As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"

All this to say, on a statistical level, it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.

If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.

Think of this way. It doesn't matter if the message/info you are sharing is already written about. A ton of people didn't know about it. So when the message is written about again by YOU, more new people will know about it. And read it. Sucks for people who know about what you are sharing. But you're not writing for them, are you?

Not to mention, even if a person already know about the topic someone wrote about, there is still new perspective and angle to it that this piece might have. So, read it for different perspectives or angles!

1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with.

I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”

I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.

At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.

Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.

And then they get bored and just go full bore ¿ conjunctivitis applique to unbound ¤ variable 》》-> is a Mongolian {....} ... forgetting they were in tutorial mode. Or, showing examples which embed syntax which is apparently the same as before but "oh shit, I forgot a : means something else in this context" so having explained syntactically what a : means.. confusing you again.

Or showing REPL prompts without explaining if the # is a prompt or part of the command. The list is frankly endless.

Decades ago, this was C programmers trying to explain basic imperative syntax and then using a "compute prime" with a recursive function call or a ternary operator or bitshift.

So my next blog maybe will be "seven cardinal sins of blogs about basics" which will have only one sin: forgetting the job, the only one job you had (or apparently set yourself)

And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say.

I think that human communication is about pure relationship socialization as much or more than it is about actually communicating information or ideas.

I thought that meant the degree was worthless. But he said just the opposite. Even though it's all obvious common sense, it really helps to have someone lay it all out together and remind you to think about those obvious common sense things as you go about managing a business.

There's spreading new wisdom. There's sharing your own recent discoveries. There's bearing witness to a phenomenon, or adding one's own voice to support or opposition to it (both of which apply to the Gruber example noted here). There is documenting your own path, hopefully forward. There's simply sharing commonplaces and the quotidian, which whilst not grand or spectacular often serves to record or fill in the details which make up a place or time. (One of my own favourite finds at museums are the incidental details, whether within a larger work or of themselves: everyday elements within a painting, small studies or sketches, archeological artefacts such as the gaming pieces, make-up tools and materials, and sand toilets dating from pharonic Egypt of 5,000 years ago.

I do seek novel discoveries myself, I may have made a small handful. More usually, if I think of something I look to see who might have come across the idea first. If I'm quite lucky, I'm only a few decades behind the vanguard. Generally I see that not as a failure but a sign that I'm treading interesting ground, and not too far from the frontier itself.

I like actually taking the full form weblog and nudging the space we get also 'we blog'.

Plus let's be honest, there are a surprising number of topics where the obvious hasn't actually been documented in any real way, or where finding an answer to certain questions is near impossible. In those cases, just having an answer publicly available rather than say, on Discord or Google Docs can be a huge help.

[1] https://graybeard.ing/llms-are-grep-on-steroids/

Blogging is fun. What's obvious for you isn't for everyone.

I've felt the "chilling effect" way too often when considering if I really want to put an idea out there that might later turn back to haunt me (even for things I would not consider controversial). I am very aware of the irony that oddly enough, psychologically I don't perceive the same level of danger from random HN comment threads though.

I don't think i ever went past the 5-blog count on any of my attempts.

But which "know"?

There's seeing something and recognising it as something you've seen before.

There's being able to recite it without seeing it.

There's being able to explain it.

There's _knowing_ it. Where your life is an active demonstration of having made it _part_ of you.

To the extent we obtain wisdom with life, it's usually a progression of things progressing deeper down the layers, years, perhaps decades after they attained level 1.

With the advent of LLMs, I've felt even less need to publish publicly. It's as if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored to the reader's context in a shorter period of time. Or the topic I write would be so niche that it should just be in a group chat.

I want to dig more into archival of the sources I use. I think it is important when linking to an other resources to at least describe what was found there or just mirror the source. I have read enough forum posts with link-rotted images to know how a useful comment can become a puzzle when a few links, images or referenced source dissapears.

Now I wonder how well the web will be archived in the long run, but that's another matter. Seems it is an ever sliding window where knowledge of the past is build upon but not kept.

Perhaps repeating such simple truths is like a spaced repetition system for society

  > If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

I hope so. I would love if search engines would do that.

I find it extremely sad that blogging shifted from personal writing to a performative act - we can feel ashamed stating something obvious because the expectation is to get approvals and shares, rather than us writing something we find intriguing, interesting or worth writing down.

In that sense, my personal problem is that no one visits my homepage (www.makonea.com). Ultimately, I think conveying thoughts on such topics also depends to some extent on reputation.

On the face of it things might sound obvious, but the study or in the case of blogging the discussion actually attempts to get the to the bottom of why that might be the case.

It's why I follow Scott Manly or PBS Space Time specifically. There's lots of the same content on other channels/mediums. But I like them specifically, so why not?

Continuing to state the obvious, this is why you specifically should write if you have opinions you'd like to get out.

personal domain blogs survive faster than medium.

Some "obvious" things come with experience, sometimes it's the opposite: beginner's luck.

But I can tell you there's a strong correlation between why you're writing a post and why I'll subscribe. If you're trying to hustle I don't give a shit. You're most likely another pseudo intellectual chasing whatever is hot. What I, personally, want is the experts. I want to see that depth of knowledge. I want to see how you think. I want to read a blog post where I get to know you, not some facade. Not everything needs to be a hustle. Find your niche and your niche will stick with you. If you try to write to everybody you'll end up writing to nobody. Concentrate on making me want to subscribe, not pestering me into it. You're not a used car salesman

There's ten thousand people new people each day, and someone has to be the first time they run into something :)

Improving articulations is a helpful skill for use with AI too.

Anyway, there's another side to "stating the obvious" that really annoys me. It's the "I have to post today" posts. People get advice that they need to post regularly, be it a blog or Tiktok or Youtube or whatever. "Post once a day at a fixed time" is common advice. What this leads to is posts without content. It can be "thank you for 275,000 followers" posts or something that's obviously so low-effort and uninteresting I just immediately skip. And then you have to ask what does that do to that person's metrics if they have a low-engagement post? Is it better to have that and post regularly? I'm not convinced it is.

I also feel like eventually people run out of things to say. That's OK. But maybe just stop clinging on for dear life to this audience you've built while having nothing to say.

Anyway, if you post something obvious and long-standing like "popups suck", that's fine... unless it's the only thing you're saying.

Just say it.

I recently gave a talk about lessons learned in the past, and it felt really awkward, like, "who am I to tell people what to do?". A few days later, a student walked up to me and thanked me for it, because he adopted a practice I had suggested and thought it was useful. And I had troubles sleeping before the talk because I kept thinking about how plainly obvious it was going to be.

I started blogging again when I discovered that indeed, even if it's only me who finds this useful, it makes sense to write about it. As an exercise in writing, or in case there's at least ONE person on the internet who finds it useful.

* Of course I mean professional arguments, not political opinions or other 4chan stuff

My current feeling about blogging is, that it more then anything else is we’re certian knowledge of AI came from. The arguments for blogging being the thing again also started at the same time AI got traction.

Just identify the bloggers that know their craft, weight them height. And you got yourself a step change in LLM competency.

Paying no one.

Web sites and web content are trending towards being enshittified until it just barely becomes worth wading through all of the shit to get to what you actually wanted to consume.

For the Reel creator, it doesn't matter if their Reel is the "second time" for many people. As long as they happen to catch enough "first timers" in their dragnet, their post will perform well.

Most knowledge lives in this awkward middle ground where everyone sort of knows it but nobody has written a clean version. The person willing to write the obvious version usually ends up being the reference.

But I suspect such a blog would not be popular.