Elliot Morris

Quick one today. If you’re reading this, firstly, who the fuck even are you? Secondly, you might want to skip this one it’s just a bit of personal reflection, and not particularly insightful at that.

This will be my fourteenth blog post, which completes my humble goal of publishing literally anything each day for two weeks. Hooray, I have accomplished a thing I set out to do.

Will I keep it up at this pace? Definitely not. Whilst I have gotten quicker at producing these posts even over the short period I have been doing them, I have accomplished that by not caring very much about what’s in them. They are stream-of-consciousness, single edit-pass sort of things that never do a great job of fully capturing what I mean.

This was very much the intent, I was doing exposure therapy. It’s not possible to ever fully capture what you mean, even if you write books and books full of qualifications and clarifications. I need to remember that going forwards.

Here’s some specific musings that I at least find interesting on this process.

I’m still fearful of repercussions

I publish under my own name. Most of my online accounts are under my own name. Honestly, I find anonymity a little bit gross if you’re trying to be part of a community.

However, I’m also a full time employed professional, but not being in Silicon Valley crazy town, I get paid a normal amount relative to what I do. All I’m trying to say here is that I need to maintain my job, and I am fearful, given the writing style I have adopted to allow me to produce posts at this cadence, that I might rub some people either at current or future employers the wrong way. There’s a fair amount of working class anger in what I write, it’s part of me. Heck it’s part of most of us, despite the economic systems we exist in forcing us all to mask it from our betters the majority of the time.

See, right there, “our betters.” Bet that’d make you uncomfortable if you were some south of England trust-fund executive making a hiring decision. That in particular causes me some hesitation in how I present myself in the future. I’ve been expressing what I mean here crudely and in a simplistic manner up until now, and I worry that that’s dangerous for me. I suspect I will have to be more complex in these areas going forward, which will make everything a little more burdensome.

I’m not pleased with this fear I find inside myself, I fight it actively, and resent people who do not have to. I do not want to be afraid of speech, and I do not want to constantly have to mask who I am, even if there are repercussions. I think everything I do is done better when I am being bold.

Speaking about LLMs is addictive

I wrote more posts than I expected to about LLMs. I have more posts still to write about LLMs. The whole space is driven by dopamine addiction and I am no exception.

You’ll note I say “LLMs” instead of “AI” when I can. I think that’s important. Let’s be precise about what we mean.

Writing how I speak

I have made no effort to develop a “writing style”, if such a thing exists. I’ve been writing how I speak. I wonder if this is a good idea? Given more time to craft these things, perhaps I will delve a bit more into the academics of writing. God knows I believe the form a piece of technical implementation takes effects its second and third order effects greatly, I don’t see why that would be any different with writing.

Spellcheck your work you moron

One of the few people who actually reads these things mentioned how poor I am at grammar and basic spelling. It’s true, I’ve never bothered to really try on this because it doesn’t bug me. I know what I’m trying to say. However, I also know that it bugs others, and can even lead to legitimate misinterpretation. Just run a checker Elliot, it’s not that hard.

got fast pretty fastly

The first few of these posts took me three or so hours all told. This one will take me about thirty minutes.

I’m not bragging. The quality of these things isn’t great. Luckily, I suspect no one but a few of my close friends is reading them at the moment.

Going forward, I don’t think I will stop writing, but the next test is to try and amp the quality of these things up just a tad, without losing the ability to finish a piece of writing. Let’s see how that goes eh?