HN Explorer

Ask HN: Do you have more or less than 1Mb text of your own writing?

1 points by cwmoore ↗ HN
Of all that you have written in ypur lifetime, do you have in your possession more or less than 1Mb (180,000 words) of text?

Printed, blogged, work-related, personal diary, fiction practice, emails you personally wrote (not so much copies of boilerplate, or coauthoring when added for other reasons than actual written words).

Asking out of curiosity.

29 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 48.7 ms ] thread
KashifNY
Yes i do, i like to put down my thoughts in writing as well as planning out strategies and such as i found out that i could not find a pen when i needed it much which was a dilemma of mine and so i started just using my laptop and phone to jot down what came to mind and was worth recording
cwmoore
How much more than 1Mb, do you know?
cwmoore
50 years of one 50 word grocery list per week (if you keep them) is 130,000 words, but not everyone writes that much, or that consistently, or for that long, or keeps complete digital copies.
Bender
Some here probably have more than 1mb in comments. There's probably a way to calculate that through the API if someone were so inclined.
eth0up
I just pinged the api to dump my 10 year comment history. Yes, that definitely can be done, in a few seconds and a script.
cwmoore
Great datapoint, thanks.

My “Ask HN” was not intended to focus on HN comment writing only, but since it headed that way on its own, can you share a scriptlet so that others may do more than speculate?

billybuckwheat
Far, far more than 1 MB.
cwmoore
Thanks, that’s a lot. Can I ask for a ballpark figure? And how you have written so much?
eth0up
In case you don't receive an answer, an alternative to whatever they might have said or not have said, is stupidly simple: Just force yourself to write. Sit down. Lay down, stand on your head. Just do what ever you need to do to force yourself to write. Small personal essays are my suggestion. And a tip: never pause to edit -- just keep writing until you tire, and only then, if you must, go back and scrutinize yourself.
cwmoore
Hah! Good advice!

What I was asking was for anyone, prolific at writing or or not, to understand their own output in relation to…L1 cache or a context window.

But thanks! I guess my issue with writing is the later stages of compiling or reviewing. Reading is not thw only reason tonwrite, but it is an important one.

eth0up
If I am understanding correctly, you are also putting into perspective the dizzying contrast of human vs LLM, where the mere context window far exceeds an average lifetime of writing, which if so, yeah, ... interesting times. Before they ruined Claude with 4.7 and 5, I had more than a few extensive, hundred-page discussions which still kind of blow my mind in review. I miss it as I do some old departed friends. It would get quite amnesiac toward the ends, but still beat the hell out of many conversations I've had with PhDs.

On that note, my generated content, or product of my LLM interactions, exceeds 6GB, probably a lot more. Of course, on average, the LLM is producing far more output. But that's ~ two years of heavy, mostly research-based dialog, much of it adversarial, probing the frontier systems themselves.

cwmoore
Exactly right—interesting times. I’m curious whether you could estimate what percentage of the 6Gb sessions were your own writing? Of course you guide the ideas, but this word count is a different question from “how many words have you read?”
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billybuckwheat
Apologies for not replying sooner. I can't give you a ballpark figure, partly because I'm too lazy to go and check. But I've been writing since ... well, forever. Both personally and professionally. Do that regularly, and even in small amounts, and the number of words and pages and files adds up.
dlcarrier
It doesn't take long to build up that many words on online forums, like Hacker News.
cwmoore
Thanks for your input. Apparently it does! There’s another commenter on this thread who found less than that in their 10 year history.
cwmoore
The text content of my iOS Notes, when zipped, is about 500Kb. Some small fraction of that was copy-pasted from someone else’s writing.

I probably have an order of magnitude more than that.

Bigger than a context window, smaller than a useful model, and fits in L2 cache.

senordevnyc
Way way more. I write about that in journal entries alone per year
cwmoore
Thanks for the feedback! Sounds like you are prolific and consistent!

Do you write outside of journaling? Same amount?

mikewarot
I've got 459,203 words posted here on HN alone, according to clickhouse
cwmoore
Sure, and thanks for the ranking context also. I think 1Mb is an interesting ballpark figure.
CM30
I haven't exactly counted it, but I'd say I've almost certainly have access to more than 1MB of my own writing. I've written articles about a variety of the topics for the last decade or two, posted far more on forums than is probably healthy, and have an untold number of my own emails in my inbox.
cwmoore
That's the kind of info I am interested in, thanks.
apothegm
Easily. I probably generate 180k words per quarter at work and another 180k for personal and social media purposes. Maybe 180k/month, even.
cwmoore
Thanks for the info. Wow, 9000 words per workday seems extraordinary.
apothegm
I might be off by a factor of 2 in that estimate, but not much more.

Most of our communication is via chat. Then there are ticket specs and comments. Project overviews and status updates. PR descriptions and comments. Documentation. ADRs. Retros and incident reports. Meeting agendas, notes, and writeups. The occasional email. LLM prompts. Last week I spent 5k words in a few hours just breaking down a large planned project to ticket-level bullet points so we could give an appropriate estimate for roadmapping. (Which turned out to be crucial, because it revealed that the requested timeline for a pilot was too short by at least a factor of 2 even for the most descoped version the stakeholders would accept, and we had the receipts to convince the CTO.)

I’m definitely not spending most of my days writing novels, but all the sentences add up.