Working in public a la Doctorow

It's been a minute since I wrote regularly. I only sporadically jot things into my Obsidian vault these days—most of my writing is done either in my sketchbooks or in the margins of papers.

Since discovering Large Language Models in December and slowly realizing how transformative the technology is for programming, I have been binging on research papers. 3 months later, with barely any notes having moved into the vault, I realize how much I am missing, and how much work I will have to put into transferring what I learned into notes that will keep their value into the future.

Cory Doctorow ascribes a fair amount of his prolific productivity to his habit of writing daily, in public, about the material he comes across. I noticed that kind of transcendent effect in making music (and sharing it with peeps on discord) and writing notes and publishing them in Obsidian. The idea of not just making them accessible, but really publishing them, however, is something I haven't done.

Writing two or three paragraphs is not that much effort, and the microblogging platform (as well as its posting to mastodon) is hopefully low enough on friction to allow me to do this 15 times a day if necessary.