It's hard to write with no audience

This blog has long been for my own benefit, and that's not really about to change soon... but I'm also reflecting a bit on why I started blogging in the first place. Part of it was a desire to become better at writing.

But, like I tried to say in my last post about programming, just doing a lot of something doesn't necessarily make you better at it. I still have this idea that when I've written one million words on this blog, I'll "archive" everything so links still work but otherwise fundamentally redesign the site so that it's just a categorized collection of stuff, like Gwern's site, and maybe some old stuff can be salvaged or lightly rewritten as "best hits". I'm currently at only ~400k words, though.

But if you include my Hacker News comments, plus my private journal, I'm at ~900k words! So surely I've long passed the "million words" point as far as lifetime output is concerned. So as far as redesigning this blog goes, part of it's just laziness. Besides, I'm not looking for a job right now, so I don't need to be overly concerned about easy-to-find cringe (which this blog is full of).

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An interesting question

From this, which I didn't find interesting overall, I still found interesting for the question it asks at the start: "what are some things that you used to strongly believe but have now changed your mind about?" This is mainly in the context of coding, though it can be fun to answer that question for other things too.

First I'll touch on the areas that post touches on, then highlight a few others that are even more minor changes. You might want to skim that post first.

First, on Everyone is doing it wrong.

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Sephira Su Archives

It's been many months since セフィラ・スゥ retired, but she's not forgotten. This is a good time to re-post some archives that fans have made, and hopefully boost future searchability...

The video above links to this archive which is mostly complete, it's missing member videos. On youtube there's a mostly-complete archive channel here, with videos hidden in playlists, and a playlist of off-channel collabs here. Lastly, there's a complete archive + non-video stuff available as a torrent, here (magnet). There are a few seeds, but if no one is seeding leave a comment here and I'll get a notification.

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