This is just me hashing out some thoughts out in the open. It was written by hand non-linearly and edited after the fact for clarity and conciseness. I then asked Claude for a final review and I incorporated much of Claude's feedback.

It's hard for me to make peace with the concept of a personal website. What are the expectations really? Do I actually have anything meaningful to say when there are already so many brilliant people writing more stuff than a single person could read many times over?

What is my audience? Is it a close friend, or a random acquaintance, or (most likely) a web scraper trying to collect more data for LLM training? Is this going to make me look bad some day when a future employer stumbles upon it? Is there a due date? Are year-long gaps OK when no one is reading it? It's so easy to say 'oh I'll make a post tomorrow' and later find it's been basically a year since I've touched the public-facing part of the site.

Things are so much easier when I have an audience, goal, and due date. I can edit and refine carefully, imagining in my head what context they likely have, and tailor text or diagrams exactly to spec. (Having an audience, clear goal, and due date I'm realizing is so much harder to come by and so much more valuable than I've appreciated in the past. I just listened to a Freakonomics Radio episode where Larry Page gave Google's driverless car team an exact challenge they called the 'Larry 1K' that focused their efforts brilliantly. Maybe this mix of audience, clear goal, and due date is actually a fundamental service that education provides. But I digress.)

I've had a few former websites where I posted stuff, looked back on it and saw all the places where I was wrong or naive, and just took it all down. And now I'm trying to keep courage to say that if I don't like something, then just add more stuff that is better. Sturgeon's Law is real: the truth is that most stuff people make is lousy or mundane, with a few items rising above the rest. Probably part of being honest and being alive is just accepting that most days will be mundane stuff not worth publishing, plus a few gems that turn out valuable, and without much insight into which is which.

I'm aware that the key to getting really good at something is to just do it and keep at it, constantly refining one's ability through one's own taste and the best available external feedback. (See the famous Ira Glass quote about taste and beginners, or Masahiro Sakurai's 'Just Do It Already' YouTube video. Claude mentions Austin Kleon's "Show Your Work!") So, on this random day, I'll say that making posts at least three times a week here is important. By declaring I'll just publish what I have, flaws and all, I hope that it nudges me into giving up some of the perfectionistic tendencies and accepting that there is no form of progress besides imperfect progress a day at a time.