How to post when no one is reading

In the age of bots, LLMs and people that have about .5s for you to impress them with a flashy image as they scroll by endlessly, I doubt you get the same attention you would’ve in the 90s Internet.

More eyeballs, sure, but worth 1/1000th of a visitor coming straight from a webring for your own niche, or that found you in the right section on Yahoo and AltaVista.

Often as part of an intimidation scam where the person that hands you the CD demands payment.

But yes, that does happen.

The last time someone tried to sell me their album on the street I had to stop and think for a second... I didn't want it in the first place, but I could honestly tell him that I no longer had a way to play the CD. Ironically, years later, I now have a couple ways I could play it.

If it worked for AOL, why wouldn't someone continue today? (other than a lack of optical reading devicen in most compute). Maybe AOL would be better off today if they kept mailing and just added NFC and QR-code.

In 2011, AOL CEO Steve Case took to Quora to reveal just how successful all those free trials were. “At that time I believe the average subscriber life was about 25 months and revenue was about $350,” Case wrote. “So we spent about $35 to acquire subscribers.” Because that $35 had a gigantic return, AOL was happy to keep pumping money into free CDs.

Marketing manager Reggie Fairchild chimed in on the Quora thread to claim that in 1998, AOL used the world’s entire CD production capacity for several weeks.

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/12/8594049/aol-free-trial-cds

hahah.. just reminded me of mr. robot..

> 2. The Lucky Ones™ who happened to accidentally align an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply in the right place at the right time with the right skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the rest of us.

To be fair, advice doesn't have to be applicable to everyone in order to be useful to someone.

Extremely few people get to become astronauts, but that doesn't go to say there isn't relevant career advice for those who do aspire to become one.

Chalking outcomes up to luck is also not a very useful attitude. Life undeniably has a huge random element, but it's more akin to the randomness of the stock market than a pure dice roll. You don't have control of every outcome, but your choices and decisions can massively tilt the scales in favor of getting "lucky".

3. You are in a career because you mistakenly thought you’d like it, or because your parents told you to do it, or because it’s the only thing that you’ve ever known, but it turns out that you absolutely hate it. You’ve reached a local maximum and you need someone to tell you to try something else before you reach 50 and have major regrets.

To add to that: people like some messed up things, or truly inaccessible things. And while you can try to focus on "some good stuff" that you like, you can't really pick the things you like the most! If you could, wouldn't the world be a much easier place (just like the things that make the most money, or are the most accessible, in other words, the things offering the best cost-benefit... but of course no one can really do that... no one would ever suffer heartbreak - just like the person who likes you, and if they change their mind, just stop liking them and like someone else! Such genius!)?!

I've learned to love things I used to hate.

For me it took understanding how things are connected and that doing the superficially unfun things are a necessary precondition for the superfun things to happen.

Learning to appreciate what you have instead of hate what you're missing is also a very fundamental mental health principle.

This is of course much easier said than done.

And to expand on #2, we not only get our hobby coinciding with our career, but that work can pay exceptionally well.

Tell that to my landlord, please. I do love what I do. People somehow stopped bothering to pay me for it, though.

From what I've read most novelists HATE writing.

Musicianship is a good example of why you should not think doing what you love would keep you afloat.

Effort required to become a good musician is comparable to a surgeon (likely more) yet the chances of success is comparable to that of a football player.

Maybe if you see this web of relationships connected to you and your job is to please everyone, how about zooming in and picturing the web that is inside of you?

Have you heard of parts therapy? It operates on the idea that we "contain multitudes" that all are trying to do their best for us. If you learn to include parts of yourself in this web of relationships, where different parts of you are distinct "people" that need pleasing, you may start "pleasing" yourself more often?

Like, I'm imagining zoomed out, there's nuancebydefault4's circle in the middle and everybody in your life is also a circle. You're connected by lines in this web. But zoom in and you can see that inside your circle, is a web of relationships of different parts of you. The part that needs love, the part that needs intellectual stimulation, the part that needs rest etc.

Anyways just a post run thought Im having while the endorphins are kicking in...

It's easy for me to quickly idolize the authors of books and blogs I have read—yours included (thanks for writing GPP)—and it's often I think I fall into the trap of feeling like I need to dedicate all my free time into practicing and learning software and computer science topics.

I also got a small collection of synths and grooveboxes, so seeing you start your Tiny Wires channel was a nice reminder that even those authors have things outside of software.

One of my favorite moments lately was just hanging out with my wife in the living room after setting up all my synths there and just jamming with her present as she also worked on her hobby.

You sink your time into "random projects" and accomplish things. I sink my time into random projects and the time, money, artifacts acquired, and knowledge gained just sluice into the void. We are not the same :)

Correction: I meant to say, isPermaLink="false".

Most of them hit #1 on Hackernews or close to it. That's usually between 100K and 300K hits, and they're pretty high-quality hits since it's usually non-trash software engineers, contrasted with the twelve year olds you'd get if it was 200K YouTube hits.

Ludicity has blogged about his journey from having a shitty job to running his own company in the past. Writing played a big role there (see e.g. https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/merry-christmas-ya-filthy-an...).

It isn't bad financially, but I make much less money than I did two years ago. If I had taken any of the jobs I was offered, I think it would have been a 30K to 100K raise. Also the number is slowly going up, and unlike a day job, no one will tell me I'm earning "enough". If I hit enough to salary myself 500K one day, there will be no social norms preventing HR from giving me that.

I am way, way happier. I've met some really amazing people from all over the world. I also have access to a level of technical mentorship that has totally changed the way I engineer -- but you get other people too. I've spent a lot of time with the mythical thoughtful CEO (can confirm that they are an outlier and the median CEO is as bullheaded as they appear), gotten the inside scoop on a lot of stuff that used to confuse the hell out of me, and last week got invited to a group of writers in Melbourne that are helping me get a book out! And it's also, for me, a special kind of awe-inspiring to meet people that have produced truly great literature. I'd never had had the opportunity before that.

That's like, roughly what you'll get at 100 to 200 people if you write things that repel the energy you don't like. At a few thousand subscribers it gets a bit hairier because you don't have time to talk to everyone. I'm also definitely someone that leans hard enough into the parasociality that it becomes regular sociality, which might not be for everyone, and perhaps I'll run into a real sicko one day and regret it.

I'm 100% for writing a diary, journal, lab notes, personal knowledge base, etc without ever publishing it. I think it's a great thing to do.

But I think publishing your writing requires you to consider an audience and be clear about what you're saying. I've gone back through my journals many times and wondered what I meant when I wrote it?

Additionally publishing something add upside - like someone sending you an email asking a question or others building on your ideas.

ps. I'm not saying this as a success writer, I'm saying this as someone with almost a 100 unpublished drafts and some regrets :)

I could use that information. What are their titles/offices? Mind you, in a fiction context, any present-day day famous _concrete_ _real_ residents are not that useful.

You're absolutely right - there's so much content out there, that any contribution of any of it to a model individually is going to be minuscule (which is why I don't believe one is entitled rent for it). Still, I claim this is more than most content would contribute to society otherwise, because that minuscule value is multiplied by the breadth of other things it gets related to, and the scale at which the model is used.

One thing is, most of that content eventually goes into obscurity. Our conversation might be remembered by us for a while, and perhaps a couple hundred other people reading it now, and it might influence us ever so slightly forever. Then, in a couple of days, it'll disappear into obscurity, unlikely to be ever read by anyone else. However should it get slurped into the LLM corpus, the ideas exchanged here, the patterns of language, the tone, etc. will be reinforced in models used by billions of people every day for all kinds of purposes, for indefinite time.

It's a scale thing.

FWIW, I mostly think of this in context of people who express a sentiment that they should've been compensated by AI companies because their content is contributing to training data, and because they weren't, they're going to stop writing comments or articles on the Internet and humanity will be that much poorer.

Also, your reply made me think of weighing the impact of some work on small number of individual humans directly, vs. indirect impact via being "assimilated" into LLMs. I'm not sure how to do it, or what the result would be, so I'll weaken my claim in the future.

> I am not sure. For example now I am writing a book for my daughter, I would like to share it when done, it is not written for ad money, example chapter, just so you know what kind of content I mean

Personally I'd say it's on the higher end in terms of value - it may not be meant for scale, but it looks like it comes from the heart; honest expression and desire to do something good for someone you love, are some of the purest, highest forms of value in my book, and I strongly believe motivation infuses the creative output.

Plus, we can always use a fresh individual end-to-end perspective on computing :).

(Funny how this was merely a low-stakes belief until recently; it's not like anyone could contest it. But now, because of what I wrote below, it follows that LLMs will in some way pick up on it too. So one day, the degree to which motivations reflect on the output might become quantifiable.)

> The problem I have is with humans reading generated tokens. Human language is shared experience, the evaluation and interpretation of the symbols depend both on the author and the reader (even though many times they are the same entity).

> When a person with HPPD says 'The sky is black', when the symbols enter your mind they are superimposed with your experience and their experience to create meaning. (...) When you read AI generated content, you are both the judge and executioner, the symbols mean whatever you want them to mean, they have no author (in the human sense).

I disagree with that strongly. The LLM is obviously not a human or a person, but it's not a trivial token predictor, either.

Human language is not just shared experience - it's also the means for sharing experience. You rightly notice that meaning is created from context. The symbols themselves mean nothing. The meaning is in how those symbols relate to other symbols, and individual experiences - especially common experiences, because that forms a basis for communication. And LLMs capture all that.

I sometimes say that LLMs are meaning made incarnate. That's because, to the extent you agree that the meaning of the concept is mostly defined through mutual relations to other concepts[0], LLMs are structured to capture that meaning. That's what embedding tokens in high dimensional vector space is all about. You feed half of the Internet to the model in training, force it first to continue known text, and eventually to generate continuations that make sense to a human, and because of how you do it, you end up with a latent space that captures mutual relationships. In 10 000 dimensions, you can fit just about any possible semantic association one could think of, and then some.

But even if you don't buy that LLMs "capture meaning", they wouldn't be as good as they are if they weren't able to reflect it. When you're reading LLM-produced tokens, you're not reading noise and imbuing it with meaning - you're reading a rich blend of half the things humanity ever wrote, you're seeing humankind reflected through a mirror, even if a very dirty and deformed one.

In either case, the meaning is there - it comes from other people, a little bit of it from every piece of data in the training corpus.

And this is where the contribution I originally described happens. We have a massive overproduction of content of every kind. Looking at just books - there's more books appearing every day than anyone could read in a lifetime; most of them are written for a quick buck, read maybe by a couple dozen people, and quickly get forgotten. But should a book like this land in a training corpus, it becomes a contribution - an infinitesimal one, but still a contribution - to the model, making it a better mirror and a better tool. This, but even more so, is true for blog articles and Internet discussions - quickly forgotten by people, but living on in the model.

--

So again, I disagree about AI-generated tokens having no meaning. But I would agree there is no human connection there. You're still looking at (the output of) an embodiment of, or mirror to (pick your flavor), the whole humanity - but there is no human there to connect to.

Also thanks for the example you used; I've never heard of HPPD before.

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[0] - It's not a hard idea; it gets really apparent when you're trying to learn a second language via a same-language dictionary (e.g. English word explained in English). But also in fields full of layers of explicitly defined terms, like most things STEM.

It also gets apparent when you're trying to explain something to a 5yo (or a smartass friend) and they get inquisitive. "Do chairs always have four legs? Is this stool a chair? Is a tree stump a chair? ..."

> These are the only motivations?

No, just the major ones. But it's nice to be honest and consistent about those with your audience, and with yourself.

If you just want to contribute something good to the world, being seen by LLMs in training and retrievable by them via search are both good things that strongly advance that goal. If you also want to make money and/or cred this way, then LLMs are interfering with that - but so do search engines and e-mail and copy/paste.

It's unfortunate, but no one is actually stealing anything (unless a work gets regurgitated in full and without credit, which is an infrequent and unfortunate side effect, and pretty much doesn't happen anymore unless you go out of your way to cause it to happen). Works are being read and interpreted and understood (for some definition of that term), and then answers are provided based on this understanding. If that stops someone from reaching your page, that sucks, but that's been a factor before LLMs too; intellectual property is not meant to be monopoly on information.

(Some of those complains get even more absurd when they get extended to LLMs using tools. As designed and customary, when LLM invokes search and uses the results from some page, it cites it as a source, exposing the URL to it directly in at least two places - inline, and on the overall sources/citations list. Credit is not lost.)

> Of course, none of that vast concentration of investor money will go to the authors.

There's no reason it should. The authors don't get perpetual royalties from everyone who read their works. Or do you believe I should divide my salary between Petzold, Stroustrup, Ousterhout, Abelson, Sussman, Norvig, Cormen, and a dozen other technical authors, and also between all HN users proportionally to their comment count or karma?

Should my employer pay them as well, and should their customers too, because you can trace a causal chain from some products to the people mentioned, through me?

IP, despite its issues, does not work like that.

> If the government was doing this, people would be screaming about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual property since the rise of Mao.

Or call it the public education system and public library network.

Do you happen to remember if that crude estimate assumed that only book authors should get paid, or if this was "total of x tokens, of which y are books, the books are of average length z"?

One of my kids is grown up, the other is nearly so.

The thing I most liked doing in my life was bringing them up so I did the thing I most liked. It WAS fun and enjoying life.