Things move quickly in the AI space, and I’ve found my ability to write up my thoughts on this site hasn’t really kept up. So I’m going to start thinking out loud.
I believe that writing, or more broadly communication, is an important skill regardless of your field or industry. In a period of great change it’s doubly so. In my opinion, if you can’t communicate your ideas and learnings it is an unfortunate limitation. You could have the best idea in the world but if you can’t share it with others and help them understand it, then your idea will wither like an unwatered flower in the shade.
One issue has been that I have not shared the things that are in progress because I feel like everything I put out there should be polished. Since becoming a parent and becoming more strapped for time, that has meant that what I’ve put out there is tending towards zero at this point. Therefore I’ve determined that I now need an outlet for shorter form thoughts and works in progress.
Previously I used social media a little for this, specifically Twitter, before I finished using that service - for many (hopefully obvious) reasons. So I lost an easy outlet for shorter form, potentially throwaway thoughts. Occasionally I would post the nicely packaged thoughts to LinkedIn, but they were few and far between.
In light of all this and as part of my determination to think out loud, I have restructured this site to provide me a space for less polished, work in progress “notes”. This will allow me to get my thoughts and ideas out there, while maintaining ownership over the platform.
I’ve long been inspired by folks like Jeremy Keith, Simon Willison and Pawlean for advocating flexible approaches to blogging, and each maintaining their blogs over so many years. These approaches really resonate with me especially as someone who’s keen to maintain ownership of my outputs independently of social media platforms. I’m also someone that enjoys learning and therefore I’ve always found a lot of joy in books and encyclopaedias, physical ones like my Grandad owned or digital ones like Wikipedia. I love to hop from topic to topic, and crawl through knowledge to learn interesting facts and insights.
Recently I’ve been thinking more about wikis, specifically Andrej Karpathy’s idea of a generated wiki as a way for agents to curate information. And also hearing Maria Popova talk about her site, The Marginalian, on the “How I Write” podcast. While these both serve different usecases to my own, in general I find treasure troves of knowledge very compelling. I would like to experiment taking a Wiki-like approach with this website. I will still maintain a curated and polished list of articles, but alongside that I will now also maintain this repository of notes which will map out the various thoughts, ideas, works in progress and interesting tidbits that I come across. I may iterate on these notes over time, with the hope that an amount of those pages will become living documents that I maintain. Essentially I need a place that I can jot something down very quickly, publish it, link to it from somewhere else, and maybe return to it in a couple of months and add a little bit more to it.
Over time these notes will evolve, and I may transition some to become fully fledged articles. This is a longer term project but I have confidence after maintaining this website for over 10 years. Even though it’s small and it serves its purpose, I’m certain that this website will exist in another 10 years and that I will have worked away at both my articles and my notes.
Over the years there have been many blog posts that I’ve since unpublished as part of a curation process. It felt rational; I wouldn’t say my writing here has been massively enlightening, but rather I have focussed on writing at all. Better something than nothing! And therefore as time went on it felt that older, outdated or less refined posts should be dropped. But I’ve changed my mind on this as well, and I’ve republished my (much) older notes from my teenage years and early twenties. I’m returning to peace with the idea that this site should authentically communicate my journey through my career.
It’s very important to me to document my thoughts. I am quite nervous about memory and not remembering things, so I like to write things down, take pictures and archive for my future self, family, friends, etc. Yet it’s something that hasn’t translated to this website and I would like to change that. I have many learnings and ideas to share, and it’s time to bring out the watering can and get them some sun!