Thomas Pendergast Vladeck home

The space of things you can write

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.

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)

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.