I wrote an article that never fails to put a smile on my face every time I read it. I felt like I had finally found my own voice. Ran it through Claude and it told me to tone it down a bit, but I ignored the advice and published it anyway.
The article caused people on HN to say I had issues. They weren't exactly wrong, but still. Be careful with what you publish out there. Warm reception is never guaranteed. My one consolation is the fact Bob Nystrom apparently liked it.
Sometimes I see technical people who feel they aren't good writers, but who have good ideas. They then turn to LLMs, believing that the LLM will help them express their good ideas. They're often right that they have good ideas. But the LLM just turns them to sawdust.
Kudos to spurning the mediocrity conversion machine and hitting publish.
Let's just say I definitely toned it down a bit in my next article.
The thing about keeping your personality in your writing is that you will have to be prepared for it to rub some people the wrong way, even while some people (like me) like it much better: the only writing that no one dislikes is writing that no one likes, either.
Anyway, fight the corporate blandness, have fun in your writing, and keep it out there! That at least is my opinion.
PS if you add RSS I would gladly add your blog to my feed, based on this article.
I do have RSS and Atom.
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/rss.xml
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/atom.xml
Please let me know if it doesn't work, I'll fix it.
I love reading these personal things - especially the things that people publish in spite of being told they're crazy. In my experience they're usually the more real, honest and raw things in a crazy world where everyone is keeping up appearances and pretending to be normal and sane
I have no idea how reading this people would jump to the conclusion that you have problems, but I will jump to the conclusion that those people probably like to live in a gray box with blank walls
HN posters tend to be overly critical, often tripping over themselves to demonstrate how they're smarter than the creator of whatever it is they're commenting on. In my experience, they rarely are.
That's the helpful part though, as one of the only communities that is overly critical instead of too much on the other end of the spectrum like every other community. Criticism helps you refine and sometimes even see new perspectives, and the other chaff and useless comments you can just ignore, doesn't really matter, as your experience shows as well. Ultimately I think you get back what you put into the HN-machine.
I do agree LLMs water down human writings to a extreme degree and people should just wholesale avoid them except for very surface-level copy-editing fixes, like spelling mistakes. Don't ask for their feedback how something feels or if it's "dumb" or whatever, use your own intuition.
Lately I've decided to write for ME. What do I want to write about? That has made it a lot easier to get unstuck. That and not looking at the views, likes, etc.
I can make How-to's that can assume they had gone through at least one of the tutorials, but even then I put links to the appropriate tutorials so they could refresh or learn if they needed it.
But lately it seems like people are getting more computer illiterate. So how low do you go? I am getting tempted to add a link to some basic computer literacy.
It's kinda like people complaining about Space Launch System, why aren't we using Saturn V or an improved version of it. We have the blueprints and schematics and everything but it appears there's a gap between what's written down there and what's in the textbooks. A lot of in-between experience has evaporated because shop classes and manufacturing were shut down.
I am realizing that a lot of experience was never written down and turned into institutional knowledge that could be used later. The AI companies would love this but it's gone because it was more cost-effective not to.
(def racer
(->> [0xca 0xfe 0xba 0xbe
> “Magic numbers.” You are, after all, a witch. “Every class begins with a babe, in a cafe.”
> “What?”
I love it.
PyWoody•1h ago