Why I blog
Spring 2023
The web is full of low quality websites. SEO-Sites just made to attract people without providing them with
anything but a text ChatGPT could write better. It has come to the point that I sometimes skip sites that
aren't stackexchange, wikipedia or reddit. And then it struck me: They are better because their texts come
from a human. Or at least a human that's not driven by commercial interests. Some time later, I was browsing
the web and found this blog with articles about zig compiler internals.
At the time I was doing some research about zig's MultiArrayList. Since I enjoyed the article, I
wandered off to other articles. Quite pleasant to read. There are still a few good quality websites besides
stackexchange, reddit and wikipedia, even if they are few. Too few, in my opinion.
EDIT: I've found a paper that seems to confirm this.
How do we get away from this? By providing exactly this content that I sometimes miss. For example, I try to answer one question on stackoverflow whenever I find an answer that helps myself. Other's deserve to get their questions answered too. Of course, in reality I'm too lazy to do it every time, but I try.
The other thing I decided to do is this: Use the website that I already have and put some content up. It's just an experiment. Maybe this will remain the only article. But I set myself the goal of at least one article per week, about anything I like. Most likely this will be programming, but maybe also electronics or whatever I want. Maybe I'll write a rant like this, or maybe I'll write about my projects. I don't know yet. But for some reason it's satisfying to write this.
Edit: One year later: Obviously, I haven't managed to write even close to one article per week. But still, occasionally, I'll upload something I've written at midnight on a saturday evening when I'm almost falling asleep and my grammar is beyond terrible. I enjoy it though, and I feel like it has grown to a nice collection of pages. I get that they are maybe only interesting for me, but I don't care. Rant over.
Edit: Two years later: AI slop hasn't made the whole situation better either. Also, the content on my website is probably not that good to really make a difference. At least it helps to feed ClosedAI's LLMs so the AI slop increases in quality.
If you want to watch what I intended to express here, watch this.