Logbook

enormous pile of words

We systematically underestimate the difference between an enormous pile of words and a coherent extended narrative.

You type and type and type and answer a bunch of questions and contribute your hot takes and all of that. Then you look at that word pile and think "gee, I wrote a novel!" No, you didn't.

The long format is not simply a conglomeration of your brief efforts. It demands more concentration, more refinement, and a sustained focus to pull it off. Mostly, I don't manage to do that in the writing here, but at least I'm writing blog-sized stuff and not just hot take individual sentences.

"Maria", a generative AI for composing correspondence

Take a letter, Maria. Address it to... Send a copy to...

Maria is the prototypical stenographic robot. She - and definitely gendered is she - knows how to compose business correspondence.

In an advanced household, there's a corresponding secretary who handles the mails. Many tasks do not need the attention of the head of the household, yet need doing. The secretary answers the incoming, but does not initiate outbound.

The Maria interface handles outbound correspondence, not inbound. Maria has to project authority and agency, though she does not have it herself. There are many ritualized communications strategies. Maria knows them all, and how to prompt her mistress to conform to protocol.

How many ways can you express a common sentiment? Maria reads greeting cards in her spare time.

(Hall)Mark is the male voice of the same system.

The challenge is to appear fresh, even if you are dull and hackneyed. Dull, hackneyed, pedestrian, and trite.

[written in 2016 at the People's Food Coop, Ann Arbor]

personal blogs vs AI

"I'm thankful for personal blogs today. In a sea of AI-generated keyword bullshit, real original content stands out like a lighthouse." Max Böck, writing on Mastodon at https://front-end.social/@mxbck/111783003459044788

using Mastodon as a source of first drafts

Here's a useful pattern for doing some writing.

https://hachyderm.io/@w8emv/111480023329516891

Post something to Mastodon that fits in 500 characters. It will probably be abbreviated to fit. Most instances have a character limit (some are longer than others), but inevitably it will be too short to fill in all of the things you might possibly say. Embrace the constraint.

Wait some indeterminate amount of time until any initial reactions have appeared. You might get likes or comments or people sharing their thoughts. The waiting time will vary - you can even use this pattern on very old posts that are still relevant.

Write a longer version of your original on your blog. (You have a blog, maybe a bit dusty?) Start from the original premise, add a few links, write more where previously you wrote less. Expand the thought in the ways that thoughts tend to expand when there's a bigger rectangle to think in.

Edit the original post with a link to the new blog! And put a link to your original post in this blog, so that you can find it again and close the loop.

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This reminds me of Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts", from her "Bird By Bird" 1994; except that her first drafts have the quality that "no one is going to see it".

https://jlserna1125.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/shitty_drafts_2_-1.pdf

Linking back to yourself on another site is a time-worn technique to improve findability. On Mastodon you get a little extra bonus in that the edit to put in the other link alerts the handful of people who have replied to the original.

Another reason to copy and rewrite for your blog in addition to posting the original to any social media system is some sense of control and permanence to the posting. Other people's web sites do disappear from time to time, and having an original copy in a place that you are responsible for reduces the chance of things being lost forever.

number go up

It's disappointingly common for the incentive loop to be as simple as "number go up". Technology and the world reduces a human process to a number, we fixate on that number, and all efforts are reduced to being evaluated as to whether they succeeded in making the number go up.

The gravity for this weblog to make the number of page views go up seems to be mostly tied to posting more things, and I'm happy to do that. I never know which of them will be a hit, and I don't really ever expect the golden years of blogging to repeat.

Post more, number go up. Hopefully you also have something useful to write about, but that's incidental.

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From an original shorter post on Mastodon

https://hachyderm.io/deck/@w8emv/111433158627006948

David Gerard writes about the origin of the phrase "number go up" in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency culture

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/05/27/the-origin-of-number-go-up-in-bitcoin-culture/

Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

writing in a personal wiki

I prefer writing in a personal wiki to pretty much anything other kind of writing. There's a certain amount of producing original words, a lot more editing so that you get the right words or enough words, and a peculiar bit of wiki gardening where you're trying to shape the whole thing one edit at a time.

My favorite wiki to date is Obsidian. I've produced about 3300 pages in my word-hoard there, about 300000 words in 2 years.

I told myself that at 10000 pages I'd start over.

via https://hachyderm.io/@w8emv/110676439276925705

Converting hot takes into a proper weblog

I wonder what my blog would look like if I took my hot Twitter takes and wrote 500 words on each rather than 280 characters.

(Yes, I still have a blog, a couple of them actually.)

The instant publication of a tweet is very appealing, with a quick hit of dopamine possible if you happen to get really lucky and write something that triggers a quick response. That's great, in the same way that a rat pressing a lever thinks that getting fed is great.

In the olden days of web rings and RSS feeds and Google scooping up all of the blog content it could find, posting to a blog felt a lot more "live". If you wrote about something that people were searching for right at that moment, there was an opportunity to do serious numbers. Those days are mostly gone, with changes to the world leaving blogs behind as the source of hot news.

The biggest advantage of the blog format over the tweet (aside from its absurd length) is that you have a lot more room to ponder an idea and a lot more space to link out to other people's takes on the same subject. The writing has some space to breathe, there's a lot more chances to edit, and the shelf life of the words is a lot longer.

Not many people read blogs though any more so they fail for general audience seeking. We're in the Newsletter Era, so I suppose the reasonable option is to somehow cajole people into signing up for everything you publish. Direct email does increase the chance that any given thing will be read. The downside I guess is that readers expect to write back! Suddenly your hot take is an extended conversation and maybe you were just chasing a passing interest rather than a deep thought to ponder.

One thing is for sure: when you write blog instead of a tweet, there's a whole lot more time spent typing your own ideas, and a lot less time hitting the refresh button hoping someone else somewhere in the world has said something interesting. I can get into that.

Obsidian as a daily note taker, a year out

I started using Obsidian about a year ago, and switched away from Github Issues about six months ago. So far so good. As is my habit, here's some notes on the process that will probably be more useful to me than they will be to you, but that's the nature of blogging these days to write notes to yourself mostly.

Obsidian has completely captured the "daily diary" part of my daily routine, as well as the "write down what you're going to do today before you do it", and the "take notes in wiki format". All of that is about 80% of what I need, and so it gets repeated daily use on my laptop.

Surprisingly, even though I can and do sync my laptop with my Android phone, I don't really use Obsidian much on my phone! To the extent that I do, it's for lookup rather than typing. I guess part of that is that the computer is so much faster as an input device that for any writing of any length I'd rather be at a full sized good keyboard.

When I gave up on Github Issues for daily tracking, there were 10000 issues that I had gone through, and I could tell you with some certainly how long various items had been on my todo list. And you know what, that's not a knowledge about myself that I miss having. I write things down and then I do them or don't do them. The process leaves enough of a trail that I can reconstruct my thoughts. I'm not really reporting out to anyone else the progress towards any one specific goal, so there's less unfinished business to worry about.

Is there unfinished business? Of course. It's just that's accepted as a normal course of events, and you get to things because you remember them and not because there's some Master List Of All Undone Tasks that you consult before taking on the next iteration of your day.

I love Obsidian as a daily note pad, and I really like it that I can bop around in about 1600 separate pages that are a fair capture of a year's worth of doing things and feel at least to a certain degree that it's a connected whole.

At 1600 pages a year, it's about six years when I hit the 10000 page mark. That would be a nice body of work, and by then some other system for writing will probably be available on some shiny new computer and I'll want to start over again from scratch. But until then - this is pretty nice, and I intend to keep at it. (Check back in 2027 and see if I still am thinking the same way.)

notes to future self, and the Blogger's Secret

A lot of years ago, I came up with this plan, which I called the Blogger's Secret

1. Pick a topic.
2. Write about it twice a day.
3. In six months, you will be an expert on that topic.

At that point I noted

One constraint that is clear at the start is that your blog constructed for this purpose cannot be about anything and everything that comes to mind; as soon as someone describes it as eclectic or has a hard time pinning down what you are doing, you have strayed from a purpose.

I am hopeful that this weblog, by staying on the straight and narrow about regular and routine writing about a relatively narrow set of topics will prove fruitful.