Discussion: On Starting a Web Log in Two Thousand and Twenty Five Anno Domini

May 25, 2025

So I have decided to start a blog. It feels like I’m doing it because of an embarrassingly nostalgic impulse - I yearn for the internet of the aughts like a moth yearns for the moon! It also feels like one of the more important things I can do at this very moment. I’m going to attempt to reason through the “why” of it, and go on to how I conceive of this blog.

30 is approaching me like a comet. At the time of writing it’s less than a month away. It’s an arbitrary ticker mark, sure, but it’s a big arbitrary ticker mark. Critically: I can say with relative confidence that the structure of my life is largely settling into place. I’m imagining a sort of jello mold I’m hardening into¹. Inertia will win, if I let it. This realization compels me towards a greater degree of intentionality in my life: I have to try harder to do what I wish, I have to more actively choose what I think, how I spend my time. I feel confident that I can live in this world - it’s now incumbent on me to make sure that life is rich to the degree that I want it to be. To write feels like an active act towards that enrichment. It’s how I think, so by writing I choose to think. And it’s work.

Speaking of work: it’s never been easier to choose NOT to do the work of thinking. I am writing this while swimming in the AI discourse and it’s become pretty clear that the advent of Generative LLMs is decapitating learning from education, removing inherent joy from my profession, and all around erasing society’s ability to discern truth. Scary stuff! I also think AI is Normal Technology, and that it can be easily controlled with smart, active regulation + time to build societal antibodies². On the whole I think we’ll be okay. However, these changes still impose individual choices. One could, with remarkable efficiency, offload the work of discerning truth and meaning onto a privately controlled for-profit computer program. I don’t feel particularly able to enunciate a cure for that problem BUT, I can do my best to try and solve for it in my own life by really FORCING myself to think.

So, I plan on writing. To start, I’m not going to set any specific goals for this little blog. I’d like to see where things go. However, I’d like to largely do 4 main types of writing, where each piece of writing is prefixed with its type. Those are:

Anecdotes: I hold myself to pretty low standard here. These are chances to talk through subjective experiences and memories. I hope these anecdotes may prove emotionally potent and somewhat elucidating. At worst I hope they’ll at least be amusing.

Discussions: this is me trying to work through an idea. I predict this will be the most common type of writing. It’s hard for me to build steel-clad conviction in my own opinions and thoughts, so I hope these discussions can be a place to reason through ideas and build up conviction.

Essays: this will be writing for which I feel I have sufficient conviction and expertise. Real, meaty arguments I am compelled to make. With teeth. My hope is that sufficiently thought-out discussions can evolve into these.

Miscellanea: Random lists, recommendations, or other odds and ends. These should be low-effort, and ideally: fun! We love fun, don’t we folks?

The last key question to work through is: “what about the audience - who is this for?” I see two ways of approaching this: thinking of the audience as a subject, as well as a participant. The audience is a “subject” to which I am directing my writing. I will try, as best as I can, to not think this way. A direct consequence of my rationale above is that I am doing this for me. The bulk of the writing I do is intended as a way of making sense of whatever is going on in my own head. If any of the essays end up with sufficient “umph” I may choose to submit/publish them somewhere. TBD. I also don’t intend to profit off of this effort (but if you’re so inclined my Venmo is @Yotam-Bentov 😘).

The other purpose of an “audience” is as a participant to discuss the writing I’m doing. This, on the other hand, I do find quite compelling. The internet is excellent at attracting experts to mistakes, and I earnestly would really enjoy working through ideas with people. To that effect, I will try to include some basic commenting functionality. For now there is the Github repo where this blog is hosted. I might try and include other commenting mechanism down the road (comment providers? Hacker News links? something else? Not sure! Contact me if you have opinions about this). That said, the internet tends towards ignorant sensationalism, and moderating these comments (should they arrive) sounds sisyphean. That said, in all likelihood I can just expect silence.

Still, I will write. Let’s see where this goes!

In 2017 I finished ascending all of New Hampshire’s 48 4k footers. This is a picture of the rock mound on top of Mount Hale, which was the final peak for me. Pretty friggin’ underwhelming wouldn’t you say? This picture serves as a self-directed reminder that it really is about the journey, and not the destination.