Writing (11 blogmarks)

The idea of context synergy is that I want to produce high-context notes that can be leveraged in multiple ways. For instance, if I'm typing notes into logseq detailing a TODO for my current feature, I've been working to shift my phrasing to directly actionable notes instead of low-fidelity placeholder. I want that TODO from my notes to be something I can directly paste to an LLM. When I start writing my notes in this way, I find myself writing in an active voice. Those items can make there way into PR descriptions and project management issue descriptions.

Notes written in this way are useful to me, to an LLM, and to team members and stakeholders who are reading my issues and PRs.

I’ve never managed to get a blog going, but I take a ton of notes for myself. So this time I’m trying the mental hack of calling these posts “notes” and writing about the most mundane things that could still be interesting to another person.

Same for me. Ever since I started writing “blogmarks” which have evolved more into what I’d consider notes, I find myself posting all the time. Whereas a blog post feels daunting, I get halfway through writing it, and then give up.

This is the rationale that has made it relatively easy for me to write so many TILs over the years.

Atoms are a cool variant of what I'm doing with blogmarks. tbh, it is closer to the format I want to be doing. I often have thoughts that aren't really tied to a specific blog post. Sometimes I have thoughts that bring together several blog posts or links.

Brandur describes Atoms as:

Multimedia particles in the style of a tweet, also serving as a changelog to consolidate changes elsewhere in the site. Frequently off topic.

Anyway, this one looks great and has good content.

It reminds me of Smidgeons. Though Maggie is more long-form with these as compared to Atoms.

Justin describes a use case for LLMs in writing, where he asked for the difference between "consumed" and "subsumed" and which would make more sense in what he is trying to say. The LLM gives definitions of both and suggests that "subsumed" is a better fit citing specifically why in the context of what is written.

I've done this and a similar thing where I'm trying to remember a word, it is on the tip of my tongue, so I describe what I'm trying to say and the LLM makes some suggestions. This can also be generally done for terms and phrases where you know the general idea but aren't sure what the technical term is.

Here is an example of this that I just did with Claude:

Me: "What do you call the kind of cognitive bias where you have already made up your mind, so as you engage in a shallow investigation, you key in to supporting evidence and ignore things that contradict your opinion?"

Claude:

This is known as confirmation bias. It's the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports your pre-existing beliefs or values, while giving less consideration to alternative possibilities or contradictory evidence.
When experiencing confirmation bias, people tend to:

• Selectively notice and emphasize evidence that supports their existing belief
• Discount or ignore evidence that contradicts their view
• Interpret ambiguous information in ways that reinforce their position
• Seek out sources that align with their perspective

It's one of the most well-documented cognitive biases and affects people across many domains, including politics, personal relationships, scientific research, and everyday decision-making. Confirmation bias can be particularly problematic because it creates a self-reinforcing cycle that makes it difficult to change one's mind even when presented with new, relevant information.

You should strive for your writing to be four things:

• Clear
• Organized
• Persuasive
• Valuable

And it is valuable that is the most important

Anytime you want to apply any sort of rule to your writing, you should be asking, "for which readers, and what purpose?"

• "Don't use jargon" ... maybe (probably not), but if so, be able to answer, "for which readers and what purpose?"
• "Use short sentences." ... well, for who and why?

No advice about writing makes any sense unless you've clarified who is reading and for what function.

Claim: the function of the text is change the way the readers think about the _world. You are a person with expertise, who spends time thinking and writing nuanced, complex, interesting, deep things in your area and how it relates to the world. What your write, the text, is the readers experience of that. Whether it is valuable to them depends on whether what you have written valuably changes what they think about the world (or what they do out in the world/in their job/in their life, or how they make decisions out in the ..., etc.).

Or to change the perspective on that: good writing is something that people will seek out (pay for even) because they want to read something that will change the way they think about the world.

Readers need you to make your text valuable to them. Instead of "does your writing check these boxes and follow these rules?" it is "does your writing provide value that readers are seeking?".

Larry strongly emphasizes the point that teachers throughout all of your years of education read what you had to write not because the writing was valuable to them, but because it was valuable to them that they were paid to read what you wrote and evaluate you for it. He goes on to say, this will never happen again after school, no one will be paid to read what you write. This isn't quite right though. There are a lot of jobs where a person doesn't have to be good at writing because everyone on their team (or on the project or whatever) is expected (and paid) to read it -- a report, documentation, a plan for a project, an email, etc. These things can be as well-written or poorly-written as you can imagine and we have to read them. Well-run and poorly-run meetings function the same way.

"the language game"

Why do people read something like the NYT? To be informed...maybe. But also, perhaps primarily, it is to be entertained. The editors at the NYT understand that.

You have to think about this holistically, which means you have to think about the reader, how they are encountering the text, and what their experience of it is. Once you are looking at it through that lens, you can notice the ways in which the medium gets in the way of the reader or enables the reader... to get the value they are seeking.

In what ways can the medium (text, content, whatever) interfere with the process of consumption (reading, viewing, whatever)?

Your job, as a writer, is to make sure the process of reading is valuable for the reader... all the time.

The importance of knowing your audience is knowing what they'll endure to get to the valuable part. If, in the case of the average NYT, it is "not much" that they will endure, then you need to provide constant value (whether that is quick-hitting sentences OR long sentences with value laced within). What you cannot do in that case is make them wait until the end to get the value, because they won't get there. You'll lose them before that. They quit, they read something else. That might work in an academic paper where the reader is willing to wait until the end of a dense paragraph, but that is a different language game.

Via Geoffrey Litt on bluesky

I was grabbing coffee with someone the other day. I mentioned that I sometimes go the whole day feeling like I have dozens of scattered things I need to get to and that it destroys my focus and sense of calm. They recommended starting the day with morning pages.

Morning pages don’t need to solve your problems. They simply need to get them out of your head, where they’ll otherwise bounce around all day like a bullet ricocheting inside your skull.

A personal email newsletter ought to be divided into seasons, just like a TV show.

The benefits being:

• a sense of progress: of going and getting somewhere.
• an opportunity for breaks: to pause and reflect, reconfigure.
• an opportunity, furthermore, to make big changes: in terms of subject, structure, style.
• an opportunity to stop: gracefully.

I like this as a way of setting expectations for yourself and your audience. I think it also opens up an opportunity to be playful and experiment. Having a finish line rather than a vanishing point on the horizon is energizing.

I see podcasts that go both directions on this. Some podcasters start recording with no timeline parameters in mind. Others approach it with a definite set of episodes they want to do. I'd never thought about translating that to a newsletter.

Shared by Matt Webb.

just an incredible quote from someone who has now been blogging for 25 years

I felt when I started in February 2000 that I was coming to blogging late. I procrastinated about setting it up. People I knew were already doing it.

And so much more interesting reflection and history of the emergence of blogging.

Everything starts with awareness. So be noisy about the precise things that I’m interested in, and see what happens. That means product design but also means nonsense about weird history or whatever.

There is something really cool about seeing other people adopt a practice of writing TIL-style posts and coming to the same realizations and conclusions that I did with mine.

TILs are great learning resources and reference resources:

I think this new section of the blog might be more for myself than anything, now when I forget the link to Cryptographic Right Answers I can hopefully look it up on the TIL page.

In Simon Willison's 1 Year TIL Retrospective, he points to how they reframe writing and publishing something:

The thing I like most about TILs is that they drop the barrier to publishing something online to almost nothing... The bar for a TIL is literally “did I just learn something?”—they effectively act as a public notebook.

and on the value of always having a learning mindset:

They also reflect my values as a software engineer. The thing I love most about this career is that the opportunities to learn new things never reduce—there will always be new sub-disciplines to explore, and I aspire to learn something new every single working day.

It was fun to read through both of these posts having just myself reflected on A Decade of TILs.

This article and the following quote came up in Chapter 1 of Writing for Developers.

Even if you're writing about a popular topic, there's still a chance your post gets through to someone in a way other posts do not.

Why write? To practice writing so that you can write better in all sorts of venues and formats. To cement understanding because putting it in words makes you go a step deeper and wrestle with the hazy parts. To provide your perspective in case that is more accessible to someone than whatever else is out there. To demonstrate your expertise.

I usually try to wrap my head around the aspects I don’t understand before hitting publish. But for when I don’t have time to do that, I can call out that it is a gap in understanding.

Write to explain and teach. When you don't understand something, call out that you don't understand it. That's not a bad thing, and the internet is normally happy to help.

I'm intrigued by this form of micro-content that Maggie Appleton is calling a Smidgeon. It is similar to Simon Willison's blogmark concept. The notable difference to me is that they aren't explicitly tied to some external URL.

With a blogmark, I'm linking to some blog, resource, whatever on the internet and tying some of my own commentary to it. Whereas with a smidgeon, I don't necessarily need to lead with a URL. One might just be a small bit of freeform thought.