It really fascinates me how the "other" clientele of HN operates. The world of networking, marketing yourself, creating a resume of sorts through your blogging. I'm just some dude with a decent job occasionally writing blog posts because it amuses me. I'd be pleasantly surprised if a dozen people read them before I die. AI doesn't really factor into the calculus of whether or not I want to continue doing it at all.
Yes. I don’t really understand the “you will be replaced” mentality. I do things because I like doing them not because they have some optimum economic value.
Like read the ad copy of old apple or HP or xerox and see how they wanted to help make tools that help you think. Today everyone wants to make tools that help you make money. I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
I love designing posters for thé love of it. AI helps me learn new shortcuts or suggest tools, helps me delete this or that, but essentially - my appreciation for the process comes from actually moving things around myself and having a say myself.
With generative art/writing, well honestly - the author is very very limited in what he can command the NN do and particularly if the author has a string vision.
Same for music - I wouldn’t let AI arrange my Renoise tracks, I’d love to do it myself. Is love to create the VCV patches by carefully tuning each knob. And particularly when I actually know/imagine/envision how it should sound.
It takes understanding of underlying tech and love for the work. Love - very important.
For people lacking vision and creativity, those in a hurry, those under pressure to do shitjobs they hate - it idées may be better to use AI. But not for the real artist.
I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
```
This hit me hard! Thanks a lot mate for this comment.
> I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
I feel the same way. But I think this is kind of forced on us nowadays. For example, I might want to write a blog post to share my ideas/work/whatever. But it will be used to make money. It will be used to feed my competition. Maybe not necessarily my content, or not necessarily directly compete with me. But as a class of people, by creating more content we are feeding our competition and some minority will make a lot of money out of it.
Maybe I was not doing it for the money in the first place, maybe it was being read by 5 humans in total anyways. But still, I have no escape and I personally find the whole idea disgusting. I will take no part in it.
> I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
This means your are rich, and you can afford the luxury of such mindset.
I might be the kind of person that requires external validation, what I noticed is I simply stopped writing online, for the most part. It just feels like writing/tweeting/etc into a cacophony, makes me slightly uncomfortable adding to the noise and discouraged that nobody (no human at least) will read anyway. So I just write what would be blog posts on Notes app and don’t post anywhere…
That said I have also found myself writing less, but not because I think it’s less worthwhile than it was 15 years ago when I started, it’s that the internet feels like it has become less deep. Probably not because the internet has changed but because I’ve learned more so fewer and fewer things tickle that curious part of the brain and feel worth writing about. The things that do feel worth it are so off the deep end that there are fewer and fewer readers who are interested.
So you actually enjoy writing, without getting anything in return. Sounds like it'd be the good kind of blog (as opposed to content marketing, personal branding and all that hustling). If you were to publish it, maybe one person will come across it and get something out of it.
There's this Spider Man quote I like: "If you help someone, you help everyone". I think it's not comic canon but just from the PS4 game. So getting meta here, that random line a writer for a random video game came up with had a big impression on me.
It's a typical programmer fallacy to avoid redundancy. If somebody else already wrote about something, why would you? Yet in communication, redundancy and repetition is actually quite key. We need to hear ideas multiple times and from different angles before they land.
I used to blog and write a lot and I never cared how many — if any — read it. Purposefully avoided analytics tools etc.
But after the last few years with the proliferation of “AI” tools and the increasing amount of noise on every level I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”. It might be unreasonable but I’ve felt it for over a year now and it’s not going away. Instead I value interpersonal conversations a lot more again. I hang out in discord voice chats with a few people at a time. Text communication feels soulless and low signal to noise in general now.
Anecdotally almost every text chat server I’m on has less active users writing than I’ve ever seen in 25+ years of using the internet. Might be a coincidence but I wouldn’t be surprised if people’s behaviours are changing. Just like knowing you’re being watched changes your behaviour, knowing text content may or may not be fed to or generated by a slop machine algorithm probably changes how you view text as well.
15 years ago felt very different to me as well. Many of us lucked into the conditions that made many online interactions feel worthwhile. The loss of these settings sucks.* But such a creative environment is still attainable and can be found in pockets.
* To be fair, nostalgia around many off these communities can be misleading. Many were never designed to sustain realistic growth nor the inevitable pressures to monetize them. They were naive and ignored human nature, a product of the mentality of their creators or perhaps their participants or both. We know better now. Community building is tricky and worthwhile, rarely a matter of formulaic scaling.
I have actually cut back on blogging (partly) because I don't want my hard work to be slurped up and regurgitated by an AI. I write for other people. Not for AI
AI doesn’t care, the people using AI care. If you really write for other people, I’d recommend you reconsider blogging again.
Even if you write primarily for yourself (vanity, marketing, client acquisition, there is nothing wrong with that) and not for other people, I’d still recommend you publish your stuff. Not publishing will have always <= effect than publishing, even if AI slurps it up.
I’m with you, my blog is a static site with no JS hosted on GitHub pages. Unless I ever see anyone discussing it or linking to it I have no way of even knowing if it’s being read or not. I write for me, mostly.
> I'm just some dude with a decent job occasionally writing blog posts because it amuses me. I'd be pleasantly surprised if a dozen people read them before I die.
That is exactly the right approach. Most of the posts on my blog have low 3 figure hit rates after being up for a decade (the long tail is a joke) - that averages to maybe 20 hits a year. But that is not that point. I enjoyed writing the posts and just maybe somebody, somewhere enjoyed reading my hot take on The Last Jedi or whatever.
I don't really understand the people who blog for "exposure" or money - it seems like such an effort for very little material gain.
I guess I am in the same boat. I blog because I have this creative urge to write about subjects that interest me, and put it on the web because why not. AI would only accomplish taking away the part that I find "fun" about it, the reason to do it in the first place.
this is the spirit :). i dont mind ppl using AI or not actually. for some it really helps their writing. its what it exists for imho. but i do appreciate a good writer. other then that, blogs are about the topic, not it being written in some uber writing style.
for the writer, id hope like you it gives them joy, because that usually is something which gives it some spirit and joy to read also. its not important at all how things are worded if there was fun to be had!
Is your job super-safe? If so, that's awesome :-) The whole marketing thing only becomes important if you have to get a new one, and then it can become important very quickly.
That's where it turned for me. Originally, I had started a small tech-topic blog with the idea that it would be my portfolio because I really wanted to write for a tech publication, most because I thought I had the chops for it and I want a job where I can travel and work.
Things started off okay, me writing about my projects, etc on a small self-hosted site with zero analytics, keeping things small and manageable in my free time. But the lack of feedback sort of left me I limbo. Was I writing in an engaging way? Were my subjects interesting to more than just me? I had no idea. Eventually, that iteration of the blog got deleted.
And I made another. And another. And so on.
Til I landed on the current version, which is basically me just faffing about with a editorials about tech for fun since I have little time for actual projects anymore, let alone the accompanying writeup.
I still want that writing job, but I realize how much of a pipe dream it is, now. Tech bloggers were already a dime a dozen before I showed up and genAI only saturated that market even further. That, and I still have no interest in working for or hosting a site that is hostile to my reader by being a bloated sludge of scripts and sloppy use of frameworks, which limits my market for a writing career in disappointing and obvious ways.
When I see discussions like this pop up about writing online in today's landscape, it seems to always come down to "write what you find interesting or fun, but keep your eyes expectations near zero" which seems so self-defeating considering how much work it often takes to maintain a blog while you also have to tend to real life. As much as I loath places like Medium or Substack for asking for money up front, I do understand why those writers choose to go there instead of walking my lonely path.
To think clearly, come up with new ideas, make and truly understand things, we need to put marks on the blank page ourselves, and not just repeat what teachers or textbooks tell us like the majority of students Richard Feynman had during his time in Brazil — https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
LLMs/AIs are useful to help us get farther, faster, like witty, skilled, intelligent friends who sometimes take too many magic mushrooms during conversations.
Forgetting about our own agency and individuality is bad for us, and dangerous for society.
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will.” —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
―Primo Levi, If This is A Man
To create and be free like an animal outside a cage, ask, write, and draw your own questions. Look, and find out for yourself, rather than blindly believing what others tell you.
For anyone put off by the dubiousness of the left/right brain thing, rest assured that Drawing On the Right Side of The Brain is no less useful as an introduction to abstract visual creativity because of it.
This comes back to my initial thought on the effect of AI on the "producer" rather than the "consumer".
I do a lot of things badly because it helps me develop skills and makes me happy. I wouldn't outsource this to an AI even if it did all these things better and the world benefited more from it. This is for me.
There's something deeply human about putting thoughts into words (or images) and shaping them into something tangible. AI might help speed things up or spark ideas, but if we rely on it too much, we risk losing that process of real discovery.
feynman-brazil-education was an amazing read. Thank you.
I am from India, and I have a similar experience with my education — one that forces you to memorize, never experiment, and never connect the dots. It felt like reading about my own past and realizing just how bad it was.
I have seen the same in Sri Lanka. It was not as bad in my day and I was mostly educated in Britain.
Sadly, now the UK is becoming more like that. Schools are judged by league tables based on exam and test results. My daughter's sixth form college (school for 16 to 18 year olds) has deteriorated quite a bit since her older sister went there five years ago and its pretty clear to me that is the cause. A lot of other schools seem to be the same or worse.
As a general rule, any kind of explaining done with the intent of making the recipient understand the _concept_ will require oneself to have though and understood the concept. Explaining could be in the form of writing, drawing (as you eluded to), verbal etc.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is discredited pseudoscience bullshit. The exercises will make you a better drawer but not for the very stupid reasons the author claims, but because they are drilled exercises.
Care to substantiate? If the contention is on specifically which hemisphere of the brain is responsible for drawing ability, this is besides the point. The author even says
> Since
the late 1970s, I have used the terms L-mode and R-mode to try to
avoid the location controversy. The terms are intended to differ-
entiate the major modes of cognition, regardless of where they
are located in the individual brain.
> You're building up a portfolio of writing about topics that interest you.
This reason resonates with me immensely.
You're not just writing about what you've figured out, sometimes you're actually deepening your understanding as you write! Writing is the thinking process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628196
I have been writing every day at my blog for three years now, and it's been very rewarding for me to figure out what I actually care about and seeing patterns.
I like thinking about it like a bunch of skateboarders lugging the video camera around to capture the moment. (They did this before social media!)
VX1000 was peak camera in skateboarding. The one modern camera that seems somewhat close has been the whatever Lumix that the dudes at April Skateboards use. It's hd but has a 4:3 ratio and looks VX like in my opinion
For me, the #1 reason I don't blog more, especially about tech topics, is that they take too long. Maybe you can bang out a useful blog post in 20 minutes. For me it's more like 4 to 8 hours.
I have to make samples. Since I do mostly web tech I want the samples to actually work, no "here's some code, trust me". I also need diagrams. And, I have to proofread since I'm terrible at getting it right in one or even 5 checks. I write once, add samples, write some more, add images, write some more. Every time I write I add errors, so it always takes multiple passes.
Proofreading is one place that AI can actually be a friend rather than a foe. If you give Claude your draft and tell it explicitly to call out misspellings and grammatical errors only, it does a really good job.
Proofreading is easily done with an editor. I think AI is much more useful for giving critic and advice on how you write your sentences. Setting the tone, refining the main idea, pointing out redundancies are some of the things that I find very useful.
My drafts usually live for days, weeks, or even months before I publish them. (And sometimes I throw them away after having worked on them for many hours.)
My advice is to "chill": focus on the process instead of the result and let the posta take the time they take.
I like writing too. Funnily enough, the age of LLMs makes this even better. I wrote a little MCP server (this is trivial with Claude) that interfaces with my blog so it can full-text search for articles and look up articles and look at recent articles and stuff like that and it is pretty good at finding references in what I've written to thoughts I've had. It's a bit trigger-happy when looking up my blog posts (I have to put more in the assistant prompt in the Claude app to get it to stop defaulting there).
The other thing that's nice is that LLMs make the process of writing better. When I cite stuff I can just screenshot the website and ask ChatGPT to write the citation and then check it. Things like that are more painful to write than to check and LLMs shine there.
Blogging pushes me to explore things I probably wouldn’t otherwise. That’s been the main reason I’ve stuck with it pretty consistently[1] for the past five years.
Getting attention was never the goal, so the rise of LLMs has mostly been background noise to me. There have been plenty of times when I’ve searched for something on Google, only to land on my own page.
Over the years, though, things picked up. Now, I’m seeing around 30k monthly readers—way more than I ever expected. More than once, I’ve written about something I barely understood, only for the post to hit the front page. Then people corrected me, and I learned a ton in the process. That’s something I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Me too! These last two posts blogging about blogging are unusual for me. I'm working through a book (Sebastian Raschka's "Build an LLM from scratch") and posting about that at the moment. It's likely not a coincidence that I'm procrastination-posting before going through the trickiest bit...
Thank you. One reason I wrote it was to demonstrate how easy it is to spin up a blog where everything is automated and you never have to worry about the infra.
I think that as more people offload understanding to LLMs, being able to deeply understand a topic will make you stand out more and more. Doing things and explaining them are two of the best ways to get that deep understanding.
When I write about a technical topic, I open a new markdown doc and just go. You quickly run up against the limits of your own understanding, which is a valuable exercise.
Exactly, reading and consuming information is one thing but teaching it to someone else is something else entirely. If you're not writing with the goal of self-marketing and content-farming, it's still worth it.
You're conducting multiple parts of a dialogue when writing, but discussing what you've learnt can also be quite a good way of solidifying learning and encouraging further thought.
Readit News
Like read the ad copy of old apple or HP or xerox and see how they wanted to help make tools that help you think. Today everyone wants to make tools that help you make money. I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
With generative art/writing, well honestly - the author is very very limited in what he can command the NN do and particularly if the author has a string vision.
Same for music - I wouldn’t let AI arrange my Renoise tracks, I’d love to do it myself. Is love to create the VCV patches by carefully tuning each knob. And particularly when I actually know/imagine/envision how it should sound.
It takes understanding of underlying tech and love for the work. Love - very important.
For people lacking vision and creativity, those in a hurry, those under pressure to do shitjobs they hate - it idées may be better to use AI. But not for the real artist.
I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
```
This hit me hard! Thanks a lot mate for this comment.
In startup land, the world of innovation accounting for organizations is one attempt to better understand that.
I feel the same way. But I think this is kind of forced on us nowadays. For example, I might want to write a blog post to share my ideas/work/whatever. But it will be used to make money. It will be used to feed my competition. Maybe not necessarily my content, or not necessarily directly compete with me. But as a class of people, by creating more content we are feeding our competition and some minority will make a lot of money out of it.
Maybe I was not doing it for the money in the first place, maybe it was being read by 5 humans in total anyways. But still, I have no escape and I personally find the whole idea disgusting. I will take no part in it.
This means your are rich, and you can afford the luxury of such mindset.
That said I have also found myself writing less, but not because I think it’s less worthwhile than it was 15 years ago when I started, it’s that the internet feels like it has become less deep. Probably not because the internet has changed but because I’ve learned more so fewer and fewer things tickle that curious part of the brain and feel worth writing about. The things that do feel worth it are so off the deep end that there are fewer and fewer readers who are interested.
There's this Spider Man quote I like: "If you help someone, you help everyone". I think it's not comic canon but just from the PS4 game. So getting meta here, that random line a writer for a random video game came up with had a big impression on me.
It's a typical programmer fallacy to avoid redundancy. If somebody else already wrote about something, why would you? Yet in communication, redundancy and repetition is actually quite key. We need to hear ideas multiple times and from different angles before they land.
But after the last few years with the proliferation of “AI” tools and the increasing amount of noise on every level I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”. It might be unreasonable but I’ve felt it for over a year now and it’s not going away. Instead I value interpersonal conversations a lot more again. I hang out in discord voice chats with a few people at a time. Text communication feels soulless and low signal to noise in general now.
Anecdotally almost every text chat server I’m on has less active users writing than I’ve ever seen in 25+ years of using the internet. Might be a coincidence but I wouldn’t be surprised if people’s behaviours are changing. Just like knowing you’re being watched changes your behaviour, knowing text content may or may not be fed to or generated by a slop machine algorithm probably changes how you view text as well.
* To be fair, nostalgia around many off these communities can be misleading. Many were never designed to sustain realistic growth nor the inevitable pressures to monetize them. They were naive and ignored human nature, a product of the mentality of their creators or perhaps their participants or both. We know better now. Community building is tricky and worthwhile, rarely a matter of formulaic scaling.
Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.
Even if you write primarily for yourself (vanity, marketing, client acquisition, there is nothing wrong with that) and not for other people, I’d still recommend you publish your stuff. Not publishing will have always <= effect than publishing, even if AI slurps it up.
i really dont think its such a big deal. If you enjoy blogging, then enjoy it. Maybe its an excuse, AI, for something that was already in the making.
That is exactly the right approach. Most of the posts on my blog have low 3 figure hit rates after being up for a decade (the long tail is a joke) - that averages to maybe 20 hits a year. But that is not that point. I enjoyed writing the posts and just maybe somebody, somewhere enjoyed reading my hot take on The Last Jedi or whatever.
I don't really understand the people who blog for "exposure" or money - it seems like such an effort for very little material gain.
Deleted Comment
for the writer, id hope like you it gives them joy, because that usually is something which gives it some spirit and joy to read also. its not important at all how things are worded if there was fun to be had!
Not even coherent, really. That's not why I write at all. It's also not why I read.
Things started off okay, me writing about my projects, etc on a small self-hosted site with zero analytics, keeping things small and manageable in my free time. But the lack of feedback sort of left me I limbo. Was I writing in an engaging way? Were my subjects interesting to more than just me? I had no idea. Eventually, that iteration of the blog got deleted.
And I made another. And another. And so on.
Til I landed on the current version, which is basically me just faffing about with a editorials about tech for fun since I have little time for actual projects anymore, let alone the accompanying writeup.
I still want that writing job, but I realize how much of a pipe dream it is, now. Tech bloggers were already a dime a dozen before I showed up and genAI only saturated that market even further. That, and I still have no interest in working for or hosting a site that is hostile to my reader by being a bloated sludge of scripts and sloppy use of frameworks, which limits my market for a writing career in disappointing and obvious ways.
When I see discussions like this pop up about writing online in today's landscape, it seems to always come down to "write what you find interesting or fun, but keep your eyes expectations near zero" which seems so self-defeating considering how much work it often takes to maintain a blog while you also have to tend to real life. As much as I loath places like Medium or Substack for asking for money up front, I do understand why those writers choose to go there instead of walking my lonely path.
To think clearly, come up with new ideas, make and truly understand things, we need to put marks on the blank page ourselves, and not just repeat what teachers or textbooks tell us like the majority of students Richard Feynman had during his time in Brazil — https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
LLMs/AIs are useful to help us get farther, faster, like witty, skilled, intelligent friends who sometimes take too many magic mushrooms during conversations.
Forgetting about our own agency and individuality is bad for us, and dangerous for society.
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will.” —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” ―Primo Levi, If This is A Man
To create and be free like an animal outside a cage, ask, write, and draw your own questions. Look, and find out for yourself, rather than blindly believing what others tell you.
Two useful books:
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards https://archive.org/details/DRAWINGONTHERIGHTSIDEOFTHEBRAINH...
The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture by Frank R. Wilson https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/191866/the-hand-by-...
I do a lot of things badly because it helps me develop skills and makes me happy. I wouldn't outsource this to an AI even if it did all these things better and the world benefited more from it. This is for me.
I am from India, and I have a similar experience with my education — one that forces you to memorize, never experiment, and never connect the dots. It felt like reading about my own past and realizing just how bad it was.
Sadly, now the UK is becoming more like that. Schools are judged by league tables based on exam and test results. My daughter's sixth form college (school for 16 to 18 year olds) has deteriorated quite a bit since her older sister went there five years ago and its pretty clear to me that is the cause. A lot of other schools seem to be the same or worse.
As a general rule, any kind of explaining done with the intent of making the recipient understand the _concept_ will require oneself to have though and understood the concept. Explaining could be in the form of writing, drawing (as you eluded to), verbal etc.
Deleted Comment
Care to substantiate? If the contention is on specifically which hemisphere of the brain is responsible for drawing ability, this is besides the point. The author even says
> Since the late 1970s, I have used the terms L-mode and R-mode to try to avoid the location controversy. The terms are intended to differ- entiate the major modes of cognition, regardless of where they are located in the individual brain.
This reason resonates with me immensely.
You're not just writing about what you've figured out, sometimes you're actually deepening your understanding as you write! Writing is the thinking process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628196
I have been writing every day at my blog for three years now, and it's been very rewarding for me to figure out what I actually care about and seeing patterns.
I like thinking about it like a bunch of skateboarders lugging the video camera around to capture the moment. (They did this before social media!)
P.S., You may also enjoy the similar sentiment in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992159
We sure did! I’ll never forget my first vx1000 with a death lens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXqrq7aMO4
PS: I run skatevideosite.com, if anyone is interested in helping dev the site and skates hit me up!
I have to make samples. Since I do mostly web tech I want the samples to actually work, no "here's some code, trust me". I also need diagrams. And, I have to proofread since I'm terrible at getting it right in one or even 5 checks. I write once, add samples, write some more, add images, write some more. Every time I write I add errors, so it always takes multiple passes.
My advice is to "chill": focus on the process instead of the result and let the posta take the time they take.
Deleted Comment
The other thing that's nice is that LLMs make the process of writing better. When I cite stuff I can just screenshot the website and ask ChatGPT to write the citation and then check it. Things like that are more painful to write than to check and LLMs shine there.
Getting attention was never the goal, so the rise of LLMs has mostly been background noise to me. There have been plenty of times when I’ve searched for something on Google, only to land on my own page.
Over the years, though, things picked up. Now, I’m seeing around 30k monthly readers—way more than I ever expected. More than once, I’ve written about something I barely understood, only for the post to hit the front page. Then people corrected me, and I learned a ton in the process. That’s something I wouldn’t trade for anything.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/
Love the blog!
So I searched google and lo and behold, my own stuff was among the top 10 results.
https://rednafi.com/misc/dotfile_stewardship_for_the_indolen...
When I write about a technical topic, I open a new markdown doc and just go. You quickly run up against the limits of your own understanding, which is a valuable exercise.
That said I believe documenting history is important so I'll keep sporadically writing down notable events I've been involved in!
I also blog a fair bit about AI, and there is no hope getting views there without playing the game.