mishka_discord

This first post is a "meta post". It explains where I am starting from.

There is always a problem of choice. There are so many things one can post about, so many unpublished notes and drafts, so many published but half-forgotten things.

Looking back at my 20+ years on LiveJournal/Dreamwidth platforms, ten months after starting my first LifeJournal I felt that my audience is already too big (over a hundred people :-)) for really small things (semi-private or too specialized). And so I started a separate "journal for drafts and experiments".

That's how the (Dreamwidth mirror of) the first post of that "journal for drafts and experiments" looks: https://anhinga-drafts.dreamwidth.org/260.html (just a photo and a mood, the title is a bit difficult to translate well from Russian, I like a GPT-5 Thinking suggestion to translate it simply as "Wonderlust": https://chatgpt.com/share/68dd6b0e-f5a4-8010-9d19-d636192402b7).



For example, I published this series of 4 blog posts on Steve Vickers' paper "Locales and toposes as spaces": anhinga-drafts.dreamwidth.org/tag/vickers. I would not think about burdening the rather diverse audience of my main LiveJournal with something like this.

It's less than ideal that I feel I have to have separate blogs for things like that. But it's important to have more things published, to have more things of interest publicly accessible. It's just not clear how to organize them well.

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Looking back at my 20+ years on LiveJournal/Dreamwidth platforms, I have almost 800 top level posts, slightly more than one post every 10 days on average. But hardly any of them reach 500 words. For example, looking at that series of 4 posts on Vickers, each of them is a good informative post conveying non-trivial intuition about this difficult to master math, but none of them reaches 500 words. Even more often, a post is just a link with a short sentence explaining why it is interesting, for example, this recent post updating on Helion Energy is typical: dmm.dreamwidth.org/88707.html

Then when I do want to (re)post a longer material, I would often place the bulk of it in in the comments, for example my long old spec on non-invasive brain-computer interfaces is reposted here in this fashion: dmm.dreamwidth.org/19302.html (eventually this spec has migrated to github; it's nice to have version control).

The tree-like structure of comments is often better for what I would typically like to do with a relatively long form.

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The average one post every ten days frequency does not mean that I am posting a lot recently. This year I have only posted several times so far. 

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The problem of choice, what to write about. These days I am mostly focusing on AI, current and future, on capabilities and existential safety.

That's one obvious topic. I can easily write on its various aspects or convert my old writings on AI, public and private, to blog posts.

For example, we are entering an era when the AI ecosystem is starting to actively modify itself, the famous "recursive self-improvement" is gradually starting for real. Are there any ways for us (and for AIs) to reason about those properties of our reality which we (or AIs) would like to keep approximately invariant through those self-modifications? I have a technical "GitHub preprint" going in some depth on this topic. Some of that material could be further edited and made into posts.

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Sometimes I just want to go back, reread those old materials I wrote back then, review them. Do I want to write posts about them? I don't know.

Anyway, I promise the next one will be less rumbling and would look more like a normal blog post :-)

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This is 600 words, roughly speaking

$ wc oct1-2025.txt
  38  605 3711 oct1-2025.txt