Oct 29, 2026
How to get ppl to read your stuff:
People ask to review their blog posts and my response is usually some polite form of "it doesn't matter, no one will read it." It's a rough thing, but it's true. John Grisham in a 2017 interview said he's irritated by new authors debuting 1000 page novels because they haven't earned the right to publish books that long. That was 2017 and this is now and you haven't earned so much as a right to publish a screen-long blog post
Scott Alexander can do it because he wrote interesting stuff for many years. Pg can do it because he wrote useful stuff. Dario Amodei can do it because he built probably the most important technology in history of the world. But you didn't do any of these things (btw be honest did *you* read every word in machines of loving grace from start to finish?)
If you're new you have a baseline right to 15 tokens of ppl's attention. If these are really good tokens, you've earned the right to another 50. And if those are really *really* good, you've got another 50, and so on. See, every 50 tokens an interrupt fires in ppl's brains and they decide from scratch whether to keep reading or switch to literally anything else on the internet
So don't worry about spelling, grammar, structure, thesis, capitalization, punctuation, or any of that writing stuff because it doesn't matter. You must produce valuable tokens, 15 first, then 50 tokens at a time. Self-review for that, you'll know in your gut if you're doing it. Attention is all you need
Btw openai tokenizer tells me this post is 9 -> 95 -> 76 -> 84 -> 65 -> 42. So i'm breaking my own rules a bit, i need to get better