The direction of this blog

I just got back^[1] from a stretch of travel (Germany, Greece), and thought that I would do some writing while I'm there. I didn't in the end. It seems like there are mainly two points of friction for me:

1. My authoring tools/workflows still aren't that great, to where writing feels like a hassle
2. I'm too concerned about privacy and general opsec, where "principle of least knowledge" clashes with writing openly for the public

I spend a lot of time communicating with people within my chat client. There are a lot of people I need to keep up with, so I've become quite efficient at it. It makes sense to incorporate writing blog posts into the same workflows. I intend to have Sentinel be my post poster. Maybe I write a message, tag it with some emoji reactions, and Sentinel takes it from there.

I did actually do quite a bit of writing since my last post, but for the second reason, I decided not to publish any of that. I might try to do so, but part of me would rather go fully stealth and cut off online presence where I can, and limit it where I can't (e.g. for work).

I wonder if there's a way to use LLMs to build "unit tests" for different personas reading my blog, every time I'm about to publish something. It could also try and make inferences from posts to mitigate against any future personas that I cannot yet predict. Maybe a tool like this could be useful for people who are not very politically well-versed and want make sure they don't make strong claims that could have them in hot water later.

For now maybe I'll simply go down my unpublished posts and reconsider publishing things I've already written. It helps me to write down complex thoughts to provide them with structure, and communicate them to others without rambling or getting lost. I do that over text too unfortunately, but even more when speaking! There is one post I plan to write like that soon.

As a rule of thumb, when I repeat myself more than twice on a topic (e.g. when explaining something to someone), I decide to write a post about it, as that's enough evidence for me that other people might benefit from it, and indeed I can send the next person to ask me the same question the post I have already written. There's a post like that coming soon too.

At least for those two types of posts I don't need to overthink much. I've also decided to start writing an autobiography, at different levels of granularity. I do not intend to publish this (maybe only individual anecdotes), but I think it will help me put my life in perspective and reflect on it. I tend to easily forget events as well, so it will help me remember.

I've also recently finished a huge migration from AWS to GCP. AWS has been my workhorse for over a decade, but has recently gotten too expensive, as the last of my AWS startup credits dried up. I have since founded another company that would be eligible for credits, but I can't redeem them on the same account either way, so a migration was inevitable. Why GCP? I have $350k of credits on there for the next two years. This website now lives on GCP too, which feels like a new beginning.