How do you get your ideas out there? New forms of blogging / writing / publishing (Gwern.net)

A personal exploration about creativity, wanting to make your mark, the evolution of communication media, and how to express your ideas.

Image: from bing.com

Image: Gwern.net

It is a Saturday as I write. The house is a shambles, with renovators having left their tools about, the dust underfoot. At least it is quiet, sitting on our bedsheet-covered couch, fingers grambling away on my laptop.

The last few months have been a maelstrom of AI news.
AI draws! AI writes! AI makes stuff up!

I love meeting people and reading interesting authors like

- Cixin Liu – sci-fi author
- John Kotter – Leading Change, author
- David Allen – Getting Things Done, author
- A friend who is a karate black belt, start-up founder, biological scientist
- An EHR employee who thinks in math and yet speaks reasonable English and introduced me to The Art of Doing Science and Engineering my most recent book obsession (Thanks, Seth Hain)

I wonder what is next: we’ve been through parchment and scrolls (A hilarious Youtube: introducing the book); the Gutenberg press and books; blogs; podcasts; the social media dance (myspace, facebook, twitter/X, pinterest, mastodon, post, threads, bluesky, what is next), tiktok (chinese ownership aside, a fascinating communication form at 15-60 seconds).

There has always been an interesting creative spark from the use of restriction: newspapers with limited space; handwritten manuscripts with limited monks who could write longhand; short-form blogging with personal goals of not boring people; 1-pagers for education at work; and now, tiktok with supershort education snippets (Dr. Austin Chang, Harvard), here’s one of my own on Secure Chat.

Now there’s gwern.net and the extensively cross-indexed hover-over format of composing a website where you revisit your own writing and improve it over time; living documents that are never quite finished, as you learn, you add and edit, just you are as a human. I love the idea that our human bodies are recognizably still us, after decades of life, but the individual cells, the individual molecules have almost completely been replaced over time. Gwern is like that.