Writing

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Writing is hard. You’re condensing your thoughts into more general concepts that can (hopefully) be understood by others. It’s equivalent to compressing a giant file (your mind) into some smaller artifact (some scribbles on a page).

Writing is valuable. It’s how we can give the gift of knowledge to the future. One can learn some concept and teach it to others with no investment other than the time spent compressing that knowledge.

Writing is introspective and philosophical. Writing delves into the nature of knowledge. What’s worth sharing with others?

The process of writing is good practice for thinking. It forces you to focus on communicating clearly. It makes you think about language and how to effectively convey concepts. It makes you consider if your examples are truly clear and engaging, or just a distraction not adding any value.

I’m really bad at writing. My thoughts are chaotic and disorganized and hard to communicate. Praciting writing gives me the chance to hone what I’ve been thinking about, and work “muscles” to help me communicate more clearly.

Recent posts from blogs that I like

The Dutch Golden Age: Aelbert Cuyp 1

Trained as a landscape painter, he used his landscapes for genre scenes, animal and human portraits, even myths and a religious work, and was influenced by Claude Lorrain.

via The Eclectic Light Company

Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson

via Simon Willison

Notes on the WASM Basic C ABI

The WebAssembly/tool-conventions repository contains "Conventions supporting interoperability between tools working with WebAssembly". Of special interest, in contains the Basic C ABI - an ABI for representing C programs in WASM. This ABI is followed by compilers like Clang with the wasm32 target. R...

via Eli Bendersky