It is time that I apply the principle of more dakka and just start writing (or rather publishing) more. I know deliberate practice works for writing. If you want to be good at something, you need to do it badly and then just keep going with doing the thing is very common advice. I still find it very hard to do.
Things I ran into when writing before that stopped me:
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It’s hard to decide what to write about
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I get anxiety about writing something that is not good enough
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Topics that go into my head about what to write about revolve mostly about how it is hard to write.
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Some of the writers that I admire would see it as below their standard to write a post like that? Lots of unproductive self-reinforcing status anxiety follows.
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Perfectionism around writing and what I can do on the platform that I am writing on.
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The real pain: All the small decisions at the end. “Do I also post this on my blog or is it too much work?”, deciding to try and in the worst case I can eliminate that part of the process tomorrow. Noticing those annoyances could also be added to the post, then noticing how this is taking over the post
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At the end, I fell for the trap of editing again (I could have been done in 1h, and now it is 1h 46 minutes).
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Things that worked in my favor this time, so I ended up publishing this.
I decided to stick with 1 hour of writing and just publishing what I have at that point sounds safe to my brain.
I decided to just put it on Twitter and hope for the best on the distraction front.
Instead of editing my earlier drafts, I gave each draft an iteration number (feels more like progress!) and then I just started writing again and completing things with copilot. (This was draft 3)
I decided to stick with a nested list format, which is my favorite format for writing.
I decided no actually this nested list doesn’t work on Twitter, so I will put this in an lw shortform
gave up on adding more relevant links. That is valuable in general, and maybe I can find ways to make this easier and less distraction prone (I end up searching for a specific blogpost I like and then don’t end up finding it and read something else interesting from that blog).
Funnily enough, cluncs and the do operator are easily implemented in nix (Merging attribute sets is quite important in nix). Only problem is that nix doesn’t support even the most basic numeric operations (like sqrt, pow (so I gave up on implementing your causal examples)).