It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI

What are your favorite design posters from "the good old days"? haha. Can you share the posters you have made? It's cool that you make such things.

This view that you can't just do an activity for your own joy, you have to do it for the approval of other, is the actual dystopia. I wonder how old you are because this seems very much like the attitude of someone who was born in the age of social media.

My niece would disagree. She loves playing violin just for the playing of it.

You cannot share happiness with others if you don’t create it for yourself first as you will have no happiness to give away.

only inasmuch as a world where everyone playing violin in the streets is a dystopia, too...

Yes I agree. But also I just don’t know what to do about it. I mostly try to make things more private. Like I write a newsletter about my thoughts on ai/ml, physics, etc that’s only for my research institute sent through the email listserv. Maybe nobody reads it but also nobody monetises it. And I get an outlet that is hopefully useful to others I’m directly connected to.

> This means your are rich, and you can afford the luxury of such mindset.

The people I know that are focusing on "engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around [them]" are the "poorest" I know of.

They chose to have a part-time job (if they have one at all), they chose to live a simple life (from Western standards)... to do what they care about.

The only luxury they have is living in a society with enough solidarity to allow them to live this way.

I'm not rich and I have this mindset. I make far less than most people on HN do, less than industry average too, but I've been able to live an okay life regardless.

The goal was never to get rich as I realized early on that was improbable and I focused on other things.

I have met a lot of people who live in poverty. They're not all that interested in making money (although they are not necessarily averse but it's definitely never an all-consuming priority). By and large their focus is on human connection.

It's not the default human condition to be consumed by greed any more than it is any of the other deadly sins.

Exactly. People are trying to make ends meet. They aren't trying to optimize for money making for fun We're trying to eat today, and maybe someday retire, if we're lucky. It's harder than it used to be, so people are looking for strategies.

It's not some morally superior attitude to "engage in peace and happiness" blah blah you're just rich congrats

Writing on the internet sometimes feels like being a blob of uranium in a reactor where control rods are slowly being inserted at the same time as the reaction chamber is being expanded. There is factually more fissile material out there, but it's no longer as close to critical mass.

I am not a blogger, but was very active on StackOverflow for years -- mostly asking, but sometimes answering. I used it to learn and to create digital footprints, similar to blogging. I blame most of my slow down on experience and age (same-same, but different). After a while, my questions for SO became so hard, they would only get a few views and no answers. I'm no genius, but with enough experience, you will stumble across some never-before-answered problem.

"I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”"

If your voice isn't spoken then it will go unheard. It is of course up to you but I think that blogs and websites run by real people are invaluable (and I'd love to see what AI makes of that word!)

This is the bigger issue at the moment: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1008897/bbe01d846ec5e9cd/

> People had been stealing ideas long before computers started doing it.

So it’s not ok to be bothered by it because it’s been happening a long time?

I consider it a honor if people are inspired by my ideas or thoughts.

This could in theory still apply to machines but I would have to think about it first. It might require a different format.

I welcome people to steal my ideas. I don't welcome the AI companies. They claim they want me to lose my job. Most people online don't want that for me.

Yeah, and the movie and music industries moved fast to have laws passed protecting their "ideas". The average person has no equivalent protection nor the means to pursue legal action. So opting out of the charade is a perfectly legitimate move.

Reading and writing are both intimate activities. The reader holds the writer's thoughts in mind, and the writer knows this and acts accordingly. Personally, I don't particularly enjoy reading material that was made by an LLM. The fact that so little effort was applied suggests that there is not much reason for this to exist beyond a chance to serve a few quick links. Since the llm is also running this as a business, I would also point out the social connection between reader and writer does come with some expectation of a reward. Whether it is to be paid in cash or respect is beside the point. People often expect some reward for their efforts and they are not wrong to want that. People are often uncomfortable to put it so bluntly because that would compromise the quality of the relationship, but upending this relationship is really a perversion of logic carried out for purely selfish reasons ("I want what you are making, and I will give nothing in return").

>Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.

wow there. You do note the big difference between AI regurgitating someone's content and Google indexing it?

If I put effort into creating something digital and people find it through Google's massive index of the internet, at least they'll see who its by, enjoy it within its context and have the whole thing before them. This is way different from some algorithm mashing what it scraped from a creator's work into its own rehash of a bunch of content.

You can understand why someone might detest the one and appreciate the other?

If I create, I might want you to benefit from it, but I might also want you and others to know it came from me. Not just consume it as an undifferentiated part of some parasitic corporation's AI slurry.

Google gives attribution and maybe provenance, while AI gives you smoke and mirrors. I guess we'll decide if copyright has any legs left to stand on in the modern world, or if it falls as collateral. It's so sad that commercial piracy has hit such an incredible tipping point that even I feel bad for creative people and their bleak economically dead future ahead.

Sure, but I am the creator of the content. And I'm fine with Google indexing the content. I'm not fine with AI doing it. Especially since many of the AI's monetization goals are to make me, specifically, jobless

That's no guarantee it won't get slurped up by an AI at some point. Anything that goes into, say, GMail is ripe for plucking. And there's always a good chance your newsletters will get publicly archived on some web page somewhere, whether intentional or not.

Yeah maybe that's the move. I don't really have a following though, lol

JD Salinger took a lot of heat over his reticence to publish any more of his writings after Catcher In the Rye and the Glass family stories. In 1974, he responded to the NY Times, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work."

You'd probably have a better time using something like Cloudflare to block known scrapers than trust companies that pirate terabytes of books to train their models to obey a "please don't" text file.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...

It’s not respected, there’s a lot of posts on HN about this.

Just one quick reference: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Where's my cut of the AI profits?

The entire left brain/right brain premise that the book is based in is totally bogus. The author constantly refers back to this nonsense theory throughout the book (yes I have read it). What she refers to (constantly) as "R-Mode thinking" simply isn't real. The book works as a learning aide because she largely takes regular learning techniques and drills, and dresses them up with nonsense scientism.

https://www.smartermarx.com/t/regarding-betty-edwards-drawin...

AI is a lot more powerful in this aspect.

MS Word would find no qualms in this sentence:

"I started the car and went for a drive on the highway. There were many other cats on the road but it was nevertheless agitating."

Given the correct prompt (that avoids changing your literary style altogether), AI can quickly suggest cats -> cars and agitating -> peaceful, since it's much better at contextualizing.

Sometimes, but you have to be careful. IME Claude and (to my surprise) Grok 3 are really good at understanding your style and adapting their suggestions to match. ChatGPT, by contrast, tries to change everything into some kind of corporate drone.

I’ve tried building a static react blog and hosting it on vercel and while it was easy to set up there was just too much styling and configuration to sort through that by the time it came to writing i was pretty much unmotivated. Markdown seems to be the key here, going to try spinning one up tomorrow. Cheers.

I think it can significantly change the harm-benefit calculus. (But I'd love to be wrong.)

In the past, I could be fairly confident that if someone else uses my work (and I want them to do that! that's the point of sharing!) the good that it causes will outweigh the bad that it causes. It's not like I'm helping people make missiles.

But now it's entirely possible (especially if my content is unpopular, such that LLMs make a larger proportion of its readers) that the bad outweighs the good, given the negative effects that LLMs have had and continue to have on our world.

Good answers like "it looks cool in my CV that big company XYZ uses my MIT licensed script"

It's extremely dishonest to compare someone voluntarily releasing their work under a permissive license with someone who is involuntarily having their content and effort stolen by an organization training an AI.