January 11th, 2026

It’s been a minute since I posted something here. Been in the doldrums for a bit as of late. Lots of uncertainty in life the last month, more than I can take at one time. Thankfully feel like today I’m coming out of it.

Too much AI hand-wringing

Manton Reece writes:

I wrote most of my book years ago, so this is the first time I’ve actually run it through AI to get some feedback on structure, redundancies to trim, and grammar problems. It’s valuable, but it’s also leaving me with doubt that I didn’t have before.
Let’s say I let AI come up with a bridge paragraph that helps tie something together. Just a few sentences. Is it still my work? Am I contributing in a small way to the slop of the web?
For a blog post, this wouldn’t bother me. There is something about a “book” that gives me pause, even though it’s 50k of my own words. The tiny part that AI helped with would barely register.

I honestly don’t understand this. When journalists or authors turn their work over to a human editor, that person is going to make changes, and nobody seems to question whether it’s their own work or not. If you’re doing the same thing with an LLM why is it somehow different?

That’s what is driving me crazy about the discussions around “AI” (mostly LLMs) several years after their introduction to the general public: too much hand-wringing over simple things! I think there is valuable discussion to be had over completely-LLM generated text but using it as a tool for editing? Does that mean that in years I’ve been using spellcheck on my documents that the work isn’t my own?

I really wish people would stop with the extremes on this topic given that there is so much in the middle worth talking about.

Yet another article about starting a blog

Joan Westenberg writes about starting a blog. Lots of words about a subject that has been beaten to death at this point. It’s also the usual rose-colored glasses look at blogging from the early days.

For instance:

The blogosphere of the mid-2000s had its problems: It was insular and often smug, prone to flame wars between people who agreed on 95% of everything but found the remaining 5% absolutely unforgivable. But it also produced actual intellectual communities.
Remember those?
People wrote long responses to each other's posts, those responses generated further responses, and you could follow the thread of an argument across multiple sites and weeks of discussion. The format rewarded careful thinking because careful thinking was legible in a way that it simply isn't on platforms designed for rapid-fire engagement.

That might have happened for popular blogs, and frankly following threads across sites sucked. There is a reason social media became popular, and is still popular among bloggers for syndicating their writing — it makes discovery and discussion much easier.

At the end of the day I agree that it’s a good idea to start a blog. It can be fun and it’s a good way to share things but let’s stop with the “good old days” stuff.