Understanding blogs

Stuff I Did:

Took Monday off work for MLK Jr Day
7.5 hours of consulting work (goal of 8)
6.5 hours of fiction writing (goal of 8) — finished writing the new scene and revised a second
Blogged about understanding blogs as a media format
Walked with a friend and biked once
One appointment
Went to Homebrew Website Club
Baked blondies
Been doing the Raptitude Field Trip

It doesn’t look like I should feel so tired 😂 Figuring out a new schedule with a lot of intense brain work is challenging. I’m trying to do some of each writing and consulting work each day, though sometimes my schedule transpires that I only have time for one or the other.
Reading:

Finished reading Wintering by Katherine May
Started reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Bought Saga Volume 10, Design Justice, and a friend’s holiday story
DNF’d The Mountain in the Sea
Added two books to my TBR

Website changes:

added photos to my recipes page and populated the recipes to try page with items I’d saved on Pinterest (fewer than I realized)

Words I looked up:

Expropriate
Synecdoche – tbh not sure I get this one
Landrace – this feels like a word I ought to have known considering my interests
Logorrhea
Chuffed
How to pronounce “primer”

Hello JL, Nice article!

Liked Better eats – Works in Progress by Nick Whitaker (worksinprogress.co)

The kitchen of 2020 looks mostly the same as that of 1960. But what we do in it has changed dramatically, almost entirely for the better—due to a culture of culinary innovation.

The change has come in the form of things we cannot touch or feel, but nevertheless matter: new ideas, recipes, and techniques. And that tells an equally important story: of how intangible capital has grown in importance in our lives and the wider economy — a less visible, but just as valuable, form of technological advancement as the advancements in tangible capital we made in the half-century before.

Ooh I like this framework. It’s not just the physical technology that matters, but how people use it and what they use it for.

The central thesis of Anton Howes’s Arts and Minds, a history of the Royal Society of Arts, is that the Industrial Revolution was driven by a new “ideology of innovation.” This ideology held that everything could be improved by careful tinkering and experimentation. And this ideology spread from person to person. People become more inclined to experiment when they see others doing it and succeeding.

It’s interesting to contrast the movement of advancement in cooking with the recent reports of stagnation in scientific progress and the boringization of culture. How can this mindset from the realm of the home cook expand to other disciples?

Can the internet create non-geographic scenius? How can personal websites fit in? They certainly played a part in the democratization of experimentation in home cooking and baking — there are untold thousands of cooking blogs, often with a rich transfer of knowledge in the comments sections. I think also of the fractures in science writing that newsletters are sparking — there is a place for expertise, but there’s also a role for thoughtful non-experts in questioning and thinking.

It’s not that these techniques have no antecedent in the home either. Rather, their popularity demonstrates that categorizing and naming is a technology in and of itself. Categories and names allow us to connect ideas and techniques into an easy-to-remember bundle.

I never considered it in these terms before but evolutions in classification totally align with advances in thinking. The development of taxonomy drove Darwin and others to dig more deeply into what the actual heck barnacles are. Without the concept of vitamins, scientists couldn’t pinpoint what prevented scurvy — and a misunderstanding of the difference between limes and lemons led to a resurgence of it 😳
I love the concept of a meta recipe — I have two cookbooks designed on this premise, as well as a “flavor dictionary” that lets me invent dishes that will probably be successful, at least flavor -wise 😉

We’ve built up a vast array of knowledge and technique well tailored to the home, ranging across cuisines, styles, and goals. It’s what Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake call intangible capital, all the stuff in the production process we don’t see: our systems, our software, our skills, our techniques. We can’t touch this intangible capital, so it’s easy to underrate. But a new method for making bread overnight can be just as useful as a new machine that does it.

This supports my recent interest in thinking about, learning about, and sharing processes.

Online videos are another cornerstone of this knowledge base. They are particularly good at conveying technique, not just in traditional terms (like knife skills) but also how a cook can prep and clean efficiently. It’s what Michael Polyanyi termed “tacit knowledge.” Many cooking methods can’t easily be easily conveyed in writing and used to have to be transmitted person to person, in culinary apprenticeships or within families. But with video at scale, the best of them can be transmitted to anyone and preserved indefinitely.

Truly, video itself is a technological advancement in cooking, even if it’s not installed in the kitchen.
I appreciated this perspective into the benefits of the food science movement because I think a lot of people put too much emphasis on precise ingredient quantities, when really it’s the process that’s most important.
The example he gives of “cut vegetables into sizes based on how long they’ll take to cook” stands out as my preference, but also as an instruction that does require a basis of knowledge that video can help supply. It’s a form of higher level content, assuming quite a bit of shared knowledge: sometimes I do want explicit instructions, but often I just want a direction to point, or a ratio or baking temperature. This reminds me of a dichotomy I really enjoyed in Naomi Novik’s Uprooted: the wizard is meticulous about following and documenting spells, whereas the witch describes her spellcasting akin to gleaning, where you’d describe the rough route to another gleaner but they’ll find their own exact path.
Improvisation is as much a mindset as it is a skillset. While some of what I needed to learn to play solos in jazz band was technical — what notes a chord represents and the common patterns of chord progressions — a lot was learning to be comfortable experimenting in front of others. Developing a personal style meant both learning from others by listening to a ton of jazz and practicing soloing as much as possible.

Tracy Durnell last month wrote up a thing trying to understand blogs, as in trying “to hone in on what exactly we’re talking about” when we talk about them or use the term. I just want to hit a couple of points here.
(Once again, I need to develop a workflow wherein I capture where I find certain links, especially blog posts. There’s nowhere in the Share Sheet action saving to Instapaper to include a note.)

I was chatting with a friend recently about the awkwardness of the writing in my 2004 blog — aside from being a teenager, it was the first time I was really writing in public and I didn’t feel comfortable in my voice — but I also wonder: maybe part of the awkwardness is that no one really knew how to write online yet? The culture of online self-publishing was still developing — is still developing. At only twenty years old, blogging is frankly still a new medium.

I’m not entirely sure I agree here. As a popular/mainstream sort of thing, “online self-publishing” still might have been coming into its own in 2004 but even just “posting to the web” at that point was like eight-years-old. Prior to that, there were Usenet newsgroups, textfiles, and Bulletin Board Systems.
In a followup prompted by a response to the original, Durnell bears down on something that I think comes up a lot when this subject comes around.

[…] [B]logging is when people create and**claim a platform for themselves. The work is self-motivated. No one’s telling us what to blog about. It’s not fulfilling an assignment. The things people blog about are the things they care about enough to spend their free time considering.
And because it’s not “for a purpose,” because it’s self-directed, a blog post needn’t fit a formal format. A lot of blogging really is ‘talking through ideas’ in text, in real time — the thinking and writing happen together. […] Even when a post is edited before publishing to center a specific conclusion reached through the drafting, a tenor of curious exploration or earnest passion often carries through.

As I said last December, what she refers to as “self-motivated” I deemed “self-solicited”. One of the things that differentiates, to my mind, blogging from social media is that “bloggers almost always are writing because they can’t not” whereas social “constantly demands to be fed either by attention or production […] even in the absence of a legitimate internal need”.
(She perhaps should be glad that she “wasn’t paying attention to The Blog Discourse back in the 2000s”, because it means she missed all the “A-list” drama.)
Durnell in her first piece notes that “in classic blogger mode, I am doing zero research and opinion-dumping” and asks for pointers “to good examples if someone covered this ground ages ago”.
My go-to for this sort of thing always has been Rebecca Blood, since she literally wrote the book (and edited a second) and her website still has a helpful list of her early writings on the subject—including Q&As with other bloggers of the era.

Source: bix.blog

Liked Television writer on fight with studios, networks: “We’re looking at the extinction of writing as a profession” (World Socialist Web Site)

The executives, the management and their attorneys have taken the Writers Guild minimum basic agreement [MBA] and they’ve gone through it with a fine-tooth comb looking for every conceivable loophole, and exploiting those to the hilt. Basically, these companies would like to view us as Uber drivers.

But when you go into this mini-room and commit to this time, you don’t have any guarantee that if the show does go ahead, you’re going to be on the show, because those kinds of commitments are part of the “old model.”
The companies are saying: we’re not going to do that anymore; we’re not committing to you. We’re not promising you anything. We’re just saying, come in, we’ll pay you like piece workers, give us your best ideas and then get the hell out.

This is all part of the same business perspective that rejects artistry, rejects art, rejects the value of teamwork, rejects originality. This is the mindset that cancels once-flagship shows before their final season because the profit margin’s not high enough (Westworld) and writes off completed movies for tax reasons (Batgirl). There is no respect for the human creators who contributed to the show; they got their money, isn’t that enough? As Doctorow calls it, this is the enshittification of the entertainment industry, and in this case of culture itself, all for short-term shareholder value.

The corporate viewpoint is that all workers are interchangeable, and they design projects and work approaches that treat them that way — from the siphoning of ideas described in this article to the Microsoft vendor system that forces workers off of projects after 18 months to avoid paying them benefits.
Chris Coyier writes of LLM training data, revealed by WaPo to include lots of indie websites:

Google should be encouraging and fighting for the open web. But now they’re like, actually we’re just going to suck up your website, put it in a blender with all other websites, and spit out word smoothies for people instead of sending them to your website.

LLM runners think of everything as “content,” essentially interchangeable within subject matter. Never mind that people’s patterns of writing and word usage are unique enough experts can fingerprint the author (forensic linguistics); they’re teaching the model how to write based on how you write, but if, as in their view, all writing is interchangeable, who could object to having their work fed to the machine? How could anyone have intellectual ownership over a mere slop of words? How could a blogger’s corpus of work be anything besides a payload of content for the content mill?
They see no value in either writing or information besides its utility in selling ads alongside “content” — hence the lack of concern over appallingly low accuracy rates in generated answers to queries. Incorrect information, at least for now, buys as many eyeballs on ads as correct. The written output of an LLM is a byproduct of their actual product, the bait that draws the fish, just as search results were always an undesirable necessity; they’ve been working to get away from sending users to search results for years by stripping as much information from websites and displaying it directly in their search results, beside their own ads. I have no problem with extracting phone numbers from a business website — I was going to call anyway — but I do object to considering my writing the informational equivalent of a string of digits. Writing is more than data; the information encoded in a work of writing depends on the language used to construct it, and the human who has created it.

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