This morning I was reminded of a few tweets by Francois Chollet, a machine-learning researcher and practitioner who is the lead on Keras, the most popular deep learning library.
The scope of thoughts you can write is much broader than the scope of thoughts you can think on your own. Written language, much like computer code, can express programs that are out of reach for brains alone. Write to think.
— François Chollet (@fchollet) April 23, 2018
In particular live thoughts have limited recursion depth, and only have access to limited working memory; written thoughts have unlimited recursion depth, and paper has unlimited memory.
— François Chollet (@fchollet) April 23, 2018
These thoughts have stuck with me.
This morning, I read Fred Wilson’s post celebrating fifteen years’ of writing on his blog, AVC.Reading it, I wondered the degree to which Fred has benefited from the discipline of expressing his thoughts in a precise, unlimited, and permanent form.
I’ve been missing that. Twitter has replaced writing for me — I agree with Brian Norgard’s take that Twitter’s change to 280 characters was the final death blow to blogging (if Google killing Reader was the pummel of body blows that knocked it down)
It’s astonishing how small yet surgical tweaks to scale products can have such profound impact
— Norgard (@BrianNorgard) September 3, 2018
Threads & 280 characters on Twitter effectively killed what was left of the blogging eco-system
Who would have thought minuscule improvements would go so far
That’s effective product
But if writing is self-directed, Twitter is a to-do list of things to think about or react to created by other people (if, done well, created by a very select group of other people that you’ve chosen and refined over time).
Putting it all together, I miss writing and spend too much time on Twitter. So it’s time to restart this thing. Should be fun.