> #blog

“Shit blog”, that’s what he called it. I read about the concept on the blog of Henrik Karlsson.

a few times a week, when I felt too tired to do “real” work, I wrung the last fifteen minutes out of myself by writing something for what I’ve come to call “my shit blog.” I’ve been surprised by how useful and interesting this turned out to be.

What has delighted me about the shit blog is how abundant it has made me feel. I sit down and type as fast as I can, and the results—well, they suck, but they don’t suck that much.

Now Henrik is a professional writer, he also has has a “proper” blog and writes essays. I’m not, and with everything else going on in life, my research, our startup, it’s not really something I’m aspiring to be. But I think having a small platform to publish short-form stuff can be really useful. I hope it won’t exactly be a „shit blog„ and maybe more of a „20% effort, 80% quality„ blog, but we’ll see. I’m calling it a “Lazy Blog”.

Why?
Why have a blog in the first place? I like reading other people’s blogs. Also, I like sharing useful things, and I enjoy writing as a creative outlet. Maybe other people could like reading my blog then? My prediction is that this blog will be a weird combination of the greatest python packaging tools, rants and bad prose, which sounds like it might get interesting.

What?
I will mostly post short things, hence this’ll be more of a microblog (but hosted on proper blog software). Some vague topics I have in mind:

• Personal growth and self reflection
• AI and society
• Academia
• Cool tools and workflows

Where?
I long thought about where to start posting stuff. What options are there?

• Twitter/X: Still the go-to way for many researchers, although the frequent changes in algorithm make it unpredictable whether my feed will be useful to me on any given day. It’s also the most controversial of the options on this list.
• LinkedIn: Great because most of my couple hundred professional contacts are already there. It just doesn’t feel right to use because the posts are … so LinkedIn. It’s where you post a job change and that’s about it.
• Bluesky: They have some interesting suggestions like implementing 3rd party feed algorithms (which has been announced in July 2023 with no news I know of since then). I found it a lot harder to find relevant stuff than on the good days of Twitter. But it feels like a much more “real” place than Twitter, with actual humans sometimes reacting to you, which I never experienced on Twitter.
• Mastodon / Federated: As many others, I tried it during the Twitter/X transition peak but couldn’t find things relevant to me.
• Threads: Oh right, there’s also Threads. Never tried it, sorry Meta!

So what’s the best option? The fact that I almost forgot to mention Threads made me realize again, that there are many options and that all these options are constantly changing in one way or another. It seems like a bad idea then to fully invest in any of these platforms, without confidence which one will be the best for you in the long-run. I see some people going to various lengths of cross-posting stuff to different platforms, but where’s the single source of truth?

Independent, single source of truth

I believe it’s best to have a single source of truth for all posts, this place right here, my blog. I’ll definitely crosspost to social media, but this is the home of everything I write. It’s not going to change unless I change it. It will be the single source of truth for what I’ve published. There’s no moderation that will change depending on politics, none of my posts will get removed for any reason, no federated instance can go down and take my profile with it, no enshittification. Just my blog. Welcome.