Last week’s post on the history of the postrationalist movement proved quite popular. So much so that I’m pleased to welcome a bunch of new subscribers to the blog!
This is the once-a-month status update, which is mostly about progress I’ve made prepping the book I wrote for publication. I post essays about various topics most every other Wednesday that I hope you’ll enjoy.
I’m happy to say that I wrapped revisions on Chapter 5 (basically a long and much improved version of my most popular post of all time from back when I was blogging on Medium), and now I’m on to Chapter 6. Progress on Chapter 6 revisions is going smoothly, which I’m glad of since this is the fulcrum chapter of the book. I’m aided by the fact that I’ve written the content of this chapter several times over already, so it’s mostly about doing a fresh editing pass with Claude’s help.
Speaking of Claude, earlier this month I wrote a piece about how I became a more productive programmer with Claude. I’m thinking of writing another, similar post, but this time about how I use Claude to write essays and revise book chapters more efficiently while producing higher quality writing in the same or less time. I know a lot of people struggle with writing and try to use various LLMs to write for them, often with limited success. I hope I’ll be able to offer some advice to help them produce less slop.
And speaking of slop, I’ve been thinking lately about the enshittification of Substack. I’ve noticed that there’s a lot more nudges to subscribe and full page overlays encouraging me to pledge support. At first Substack was great because it was still in the attract users phase, but it’s slowly creeping towards maximizing profits, and doing it at the expense of the user experience. It’s not quite as bad as Medium yet and nowhere near as bad as Facebook, but if this keeps going I guess I’ll be looking for another place to blog. Thankfully, I’ve got control of the uncertainupdates.com domain, and I can always jump ship if it gets bad enough. Hopefully, though, Substack reverses course and stays great for a while longer yet.
But you know what hasn’t been enshittified? My Twitter account! So point yourself to X the everything app, follow me there, and you can enjoy a steady stream of mildly interesting posts, like this one:
