More writeups!

February 6th, 2020
meta, transparency
A kind of post I would like to read more of is "I did X, and here's how it went." You tend to see this most with research, but I've enjoyed reading them on all sorts of things. This is one of the main kinds of post I write, and I would encourage others to give it a try!

Here's an arbitrary selection of writeups I've enjoyed:

Major reasons I like writeups include:

  • Exposure to problems that I didn't know were important to people.

  • Detailed looks at how people handled problems.

  • They're generally very concrete and written after the fact, which makes it harder to write something that's neat but wrong.

  • When I'm thinking of doing something and find a writeup by someone who did something similar it's fantastically useful.

When you voluntarily make something public, you do risk that people will irresponsibly beat you up over failings. I think it's generally worth it to go ahead anyway, tell the whole story, and help build a norm of sharing things so others can learn.

Referenced in: 5x5 Go Board

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Linkpost for July

Effective Altruism

via Thing of Things July 3, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

more     (via openring)