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.
I can't stand it when LLMs tell you to tone it down. Their writing advice is almost universally awful. They want you to write the most cliched bland content possible.
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.
I don't know. Maybe you'll feel differently if you read my article. It's about conservative garbage collection, but I mythologized it as a story about people escaping the clutches of an orwellian surveillance machine created by technological wizards, until they learn the magical incantations required to find them.
Let's just say I definitely toned it down a bit in my next article.
I just read your article, and please don’t listen to the machines!!! It’s a very fun read, and I for one love some personality in an otherwise dry topic.
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.
One time a project I made appeared at the very top of the front page. It attracted many negative comments. Some saying it was barely usable. Others saying I'd built it wrong, and offering half-baked advice on how I should have done it instead. That project later went on to get me lots of work and recognition, and even won me a few industry awards.
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.
> HN posters tend to be overly critical, often tripping over themselves to demonstrate
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.
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
Haha this is excellent, I believe you’ve just invented a new genre - Garbage Collector fanfiction.
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
I never try to speak to everyone as a tech writer. Tutorials are for people who'd never used our software before, but even then I could assume a certain level of computer literacy, for example they can launch out software or browse to a URL.
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.
And for that matter, /developing/ for one person, often yourself, is probably better than for everyone. I’ll see this with app developers when they’re trying to figure out what kind of app or game to make. Just make the thing you would use!
I get stuck when I try to post on social and my brain fills up with all the random people I know that have commented or complimented a post. The problem is there are wildly different expectations of what I post. Is anyone else dealing with this?
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 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.
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.
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
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/babys-second-garbage...
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
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.
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.