If you’ve been wondering why I’m suddenly blogging every day… well, it’s about to stop! I decided last minute to join InkHaven, i.e. commit to blogging every day for the month of April.
This was a somewhat questionable decision because I have a lot of other shit going on. For instance, I’m starting a non-profit. But I figured:
I could keep it to one or two hours a day max; I mostly succeeded at this, although I did get sucked in sometimes, and I think probably spent almost four hours on the longest one.
I consider myself a good writer, but I have never been able to write fast, except when commenting on things, I figured this would be good practice. It was! I really got over this block to a huge extent! I only editted my posts sometimes, and very minimally, and I think time-boxing both the writing and editting is probably good practice.
I’ve been meaning to write more about my views on AI, and in particular, why I think it’s an urgent crisis that may require (and warrant!) drastic actions like getting rid of AI computer chips. I made some progress here, but not as much as I would’ve liked. It’s hard to sacrifice quality for things you really care about!
So for my final blog, I figured I’d do a quick retrospective. What have I learned? How do I feel about the whole thing? Here’s a list of observations:
I feel positively, but kind of lukewarm. Why is this, I wonder? I guess I was hoping for more. My greatest hope (which I wisely decided not to make a proper ambition) was that I would get most of my core thinking on AI risk down in writing. I think I got more like… 10-20%?
I feel like I have a lot to say, and I’m surprised by how little of it I feel like I said and also how hard it was many times to figure out what to blog about that day.
A lot of posts ended up feeling a lot bigger than 500 words. I spent more time on the project than I intended.
As always, writing stuff demands clarity and precision that highlights one’s confusions. This was useful.
I was often pulled to write about things other than AI, but largely avoided the temptation. I have very mixed feelings about this. I think it would have been a much more rewarding experience in a lot of ways to write about whatever I fancied. I might have actually done more of that if I had another place to put it -- this blog is about AI, after all… But I think I was also held back by the concern that it might be better to be more private and keep my public persona more “professional”. I really don’t know if that’s the right approach, and I don’t like it, so maybe I shouldn’t be doing it.
At times, I lost track a bit of what I’d said in previous blog posts. I’ll probably have to go back through and read them all at some point. I hope there’s some good content in there that I can repurpose for something more cohesive and comprehensive.
I wish I’d tracked my time a bit better… how close was I to spending 1-2 hours (max)? I know I did it in <1hr a few times for sure…
Oh hey, look, I’ve made it to 500 words!
But seriously, if you’ve stuck it out, I appreciate it! I expect I will keep blogging some, and that the quality will go up now that I can take my time more with the posts.
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