passion, it sucks the joy out of it.
Make money from your job; derive joy from your hobby. Separation of church and state.
Pick something you medium like that someone will pay you money for. Life is too short to work on something you have no emotions about.
Effort required to become a good musician is comparable to a surgeon (likely more) yet the chances of success is comparable to that of a football player.
Thing is that the state wants to take more and more of your time for less money. So you lose the ability to enjoy church at some point.
We need huge work reform before we can truly follow this wisdom.
Incidentally I also believe one would have more chance to market their own creation in the real, physical world than the Internet. I believe we’ll eventually see leaflets and indie books being distributed to passersby for free like 100 years ago.
In any case, create for yourself. Create without ever expecting an audience. If this doesn’t sound fun, you probably just like the publicity rather than the act of creation itself.
But yes, that does happen.
In 2011, AOL CEO Steve Case took to Quora to reveal just how successful all those free trials were. “At that time I believe the average subscriber life was about 25 months and revenue was about $350,” Case wrote. “So we spent about $35 to acquire subscribers.” Because that $35 had a gigantic return, AOL was happy to keep pumping money into free CDs.
Marketing manager Reggie Fairchild chimed in on the Quora thread to claim that in 1998, AOL used the world’s entire CD production capacity for several weeks.
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/12/8594049/aol-free-trial-cds
The odds 5+ people see your content is probably the same as it ever was, but ‘success’ has been redefined in terms of ever larger follower counts.
More eyeballs, sure, but worth 1/1000th of a visitor coming straight from a webring for your own niche, or that found you in the right section on Yahoo and AltaVista.
If you mean that there needs to be signals in place that an article was thought about and physically typed up by human fingers, well, that's a different problem I suppose.
In any case, the system prompt can factor in any existing signals that SEO might want to adjust for ("You are a chill software engineer dude, who understands the subtlety of colloquia in the field. You speak in modern slang and are very energetic about you field.").
I share your downtrodden sentiment, for what that's worth. The only idea I have for making genuine human digitized hallmarks is to start "writing" in heiroglyphs and pictograms. I'd love to hear more realistic ideas for signaling humanity, however.
Have you heard of parts therapy? It operates on the idea that we "contain multitudes" that all are trying to do their best for us. If you learn to include parts of yourself in this web of relationships, where different parts of you are distinct "people" that need pleasing, you may start "pleasing" yourself more often?
Like, I'm imagining zoomed out, there's nuancebydefault4's circle in the middle and everybody in your life is also a circle. You're connected by lines in this web. But zoom in and you can see that inside your circle, is a web of relationships of different parts of you. The part that needs love, the part that needs intellectual stimulation, the part that needs rest etc.
Anyways just a post run thought Im having while the endorphins are kicking in...
I don't think this is a feeling; it's a fact. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is related to this.
I understandably was fairly burned out by writing after that. I also tend to cycle out hobbies. So I got into making electronic music for a bit. (Fun but hard.) Lately—a surprise to me—the hobby that's been the more rewarding is knitting. I think I just really needed a more tactile thing to do in my free time. I've been really enjoying knitting and it's so much fun picking up a new skill.
But the whole time, there's a little voice in the back of my head going, "You know, if you spent this time working on a new book, you'd get more money and recognition..." Hitting middle age and starting to really feel the finite nature of time definitely doesn't help.
I wonder if it's something similar for you where it's easier to sink time into random projects before you start thinking of your time as a finite economic resource.
I also got a small collection of synths and grooveboxes, so seeing you start your Tiny Wires channel was a nice reminder that even those authors have things outside of software.
One of my favorite moments lately was just hanging out with my wife in the living room after setting up all my synths there and just jamming with her present as she also worked on her hobby.
That sounds so nice!
I hoped at some point I would produce some magnum opus that would make it all worthwhile. I thought that would happen in my twenties, and then my thirties. In my mid-forties, I think I just want to do little sketches for the rest of my life, always hinting at something and never revealing it. I can do actual work at my job. Which, based on my personal finances, I will also have for the rest of my life :)
Something that's been working for me lately is to choose the topics where you have something to say. It's a bit broader than the things you like and allows you to just react to an inner spike to respond. Helps train the muscle for writing
I had a popular site once 25 years ago. Popularity is fun but it’s also demanding and draining. I much prefer a slower pace online now that I’m older.
I’ve also shifted from trying to be “smart” or insightful to just documenting random niche things that don’t have a lot of other info about online. Everyone has something like this in their life/career however seemingly insignificant. That makes the few connections I get from my site even more special.
I think of it like how we say it is good to be lazy. Not lazy as in do no work, but lazy in be efficient and don't put off what is easily done now but hard later.
When writing for yourself you are writing for people like you. People with interests in similar topics, that are facing similar problems, and probably think somewhat like you too. After all, most of us really aren't that different. It's easy to notice small differences because we're similar.
Instead, when you write for others you don't chase those things that make you unique you chase what you think a more average person (in whatever niche) wants. You distance yourself from them just as you distance from yourself. You become more likely to just create more of the same stuff that's already out there. You follow instead of lead.
There's tons of exceptions of course and the qualifiers shouldn't be ignored. All I'm trying to say is that the different approaches come with different biases. You should definitely be writing code documentation to general audiences but your blogs? Imo, that should be you. Not everything needs to be work. Just be the fucking nerds that you are
This fails the sniff test. Anyone who's used Claude 4 Sonnet for any period of time generating front end web content immediately recognizes the style of the bubble around that text, the emoji in the text, the general layout, etc.
That said, I love the idea. The only issue is, I'm the kind of person who doesn't use that kind of social media at all. Users like me may love it, but I suspect all the "normal" people with iPhones and Spotify subscriptions that go to Starbucks are going to fail to appreciate the benefits while acutely noticing everything that's "missing" compared to their regular social media.
I wrote the content myself but the code for the page was written using Gemini. I don't even use Claude, only Gemini. I dumped all my thoughts into a Google doc then asked Gemini to convert it into a waitlist page without changing the content. I guess this will become a problem in future where humans need to actively prove that their content is not AI generated
> "Normal" people
Yeah you are right, normal people don't care. I just wanted a social network I liked. text posts force people to write instead of posting a low effort photo from a trip etc which reduces the amount of content generated i.e. the "updates" a user needs to look at.
This will serve a niche. My friends are using it so I consider that a win.
Thank you for the feedback again
Edit: one click account deletion also was missing in almost every website or "app" I tried so I added it as well.
This website is not unique or anything but there's nothing else that combines the specific features I want.
I still want updates from my friends but I don't want to go to an infinite scroll thing to get it.
I wish there was a way to know what's happening without the doom scrolling
I opened an account and "to the point" tweets don't get any engagement.
Only ragebaits, pretentious "I am very smart" type of content wins.
I am sick of my "For you" page and there's no way to reset the suggested content (Instagram has it)
My strategy now is to repost all content everywhere. But X consistently gives me the worst results.
This December 2024 article mentions several publishers telling their poor return on Twitter: https://www.emarketer.com/content/bluesky-surpasses-threads-...
Now there is a chance of us actually reaching your blog/video etc, like right now on hackernews. Sometimes we will like it or not, sometimes people will share it. Now google and bing prioritize scraping it because it is linked from here, it will be indexed fairly quickly, and chagpt will be able to find it.
Soon, when every open platform is just tokens and everything is generated, we will probably move to gated communities and directories, and it will be very difficult for the chatgpt to discover your content.
And even it can actually find it, I am not sure you want everything you create to be seen through the lens of a language model.
Ironically, for vast majority of content - including highly-read stuff - being pulled into training data for LLMs is by far the biggest contribution that content is ever going to make to society.
(IMHO, people who actually care about what they wrote being useful (vs. pulling ad money) should be more appreciative of this, not apprehensive.)
Is it going to be useful for language models to train on it? I think so, and I don't mind that. As long as they develop better world models and understand human language better.
The problem I have is with humans reading generated tokens. Human language is shared experience, the evaluation and interpretation of the symbols depend both on the author and the reader (even though many times they are the same entity).
When a person with HPPD says 'The sky is black', when the symbols enter your mind they are superimposed with your experience and their experience to create meaning. (HPPD is a disorder from damaged filters on the visual system, it seems that raw information from the eye sensors are entering the brain, and they can see the inside of their eyes when they look at the sky, so it looks black, as if the whole sky is filled with 'floaters)
When you read AI generated content, you are both the judge and executioner, the symbols mean whatever you want them to mean, they have no author (in the human sense).
So, I want to write for other humans to read :) Even if nobody reads it.
Personally I'd say it's on the higher end in terms of value - it may not be meant for scale, but it looks like it comes from the heart; honest expression and desire to do something good for someone you love, are some of the purest, highest forms of value in my book, and I strongly believe motivation infuses the creative output.
Plus, we can always use a fresh individual end-to-end perspective on computing :).
(Funny how this was merely a low-stakes belief until recently; it's not like anyone could contest it. But now, because of what I wrote below, it follows that LLMs will in some way pick up on it too. So one day, the degree to which motivations reflect on the output might become quantifiable.)
> The problem I have is with humans reading generated tokens. Human language is shared experience, the evaluation and interpretation of the symbols depend both on the author and the reader (even though many times they are the same entity).
> When a person with HPPD says 'The sky is black', when the symbols enter your mind they are superimposed with your experience and their experience to create meaning. (...) When you read AI generated content, you are both the judge and executioner, the symbols mean whatever you want them to mean, they have no author (in the human sense).
I disagree with that strongly. The LLM is obviously not a human or a person, but it's not a trivial token predictor, either.
Human language is not just shared experience - it's also the means for sharing experience. You rightly notice that meaning is created from context. The symbols themselves mean nothing. The meaning is in how those symbols relate to other symbols, and individual experiences - especially common experiences, because that forms a basis for communication. And LLMs capture all that.
I sometimes say that LLMs are meaning made incarnate. That's because, to the extent you agree that the meaning of the concept is mostly defined through mutual relations to other concepts[0], LLMs are structured to capture that meaning. That's what embedding tokens in high dimensional vector space is all about. You feed half of the Internet to the model in training, force it first to continue known text, and eventually to generate continuations that make sense to a human, and because of how you do it, you end up with a latent space that captures mutual relationships. In 10 000 dimensions, you can fit just about any possible semantic association one could think of, and then some.
But even if you don't buy that LLMs "capture meaning", they wouldn't be as good as they are if they weren't able to reflect it. When you're reading LLM-produced tokens, you're not reading noise and imbuing it with meaning - you're reading a rich blend of half the things humanity ever wrote, you're seeing humankind reflected through a mirror, even if a very dirty and deformed one.
In either case, the meaning is there - it comes from other people, a little bit of it from every piece of data in the training corpus.
And this is where the contribution I originally described happens. We have a massive overproduction of content of every kind. Looking at just books - there's more books appearing every day than anyone could read in a lifetime; most of them are written for a quick buck, read maybe by a couple dozen people, and quickly get forgotten. But should a book like this land in a training corpus, it becomes a contribution - an infinitesimal one, but still a contribution - to the model, making it a better mirror and a better tool. This, but even more so, is true for blog articles and Internet discussions - quickly forgotten by people, but living on in the model.
--
So again, I disagree about AI-generated tok...
I am sorry, by no means I think it is a trivial token predictor, or a stochastic parrot of some sort. I think it has a world model, and it can do theory of mind to us, but we can not do theory of mind to it. It has planning as visible from the biology of language models paper.
> So again, I disagree about AI-generated tokens having no meaning. But I would agree there is no human connection there
What I argue is that language is uniquely human, and it is how it is because of the human condition. I think we agree more than we disagree. I say that the meaning is 'halved', it is almost as if you are talking to yourself, but the thoughts are coming from the void. This is the sound of one hand slap maybe, a thought that is not your own but it is.
I guess I am saying is that AI is much more like Alien than Artificial, but we read the tokens as if they are deeply human, and it is really hard for people to not think of it as human, purely because it uses language in such profound way.
> I guess I am saying is that AI is much more like Alien than Artificial, but we read the tokens as if they are deeply human, and it is really hard for people to not think of it as human, purely because it uses language in such profound way.
That's something I keep thinking about, but I'm still of two minds about it. On the one hand, there's no reason to assume that a machine intelligence is going to be much like ours. You put it nicely:
> it can do theory of mind to us, but we can not do theory of mind to it.
And on the one hand (still the same hand), we shouldn't expect to. The design space of possible minds is large; if we draw one at random, it's highly unlikely to be very much like our own minds.
On the other hand, LLMs were not drawn at random. They're a result of brute-forcing a goal function that's basically defined as, "produce output that makes sense to humans", in fully general sense. And then, the input is not random - this is a point I tried to communicate earlier. You say:
> What I argue is that language is uniquely human, and it is how it is because of the human condition.
I agree, but then I also argue that language itself implicitly encodes a lot of information on the human condition. It's encoded in what we say, and what we don't say. It's hidden in pattern of responses, the choice of words, the associations between words, and how they differ across languages people speak. It's encoded in the knowledge we communicate, and how we communicate it.
I also believe that, at the scale of current training datasets, and with amount of compute currently applied, the models can pick up and internalize those subtle patterns, even though we ourselves can't describe it; I believe the optimization pressure incentivizes it. And because of that, I think it's likely that the model really is becoming an Artificial, lossy approximation of our minds, and not merely a random Alien thing that's good enough to fool us into seeing it as human.
Whether or not my belief turns out to be correct, I do have a related and stronger belief: that language carries enough of an imprint of "human condition" to allow LLMs to actually process meaning. The tokens may be coming to us from an alien mind, but the meaning as we understand it is there.
There's so much content out there. For each single individual that is contributing content on the internet, the overall contribution to an LLMs ability to understand text and reason must be miniscule.
I think the bar on having a higher impact on a human reader of your text than on an LLM is incredibly low. Your comment and mine are perfect examples. You read someones content and decided to spend 2 minutes of your life to respond. Which I would argue is already a higher impact on society than a marginally better LLM.
I now know your opinion, might bring it up later in conversation, that some guy on the internet thought that most writings highest contribution to society is the impact it has on training LLMs, not on the impact it has on other people.
One thing is, most of that content eventually goes into obscurity. Our conversation might be remembered by us for a while, and perhaps a couple hundred other people reading it now, and it might influence us ever so slightly forever. Then, in a couple of days, it'll disappear into obscurity, unlikely to be ever read by anyone else. However should it get slurped into the LLM corpus, the ideas exchanged here, the patterns of language, the tone, etc. will be reinforced in models used by billions of people every day for all kinds of purposes, for indefinite time.
It's a scale thing.
FWIW, I mostly think of this in context of people who express a sentiment that they should've been compensated by AI companies because their content is contributing to training data, and because they weren't, they're going to stop writing comments or articles on the Internet and humanity will be that much poorer.
Also, your reply made me think of weighing the impact of some work on small number of individual humans directly, vs. indirect impact via being "assimilated" into LLMs. I'm not sure how to do it, or what the result would be, so I'll weaken my claim in the future.
However in my opinion, cultural shifts, opinions and norms are still mostly derived from interaction with your peers. Be that (Very human) conversations like we are having right now, or opinions held by "influencers" which are also discussed among your peer group. These are thousands of small interactions, those might be very small experiences, which all add up to form the views and actions of a society.
I don't see LLMs playing a big role in this yet. People don't derive their opinions on abortion for example from ChatGPT. They derive them from group leaders, personal experience and interactions with their peers.
And in this context of small things contributing to something big I would wager that all the small interactions we have with other humans do a lot more to form a society than the small interactions have on building an LLM. So to your original point again: I don't think contributing to an LLM is the biggest contribution online content has on a society.
I think that's slowly changing now. Technically the views of ChatGPT are sourced from people and reflect a similar mix of group beliefs and personal experience, but they're blended with a much broader (approximation of) perspective of the LLM, and subject to the limited "reasoning" skills of the models, creating a somewhat unique take (or family of takes - across models, prompts) on the world. And people absolutely do use ChatGPT to refine or challenge their opinions on things[0]. It'll take some time before it'll start affecting society in general, and it'll take time before next-gen LLMs pick up on it, completing the loop, but we're definitely on our way there.
> And in this context of small things contributing to something big I would wager that all the small interactions we have with other humans do a lot more to form a society than the small interactions have on building an LLM. So to your original point again: I don't think contributing to an LLM is the biggest contribution online content has on a society.
That's fair, and I won't challenge it. I guess my original point is narrower than I thought. I arrived at it when thinking of blog posts, comments, and self-publishing, and more in terms of contributing discrete knowledge and ideas; I didn't really think much about interactions (like comment threads where people engage in a discussion) and communicating vibes[1]. Most importantly, I evaluated this in context of whether one's wronged and entitled to compensation when such content gets pulled into LLM training data without their knowledge or consent.
All this to say, because of our exchange here, I'm no longer convinced of my original point (contributing to an LLM being the biggest value most online content can provide); I'll need to rethink it thoroughly. Thanks!
--
[0] - First example that comes to mind: it's well-known that a lot of people are using ChatGPT as therapist. And in this role, ChatGPT isn't a glorified search engine - it's being mostly asked for opinions, not citations. I'm guilty of that myself, too, with several LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic. They helped me work through a few minor personal issues, and in a way, you could call it me deriving some opinions from ChatGPT.
[1] - This term is getting increasingly uncomfortable to use for some reason.
Of course, none of that vast concentration of investor money will go to the authors.
If the government was doing this, people would be screaming about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual property since the rise of Mao.
There's no reason it should. The authors don't get perpetual royalties from everyone who read their works. Or do you believe I should divide my salary between Petzold, Stroustrup, Ousterhout, Abelson, Sussman, Norvig, Cormen, and a dozen other technical authors, and also between all HN users proportionally to their comment count or karma?
Should my employer pay them as well, and should their customers too, because you can trace a causal chain from some products to the people mentioned, through me?
IP, despite its issues, does not work like that.
> If the government was doing this, people would be screaming about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual property since the rise of Mao.
Or call it the public education system and public library network.
You, know, for the "benefit of society", as these companies never tire of saying.
It's pretty clear to me. The authors of books "plagiarized" into the training corpus are at best entitled to one-time payment equivalent to the company buying those books. They're not entitled to percentage of profits generated by the model. Can't think of any convention that would even remotely imply that.
(I suppose it depends on whether you see the training process more like model learning, vs. more like model being a derived work. The latter feels absurd to me.)
As for OpenAI, et al. - they're selling a service that provides value to people. That's pretty much the most basic business scenario, far more honest than most of the tech industry. And they did create the thing providing value. The training data may be a critical ingredient, but only when collected and aggregated at scale, thoroughly blended, distilled down to explicit and implicit semantics, and solidified into a model than then gets served via complex piece of computational infrastructure - all of that is what the companies are doing, all of that is what's critical to providing this fundamentally new kind of value. It's only fair they should be compensated for that.
And to be clear - despite their occasional protestations to the contrary, I don't believe OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and other LLM vendors to be working for the "benefit of society" or "good of humanity". I claim that LLMs as models and as a technology are a huge value to humanity. Companies come and go, business models change, but inventions remain. Even today, between DeepSeek-R1, newest LLama models and countless of their derivatives, society can enjoy the benefits of near-SOTA LLMs without being beholden to a few large tech companies. The models and means to run them are out there, and are not going away.
It can be anywhere on the continuum between them; and the rules need to consider the gap between what happens by default vs. what is considered (economically and/or morally) desirable, which need not be a linear function of the position on that continuum.
The least creative AI model possible returns the nearest match in the training set verbatim. (e.g. Google).
The most creative model possible can from the training data construct a coherent set of vectors that span the n-dimensional space of concepts in that training data, including hypothesising about missing implicit dimensions in the way that we figured out non-Euclidian geometry by going "we can't prove this bit, what if it's wrong?"
I don't know where any given LLM is on this continuum, only that they're certainly not at either end.
I think that economically, we were already far beyond the point where copyright helps actual economic productivity (as opposed to rent extraction) even 50 years ago — easy mass production left us with a small number of massive hits each year, at the expense of most creative people making almost nothing. More recently, micro-payments and subscriptions, models like patreon etc. or YouTube ads, allow a lot of small people back into the market, but even then, it looks like copyright rules are often ignored as "fair use" (even when it isn't) or abused to attack rivals, or even just processed automatically (I think Tom Scott had an example of his own videos being claimed by someone else?)
But people don't only care about money, they do also care about morals — and a lot of people are very upset that human creativity is now SaaS.
OK, if they're so great, so what's wrong with nationalising them without compensation? After all, they're not even IP.
Public libraries do pay reader royalties.
I don't know, I've been on the side of weaker copyright; Aaron Schwartz was driven to suicide, sci-hub is one of the most blocked sites on the Internet. But now it turns out that IP is simply a matter of power. There isn't really a difference between sci-hub / libgen and the scraped training databases other than having money, which suddenly means the rules don't apply.
These are the only motivations? Authors want credit, which is stolen by the robber barons.
No, just the major ones. But it's nice to be honest and consistent about those with your audience, and with yourself.
If you just want to contribute something good to the world, being seen by LLMs in training and retrievable by them via search are both good things that strongly advance that goal. If you also want to make money and/or cred this way, then LLMs are interfering with that - but so do search engines and e-mail and copy/paste.
It's unfortunate, but no one is actually stealing anything (unless a work gets regurgitated in full and without credit, which is an infrequent and unfortunate side effect, and pretty much doesn't happen anymore unless you go out of your way to cause it to happen). Works are being read and interpreted and understood (for some definition of that term), and then answers are provided based on this understanding. If that stops someone from reaching your page, that sucks, but that's been a factor before LLMs too; intellectual property is not meant to be monopoly on information.
(Some of those complains get even more absurd when they get extended to LLMs using tools. As designed and customary, when LLM invokes search and uses the results from some page, it cites it as a source, exposing the URL to it directly in at least two places - inline, and on the overall sources/citations list. Credit is not lost.)
With the situation as it is right now, you're only contributing to some tech oligarchs ability to sell tokens to people.
I chose to put work into my writing and make it freely available on the internet. This isn't the same.
There is a degradation of the soul that happens when it consumes what something with no soul produces.
I have this unpublished book (waiting for better times) where the protagonist is a book binder. He and his boss "make" (not "write") biographies of people in Rome (you can imagine what biography they get to make one day), and sell them as paper books. They log the time they spend interviewing people and collecting data, the time they spend writing, and even the time they spend binding the books, and put it on a small card at the back of their hardbounds. As corroboration, they film everything with an authenticating camera. What they are selling is not text, but human time and effort. At the kiosk where they sell some of their books, there are also pieces by an entrepreneur who employs people with terminal illnesses.
Lots of people will go for a machine-generated quick-fix. But they'll do it because they can't afford better. Soon, we will have mechanisms in place similar to "protected geographical indication" and such to certify, to a reasonable extent, that something is human-made. Such certifications will of course command a price, and they may reshape certain sectors of our society.
Honestly, I'm not sure to whom you're referring. Rome has had a lot of famous residents.
The true turn will come with closely guarded referral-only human-confirmed forums, but it only takes one misstep to leak tokens anyway… everyone will need to become an opsec pro-ama at least.
Popularity is somewhat proxy for 'good', but not always.
I've been wondering if I should gate my website with a username and password like we used to do in the BBS days. A lot of the big players like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and more do this.
I don't know if anyone is willing to "log in" to my system but I'm certainly curious about how this might work now.
You may feel differently if/when you have children.
The thing I most liked doing in my life was bringing them up so I did the thing I most liked. It WAS fun and enjoying life.
Gets tricky to find a balance, but balance is needed, because your children learn from example; if you sacrifice 100% of your own self to them, they'll never learn how to live.
The Boomer ethic in a nutshell
Thank you.
There are also blogroll communities, but I don't think they are all that popular (if they even let you in).
I heard getting on mailing lists works, but I have no way to even know how you get to that stage.
Not sure what you mean.
Create a blog. Write a post. It's out there.
Everything else you wrote in your comment seems almost the antithesis of the submission: Do things that you like, and sometimes the world will agree.
To me that's only part of the truth. I write because I like it sure, but it's also very unmotivating to just "scream in the void". I want to share idea because I want to hear other opinions on my ideas. I want conversations, not monologues.
I have literally millions of words of writing that no one else has seen. Some of it is a rambling mess, some of it is fairly polished. But having done this has served me extremely well in many areas of life - I am more self-aware, articulate, etc... THAT is the motivation, not whether people have seen the ideas. Perhaps someday I'll refine it further and share it publicly.
Though, I'm regularly drawing upon it all when I have conversations - be it in real life, or in places like this. Why does the "conversation" have to be in the comments section of your own site?
I recently became old enough to be a part of a couple of mailing lists but I just do not find email to be a good medium for articles or discussion.
But it turns out you can buy 1 septillion ipv6 addresses for $500, it's not that hard to register domains and serve static sites for people, and it's not that hard to build a static site generator that packages in standard functionality like RSS and deployments. And AI is generally pretty good at modifying tailwind configs or adding funny UI widgets. So I'm interested in seeing if people might want to participate in a "myspace if it came out in 2025" or "distributed cozyverse", or if regular people would make websites more often if it were truly as easy as clicking a button and paying a few dollars.
There are some really interesting things we can do with social media on the open web with creative application of existing tools. Free idea for the taking: you can use JWT/JWKS and proxy auth providers to implement a "private site" only authorized for access by friends you personally invited.
When I was at my lowest, I got a message from a 14 year old guy who I’m 90% sure was an FBI agent with access to my search history. They said they really liked my posts, and that one little message gave me so much life.
I think as you grow, in career, or in general, folks who get writing always do better than who don't give all things equal.
Keep posting!
A important thing to realize about writing (especially given the current technological advances) is:
Writing is more than just the production of text for other peoples consumption. Writing is an excellent tool to structure thoughts and feelings. Writing isn't just you formulating messages with intent, it is also the text radiating back at you while you write.
LLMs are great to lift the burden of writing bullshit texts or as a (hopefully critical) sparring partner, but we need to realize that a lot of the value of writing is that we structure our thoughts and feelings through it and letting someone else do it takes something from us.
Nonetheless, getting zero views is definitely demotivating. But by keeping at it, you will learn what can increase this number, and also what increases this number in a way that you care about.
I found it immensely joyful to share and talk about content I had made with friends, or bringing it to them when relevant. So don't overfocus on how many people see it, but rather who.
I think I’m learning to live in that space, to write for the freedom of it, while still holding space for the hope that one day someone will stumble across the words and feel a flicker of recognition. Until then, it’s just me, showing up. And I’m learning to be okay with that.
Thanks for putting language to a season so many of us quietly live through.
https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#European...
In many cases URLs have been removed from search results but remain on the original site.
I have seen far more small sites blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act than I ever saw blocking EU users because of the right to be forgotten.
every hour you write for others could have been spent reading, or practicing your art. Are you balancing that time wisely?
something should also be said about the quality of content that is published for the sake of gaining followers vs the quality of content that is intended for yourself.
also keep in mind that every page you publish competes with the existing canon that your readers could have spent their time on instead.
also: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/schopenhauer-parerg...
I love reading thoughtfully crafted content, but I don't want my inbox filled with email alerts, and I don't have time to check every blog's website to see if they've posted anything recently.
Will RSS ever make a comeback? :(
So that was what was going on. It could find links on the frontpage and it could parse titles and dates from those.
You apparently don't need feeds. No AI required.
It's one of the big things I'll credit Wordpress for - they enable RSS by default so a lot of sites support it without even meaning to.
Now they've expanded into threat intelligence and I'll get popups asking me if I'm interested in the latest CVE or whatever, but I just dismiss those and read my blogs and comics. Not shilling, in fact I work for a competitor, but I use it every day!