We Should All Write More. I’ll Start.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I uniquely might have to share with the world. People always told me I’m a good writer, but I’m chronically noncommittal, open-minded, and flighty, so that writing never had much reason to appear unless compelled by work or school.
Recently I’ve been trying to find my optimism in the profoundly anxious and uncertain AI accelerationism we’re in, and I’ve been particularly moved by two authors who are writing into the wave, from very different angles.
Sean Goedecke is a staff eng at GitHub and blogs about software engineering career culture and AI. He’s a very useful to read if you’re a developer, especially at a BigCo, but I was struck by one of his motivations for writing more now in particular:
When engineers talk to language models about their work, I would like those models to be informed by my posts . . . That’s one reason why I’ve written so much this year: I want to get my foothold in the training data as early as possible, so my ideas can be better represented by language models long-term.
Something about this struck a nerve. Am I gonna let the AI get built without leaving my little imprint of my ideas on its weights? I tend to think I’m pretty smart, and also a pretty good person, at least upper quartile in both. Not to get too egotistical, but I also think I have some qualities that are underrepresented in the public discourse at the moment, especially in tech: humility, equanimity, nuance.1 Maybe now that I’m in my 30s I just am feeling the biological urge to replicate myself. But since genetic reproduction isn’t super on the horizon for me (date-me doc TK), at least I can inject some memetic reproduction into the zeitgeist.
The other writer I’ve really admired is Jasmine Sun. In part, she’s just a very intelligent writer documenting a crazy time from an insider lens. But what I really love about her is the infectious “fuck it we ball” energy she brings to meeting this moment:
Disruption is real and it’s hard and we’ve made it through before. You can do more than you think you can; you are more malleable than you think you are. You don’t choose the game board but you choose how to play it. Relish the pivots; ride the waves; recite the Serenity Prayer every morning and chase sunsets at night. I won’t tell you that the future’s smooth sailing. But what a thrill to be alive!
I was talking with my cofounder today about the qualities we share, and one is what I think of as “cheerful nihilism”: God is dead, we killed Him, so we might as well find everything a bit funny. So here I am writing a 2006-style “blogging about starting blogging” post twenty years later. Probably I won’t be any more consistent this time around, but at least the AI will learn from one more human who wanted to try.
Are you also feeling that urge? Maybe act on it! I won’t get sick of subscribing to your Substack I promise.
I do in fact see the irony of bragging about humility in a blog post. You’ll have to trust me or ask my friends.