Stating the obvious (or maybe not). A bit of internet history, the word blog comes from web log, and shorten to take just the last 4 letters.

I like actually taking the full form weblog and nudging the space we get also 'we blog'.

Wrote something like this earlier today [1]. There was something really nice about not thinking too much about the details and letting it be rough.

[1] https://graybeard.ing/llms-are-grep-on-steroids/

Commenting on Hacker News is often just stating the obvious, but people still upvote! ;)

In a meta way, this blog post itself is example of that: sounds obvious that blogging can just be stating the obvious, but I still enjoyed reading it, and it served as a good reminder. I guess part of what makes it feel good is confirmation bias, but it can also be nice to read something that confirms your beliefs especially if the other side(s) are very loud online. I would also add that it is just expressing oneself, and therefore it is ok for it to be non-original thought: you are not publishing a scientific article, you are expressing your opinion, adding to the general discourse online, making your voice be heard, and also just capturing your thoughts into something concrete.

  > If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

To continue the thread of obvious things back to the non-meta level, would for the given example the following idea qualify as obvious? `Downrank websites that exhibit user hostile patterns`

I hope so. I would love if search engines would do that.

I never imagined my blogs to be useful to anyone. For me, they're mostly just things I felt like sharing but with no particular audience in mind. Over the years though, I find myself receiving email from people who I helped. I even googled quite a few things in the past years only to find the first answer to be a blog of mine. So I unblocked myself a few times.

Blogging is fun. What's obvious for you isn't for everyone.

I really constantly have to fight the urge to NOT say/write something because it might be obvious or someone might have said it before.

Just say it.

I recently gave a talk about lessons learned in the past, and it felt really awkward, like, "who am I to tell people what to do?". A few days later, a student walked up to me and thanked me for it, because he adopted a practice I had suggested and thought it was useful. And I had troubles sleeping before the talk because I kept thinking about how plainly obvious it was going to be.

I started blogging again when I discovered that indeed, even if it's only me who finds this useful, it makes sense to write about it. As an exercise in writing, or in case there's at least ONE person on the internet who finds it useful.

People already know a lot of things.

But which "know"?

There's seeing something and recognising it as something you've seen before.

There's being able to recite it without seeing it.

There's being able to explain it.

There's _knowing_ it. Where your life is an active demonstration of having made it _part_ of you.

To the extent we obtain wisdom with life, it's usually a progression of things progressing deeper down the layers, years, perhaps decades after they attained level 1.

The fact that someone makes a simple observation is probably suggestive that despite its simplicity, it doesn't stick fully, maybe it's even anti-memetic.

Perhaps repeating such simple truths is like a spaced repetition system for society

I was never a prolific blogger. I do write a LOT internally at work and I write very long messages in group chats.

With the advent of LLMs, I've felt even less need to publish publicly. It's as if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored to the reader's context in a shorter period of time. Or the topic I write would be so niche that it should just be in a group chat.