Comment by ark4n
7 months ago
It is sad and interesting that the thousands (millions?) of blogs with few/zero readers will ultimately end up as a dot inside an LLM. Serving a wide audience just not in the original form, and without success/credit for the original author.
“Writing is its own reward”
― Henry Miller (1964). “Henry Miller on Writing”, New Directions Publishing
“… and now its Sam Altman’s reward too!”
― Jayden Milne (2025). “About”, https://jayd.ml/about
maybe it's own reward, but accolades and money are nice too
This. If the only point of blogging is to have some kind of portfolio when applying for a job (which I believe is valuable), then why publishing it at all?
I'm tempted to not publish my blog. Write it for myself, and send it as a portfolio when applying for jobs. So that those damn LLMs don't benefit from it.
> "send it as a portfolio when applying for jobs. So that those damn LLMs don't benefit from it."
What when it goes into GMail, Office 365, or some SaaS email filtering system or some SaaS email archiving or SaaS email backup system?
Patrick McKenzie has an interesting perspective on this:
I think this is underappreciated by almost all writers. You should be doing something very differently with your life if you assume that as opposed to a generation earlier or even five years ago, most of the direct effects of writing will be by people who actually read what you wrote.
And you have the opportunity, a near certainty that most "people" who read what you write in the future are not going to be humans. But humans will interact with what you write with an indirection layer in the middle.
from: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/understanding...
Honestly if the LLM finds and reads my blog and its essence imprints itself permanently on a set of weights to live forever it's sort of cool and way better than just being abandoned!
I wonder - what is the path toward LLMs keeping around material that has since been removed from the internet? Do the companies building them keep the scraped content around forever?