Blogging in the age of generative A.I.

I have kept a blog for a long time. The earliest posts I can find are from July 2007, so 20 years now. My blogging goals have remained the same over these two decades.

Keep a set of notes for myself for problems (mostly software related) that I had to solve.
Write up information or knowledge I gained to consolidate my understanding of it.
Organize thoughts (practical or philosophical).
Give this back (hence the publicly visible blog) to the world, since most of the knowledge I gained came from other people putting up what they learned or know freely on the internet.

One of these things has changed considerably these past few years: The first (and arguably the most trivial) goal - note keeping, and I’m pretty happy about that.

Many of my posts took the form of “Here are the steps that I had to take to get WiFi working on Ganbanda Linux 1999 edition on my ASUS XYZ MoBo.” Stuff that took me days to figure out (via experimentation, asking questions on forums, waiting, getting hostile responses and the occasional kind helpful ones (bless you) and sheer luck) but that often had very short shelf life because everything changed in six months.

Now, if I go onto Google search and ask questions like “What is the canonical way to iterate over key-value pairs in a C++ map” or “Why is cmake failing on my Project Chronos code?” I will get a polite, succinct answer with example code.

I like this much better. As I’ve said before, this is the correct culmination of search: our own diligent and blazingly fast research librarian.

This means that I’ve stopped making “How to do X” posts. They were always ephemeral, and now they are unnecessary, leaving me with the remaining, more worthy goals of learning things and writing them up to improve my own understanding and perhaps yours. (And also the occasional rant and rave and bits of philosophy).