About this site

This page is about this site; for information about myself, see About.

Philosophy

This site is my attempt to realize gwern’s idea of Long Content—i.e. the goal is to incrementally update the pages so as to produce useful, lasting content.1 It is also an open notebook of sorts. In particular, I strive to make all the source files used to produce this site human-readable (by writing pages in Pandoc markdown and storing them in plain text), version-controlled (with git), and freely-licensed (all pages are at least CC-BY, with some in the public domain2; the software used to make this site is all free software). I also like to release early, release often3; I actually don’t deploy the site as often, but I try to commit to the git repository often—so my site is the result of many incremental updates4.

Inspired by Vipul Naik, I am also experimenting with the tree structure of this site. In particular, I think many of gwern’s pages are too long, so I like to siphon off content to new pages once a section on a page matures enough, etc.

Colophon

I use Pandoc and a Makefile to produce this site, which is then hosted via Linode. For details, see Colophon.

Belief and status tags

I use status and belief markers on this site, both of which are ideas I got from gwern’s site. These are both meant to tell the reader how the author regards the content on a page. I find that it’s mostly useful in cases where I want to say “I’ve only briefly thought about this topic, and haven’t really spent much effort working on this page, so even though I think it’s worth making public, you shouldn’t take this page very seriously, nor should you think that I believe the things I’m writing”—but don’t want to keep repeating that all the time (so I just tag these pages with “Status: notes; belief: possible” or something).

  1. Of course, more cynically, one could quote Scott Alexander about the reason many people have personal websites:

    You know how if you’re under the age of thirty you have to have a personal webpage with your name, your photo, your resume, and then a link to your blog or something like that?

    Well, this is mine. Plus a little extra.

    In this case, this site would just be my attempt to “be cool”, instead of serving useful content.↩

  2. So content will be copied, making the data safe; “lots of copies keep stuff safe”, etc.↩

  3. See also Random Ideas and Suggestions | Essays on Reducing Suffering: Agile Projects.↩

  4. I realize that Aaron Swartz likes to “Release Late, Release Rarely” to the public:

    When you look at something you’re working on, no matter what it is, you can’t help but see past the actual thing to the ideas that inspired it, your plans for extending it, the emotions you’ve tied to it. But when others look at it, all they see is a piece of junk.

    You only get one chance to make a first impression; why have it be “junk”? Once that’s associated with your name or project, it’s tough to scrape off. Even people who didn’t see it themselves may have heard about it second-hand. And once they hear about it, they’re not likely to see for themselves. Life’s too short to waste it on junk.

    While I think there’s merit in what Swartz says, here are a few things I’ll say to counter it:

    • I use belief and status tags to explicitly signal how “complete” or “ready” I think my pages are for the public.
    • I only deploy the site about once per month, so a lot of the most “rough” edits tend to be fixed during the time between deployments (so most of the public won’t see them anyway—and if they ever want to see those “rough” edits, they can always dig around in the Git repository).
    ↩

CC0
The content on this page is in the public domain.