Following Simon Willison’s blog practice, I’m planning to shift the pace and type of things I write on this blog. So, if all works well, expect more frequent writings and suggested readings around here.
I’m an avid reader of blogs and other personal online publications. These days, we might call them Substacks and before that Tumblrs. The practice is as old as the web itself and consist of having a little corner of the Internet that you use as a personal publication tool. Some folx have managed to turn that into full fledged commercial publications like BoingBoing or Numerama. And some others just keep it as some personal note tool that changes as their interest evolves.
Thanks to a colleague, I found out about Simon Willison and his interest in Large Language Models. I subscribed to his blog after watching a conference he gave and I was amazed by his blogging style. Pretty much every day, for a year, Simon posted a message, usually a quote from a really good article he had just read on the topic of LLMs, with a personal note attached to it. It’s the first time I’ve been exposed to this type of blogging and I really liked it. It short, rather easy to do, but also engaging. It was almost always sending me to read a really good article somewhere else, but it also gave me a really good idea at first if I wanted to read further that article or if that quote was sufficient information for me.
I’ve been publicly sharing links online since 2006. You can still find them on this self-hosted Shaarli. But then new forms of social media like micro-blogging have moved those posts to Twitter and now Mastodon or Linkedin. But searching through my posts on these platforms to find a gem I shared some time ago is definitely not practical. These platforms are not really good at letting you build personal knowledge systems. They are great at sharing, but not so much at remembering.
While blogs, on the other hand are much better at knowledge building, and since this blog now also federates, it starts to make more and sense sense to use it for sharing than to use my Mastodon account.
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