Gwern Branwen

You often just have this experience of kind of like shouting onto the Internet that

and where everyone on the internet kind of continues to be wrong.

One thing I observe is that very often independent writers are overcome by resentment and anger and disappointment.

They sort of like spiral into bitterness and crankdom

from there and that's kind of what kills them you know they could have continued if they'd only been able to let go of the ideas and arguments and kind of like move on to the next topic spite can be a great motivation to write but you have to use it skillfully and then kind of like let it go afterwards

You can only have it while you need the motivation to write.

And then if you keep going, you sort of, and hold onto it, you're sort of poisoning yourself.

I have no defense at all there in terms of objective benefits to society.

You know, I do it because I'm selfish and I like it.

That's my defense.

I like the aesthetics of my website and it's a hobby.

Does the design help you think?

It does because I like rereading my stuff more when I can appreciate the aesthetics of it and the beauty of the website.

It's easier for me to tolerate reading something for the hundredth time when I would otherwise be sick to death of it.

Site maintenance is inherently, right, for the author, this kind of inherent spaced repetition.

If I go over pages to check that some new formatting feature worked, I'm getting spaced repetition there.

More than once, I've gone back to check some stupid CSS issue and look at something and thought, oh, I should change something or, oh, that means something.

So in a way, it's not, I think, as much of a waste as it looks, but I can't defend it entirely.

If someone wants to make their own website, they should not invest as much for the aesthetic value.

I just want a really nice website.