Writing

From time to time, I do encounter ideas that intrigue my intellect for quite some time.
I do maintain the ideation buffer to index these ideas into the larger context of my past musings, but I would also like a conveniently accessible chronological search available for cross-domain ideas.
I’ll hence be increasing the frequency of premature technical thoughts being packaged into a micro-blogs.

I might not elaborate a whole lot in terms of the theoretical aspects of the tooling but I’ll be conceptually outlining my current thoughts over the same.

I haven’t been writing quite as much as I’d like to lately and have been considering how I approach the whole thing.

Instead of talking about what I’m thinking in the moment (pretty fleeting), I’m ……

This is exactly the point where I’ll go “I’m planning on …” : I do not wish like doing that anymore. Talking about my momentary plans for a while has been quite the distraction that I occasionally enjoy.

Speech and the word written, are potential expressions of a thought. Each one of us enjoys a different mix of how we best convey ourself.

Ever since I began blogging when I was 19, I’ve been prioritising descriptiveness over precision. I feel I’ve entered a mental state where I value the distilled value of the transmission more than the exhaustiveness of the message.

I also notice a rift between the way I speak and the way I write. Not to say that any one of them is superior than the other but I could use an exercise in convergence - projecting them both onto a common ground.

I’ve decided to increase my frequency of writing on the main blog to get more reps in and converge onto my style quickly than if I continued with long form content only.

I’m also going to practice being more concise, and blogging a little more on technical aspects as well.

My usual blog post goes to around 1500-2000 words and that isn’t helpful for covering some minor writing prompts I’d like to explore.

To know thyself, is the beginning of wisdom
Socrates

On tangibility of the past

All of us create content, every moment, tuned to varying extents of influence and permanence.

It’s intent that separates us all into different leagues of producers.
Let me explain via a hierarchical build up of selected formats of content with varying intensity.
Note that the list isn’t exhaustive by any means and I’ve deliberately excluded works of larger scale (movies, video games : they have the potential to be the most influential kind of content out there).

So, I’ve been reading a book on prompt engineering and decided to practice a little…

Here’s a conversation I had with chatGPT regarding a small essay I wrote recently and fortunately, there’s room to improve.

Here’s how it went…

Criticize my writing …

Raj: You are my writing critic for this session; do not make any intellectual changes in any text I paste; do not heavily influence my style; only analyze what I say and generate pointers as to how I can become a better writer.

I’d managed to produce some fairly original essays on my last blog and I’ll soon be incorporating them into posts here. I had a habit of writing in streams in the main blog itself and there is a lot of insight stored in the chronology of some such logs.

The old blog is archived in the repository here and I could benefit from repurposing old works into the present setup.

I’ll mainly be focusing on editing the fluff out, finding what good stylistic knacks I’ve accumulated over the years, and rejecting the questionable habits that don’t serve me so well.

Books play a pivotal role in the life of any aspiring and existing intellectual. I began reading diversely and seriously when I was 19 and immediately regretted not starting sooner.

Reading sets you up for an involved existence. If you read vastly, you’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

Over the span of 3 years (2019 - 2022), I read around a 100 books ranging from the classics, biographies, auto-biographies, physics, computer science, anthropology, data science, etymology, theology, game theory, mathematics, history, how-to-books, nutrition, physiology , fitness, health, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, business (okay, don’t judge - we all do this), economics, writing, self help (guilty as charged), spirituality, humor (guides to being funny and similar stuff), young adult (only 1 - please don’t chastise me - I could not handle the cringe), philosophy (a lot - please don’t chastise me) and meta books (speed reading, how to consume books, taking notes, etc).

This is an auxilliary post collating resources for the recent video I posted …

The Pipeline

1. All the ideas, resources that I want to process, any miscellaneous questions I have, are fed into the input-queue in the buffer
2. All the manipulation takes place in these buffers - they’re org-files and I use org-roam to maintain the connections
3. whenever a node set ripens and is worth sharing, I write a post or publish a video.
4. It can go both ways : I can force a set into maturity if I wish to publish something specific or I may chance upon a concept when observing connections.

Observations

I use org-roam-ui to visualize the buffer and check for linkages that might result in something useful. I also want to publish this graph (demonstrated in video) but there’s no explicit solution for that yet and I’m planning to build one myself with rust and webassembly as a compilation target.

If you wish to be a writer, write. Epictetus

A Brief History

I took up writing as a hobby in the sophomore year of my bachelors and it turned out to be the most definitive step towards bettering my way with words and expressing myself accurately.

This is the fourth major iteration on my blogging system and I’ve noticed that I’m slowly tending towards minimalism and an overall clutter-free approach with each step, building up from my past stylistic mistakes and experiences. As with any beginner, I began with enthusiasm and held my ideas in high regard - a major reason for why I felt they should be out there. Over time, as I read more, I learned I had a lot more to learn and finally after a long break of writing frequently, here I am again, at symbolic ground zero - drafting a first post.