My first example, I was asked to give one more talk on how one needs to shuffle seven times. There were four people, and a blackboard smaller than my kitchen window. I went for it like I was in office hours, which I've always enjoyed more than teaching. A few weeks later a phone call "I liked your talk." "Thank you." "Could you come to Switzerland to give it again? We can only offer a week's full expenses..."
Then I was asked to write a review of the off-broadway play "Proof" for the American Mathematical Society Notices. I didn't read it much, but I was told people do. I worked a very hard week on my review; my Swarthmore College classmate Ben Brantley's Broadway reviews were life or death for productions at the time, and I didn't want to embarrass myself. Ron Howard read my review, went to see "Proof" twice and loved it, and hired me to be the math consultant for "A Beautiful Mind". That was a transformative experience.
Every audience is indeed an audience of one.
I can make How-to's that can assume they had gone through at least one of the tutorials, but even then I put links to the appropriate tutorials so they could refresh or learn if they needed it.
But lately it seems like people are getting more computer illiterate. So how low do you go? I am getting tempted to add a link to some basic computer literacy.
It's kinda like people complaining about Space Launch System, why aren't we using Saturn V or an improved version of it. We have the blueprints and schematics and everything but it appears there's a gap between what's written down there and what's in the textbooks. A lot of in-between experience has evaporated because shop classes and manufacturing were shut down.
I am realizing that a lot of experience was never written down and turned into institutional knowledge that could be used later. The AI companies would love this but it's gone because it was more cost-effective not to.
I also worked at a university and that was concerning because some students would just give up whenever anything didn't go right the first time. No troubleshooting skills at all. We were moving from Google to MS and they needed to use Takeout to backup their stuff locally, just in case something happened. But we got a lot of calls because it wasn't ready to download immediately. I've heard it's gotten worse.
Compare to cars. Once upon a time, every car owner had to know how to maintain a car. Nowadays, you can get along perfectly fine having no idea what's going on under the hood.
I wrote an article that never fails to put a smile on my face every time I read it. I felt like I had finally found my own voice. Ran it through Claude and it told me to tone it down a bit, but I ignored the advice and published it anyway.
The article caused people on HN to say I had issues. They weren't exactly wrong, but still. Be careful with what you publish out there. Warm reception is never guaranteed. My one consolation is the fact Bob Nystrom apparently liked it.
HN posters tend to be overly critical, often tripping over themselves to demonstrate how they're smarter than the creator of whatever it is they're commenting on. In my experience, they rarely are.
Very often I think I'm insane because of the things I think. If it was so easy, much smarter people would have done it already. Then I write the program and it actually works.
That's the helpful part though, as one of the only communities that is overly critical instead of too much on the other end of the spectrum like every other community. Criticism helps you refine and sometimes even see new perspectives, and the other chaff and useless comments you can just ignore, doesn't really matter, as your experience shows as well. Ultimately I think you get back what you put into the HN-machine.
I do agree LLMs water down human writings to a extreme degree and people should just wholesale avoid them except for very surface-level copy-editing fixes, like spelling mistakes. Don't ask for their feedback how something feels or if it's "dumb" or whatever, use your own intuition.
Sometimes I see technical people who feel they aren't good writers, but who have good ideas. They then turn to LLMs, believing that the LLM will help them express their good ideas. They're often right that they have good ideas. But the LLM just turns them to sawdust.
Kudos to spurning the mediocrity conversion machine and hitting publish.
Let's just say I definitely toned it down a bit in my next article.
The thing about keeping your personality in your writing is that you will have to be prepared for it to rub some people the wrong way, even while some people (like me) like it much better: the only writing that no one dislikes is writing that no one likes, either.
Anyway, fight the corporate blandness, have fun in your writing, and keep it out there! That at least is my opinion.
PS if you add RSS I would gladly add your blog to my feed, based on this article.
I do have RSS and Atom.
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/rss.xml
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/atom.xml
Please let me know if it doesn't work, I'll fix it.
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> “Magic numbers.” You are, after all, a witch. “Every class begins with a babe, in a cafe.”
> “What?”
I love it.
Writing isn't a distribution on a single dimension that goes from "bad" to "good". It's a lot of dimensions that encompass everything from "funny" to "formal", "precise" or "hysterical". They may be filled with metaphors, or use allegory; they may use math or logic to explain. The allegories could be from science fiction or they could be Biblical or 19th century Victorian novels. None of these are right or wrong, but they are opinionated ways to express an idea.
Writing feels better when it has real texture and character to it. That character is not the monodistribution of "bad" to "good". It's whether it inhabits pockets of out-of-distribution thought in the thousands of dimensions of "thought-space."
An LLM pushing to the center of distribution means it pushes the writing out of inhabiting any of the interesting pockets that create the feeling of texture. The middle of the distribution does not mean it is average quality: it means it's not good at all. The median of the distribution can be far worse than the median writer if you accept that the median writer has out-of-distribution thoughts on at least something, and that it is this which makes their thoughts interesting.
That's why a rough, perhaps not-totally-grammatical article written by someone with interesting thoughts is vastly better than a "correct" LLM revision, even if the human writer isn't a 'good' writer. Their article occupies an opinionated stance on some dimension that matters; it sits in a pocket of interestingness that LLMs seem almost totally unable to inhabit.
The exact middle of the distribution across thousands of dimensions may actually be one of the very worst places of them all.
I love reading these personal things - especially the things that people publish in spite of being told they're crazy. In my experience they're usually the more real, honest and raw things in a crazy world where everyone is keeping up appearances and pretending to be normal and sane
I have no idea how reading this people would jump to the conclusion that you have problems, but I will jump to the conclusion that those people probably like to live in a gray box with blank walls
- Writing for a specific child (think telling a story to someone specific)
- Writing because you have something to say and a story is how you want to say it
- Writing generally what you think a group of people want (e.g. "children like food so I'm writing a story about food")
I think the essay is available online, he is much more eloquent than I
> In [Structured Query Language (SQL)](https://example.com/sql/), you can solve Unusual Complicated Problem with Super Advanced Thing.
That said, one time I had in mind a reader archetype, for whom I added an appendix of one basic concept, which ideally they'd already know, but likely didn't.
<https://docs.racket-lang.org/roomba/index.html#%28part._.Ass...>
I could've linked the some mentions of "association list" to a chapter of some textbook they'd never seen before-- and maybe they would read it, and maybe they would come back.
But instead, I decided to give a quick overview, in terms of an example relevant to what I was documenting, and leave them with a code pattern they could use, to get on with programming a robot like they came to my document to do.
(Though I wish I'd put an accessible showing-off demo example near the beginning of the document. After the intro, it reads a little too much like the glorified inline API docs that it is.)
- Kurt VonnegutLately I've decided to write for ME. What do I want to write about? That has made it a lot easier to get unstuck. That and not looking at the views, likes, etc.
Then, I have a few products that have maybe 10 users.
Too niche is an issue.
Of course, it is also possible to stay with a bad idea forever. Personally I don't think it's possible to know which scenario you're in (good idea but gave up too early, vs bad idea) until you either succeed or die.