Simon Willison, “Simon Willison on Technical Blogging”:
My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.
Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.
John Gruber, “Simon Willison on Blogging”:
Me, I try to get into the mindset of playing live music, not recording a studio album. Except when I’m writing a piece where I really want it to be an album. Those aren’t rare, per se, but they’re occasional. If I tried to make every post a hall-of-famer I’d never get anything out.
I’m aiming for professionalism. I’m performing live in front of an audience — not just jamming in my garage or bedroom, fucking around. So I’m careful and concentrate. I want to hit every note, in time. But at my best I’m moving from song to song.
Like many others, I didn't blog for the longest time because I didn't think I had anything worth writing about. I also felt like “proper” bloggers — people like Scott Alexander — set an impossibly high standard.
Perfect is the enemy of good, and all that.
LLMs changed that, in two ways. First, quick feedback on bad writing, so I'm not rewriting the same post twenty times wondering if I arranged my ideas badly. Second, they save me the trouble of formatting — I used to get hung up on making it look just right. Now I dump stream-of-thought straight into text, let the LLM transcribe it and fix the small errors, and hit publish before perfectionism creeps back in. It's like performing live with autotune.