Simon Willison’s advice for bloggers

Via Daring Fireball: tech developer Simon Willison offers observations and advice about blogging.

Willison’s advice for someone getting started:

Just start. It’s so easy to get caught in the trap of obsessing over the design of your blog, and planning for content that you never actually get around to writing. As long as each entry has a date on it and a permanent URL, it counts as a blog.

Excellent advice. It reminds me of what my daughter Rachel suggested when I started out:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say ‘This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.’”

Willison also suggests not worrying about readership:

Don’t worry if nobody reads it. People are unlikely to stumble on your blog organically, but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers.

Here too I agree. Thinking of a blog post as a message in a bottle can be a useful mental trick when putting something on the Internets. One sends off the bottle in the hope that somebody somewhere will find it. And that can happen. Bottle after bottle.

A piece of advice with which I can’t agree:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

I’m always tinkering with posts new and old, even when they may appear to be fine as they are. As I wrote in a 2013 post, I think about writing

as the work of the 職人 [shokunin], the craftsman, whose overriding concern is getting things right, making things better, not for material gain but for the sake of the work.

I’m with Aaron Draplin (quoted in that same post):

“I’m not gonna let it go knowing that I could’ve made it better.”

Besides, what example would I have been setting for my students if I believed in lowering my own standards? Gah!

And besides, not all flaws are invisible. I know, because I get comments: “No need to post this, but shouldn’t the third sentence read,” &c. And I’m always grateful for those comments.

Related reading
All OCA blogging posts (Pinboard)

Bean soup theory

From Merriam-Webster, an introduction to bean soup theory.

(Wait — should that be bean-soup theory? Nah, don’t overthink it, Michael.)

Here, from TikTok, is the recipe that prompted the theory. My favorite joke complaint: “What if you can’t eat solid food yet because you’re a newborn.”

And from Delish, some further context.

“Bob swore!”

Miss Mowcher bids goodbye to David Copperfield and James Steerforth:

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

Poor billionaire

From NPR:

In California, tech billionaires are ramping up spending to defeat a wealth tax in the state.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent more than $100 million to blanket the state in ads and commercials condemning the ballot measure. The measure, known as Proposition 40, would impose a one-time 5% tax on California residents worth more than $1 billion. If passed, the tax would fund healthcare programs in the state.

Brin has compared the tax to the Soviet-style socialism his family fled in the late-1970s, and has moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe to avoid the tax.

Brin is also supporting two competing ballot measures in November that would effectively void the billionaires' tax.

When I heard this story on the radio, I tried to do some calculating in my head. If one had, say, an even billion, a 5% tax would take only $50 million. Brin has already spent twice as much fighting this tax. His estimated wealth when I typed this sentence: $260.1 billion. A 5% tax (which he will avoid anyway) would leave him with about $247 billion.

“The Moronic Bullshit of the ‘Third Way’”

That’s Robert Reich’s phrasing. An excerpt from his essay:

I find it deeply troubling that faux centrist groups are declaring war on progressives in the pages of The New York Times, without the Times revealing who they really are.

If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way — those that have been made public, that is (Third Way is structured as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that’s not legally required to publicly disclose its donors) — you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.

Odd that The New York Times chooses to describe Third Way as a “leading Democratic centrist group” without revealing that it’s simply a Trojan Horse for corporate America.

And then Reich names names. His conclusion:

So, please, disregard whatever you may hear from Third Way or any other so-called “leading Democratic centrist group.”

And pay no attention to headlines about “Democratic centrists preparing for war” against a “rising Left.”

Instead, focus on what’s really happening.

Voters want people in power who are going to fight for them, and not for the super-wealthy or big corporations and Wall Street.

This is especially true now — when the bottom 90 percent of Americans are struggling to pay the bills, a record portion of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the richest one-tenth of one percent, big corporations and Wall Street have never been as powerful, Washington has been taken over by legalized bribery and corruption, and there’s no “center” between democracy and neofascism.

Where’s the Silk?

I finally called the toll-free number to ask about Silk Soymilk, which has been missing from (as they say) my grocer’s shelf for several weeks. Yes, there's a supply-chain problem.

But what the Silk rep didn’t mention is that a plant in New Jersey has been shut down “amid broader struggles for the plant-based milk category in the US.” It’s not clear to me whether changes in European sourcing of soy is also affecting US production.

Do you see Silk on your grocer’s shelf? Quick — put some cartons in a catering van and send them to me. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

*

A non-dairy miracle: five cartons on my grocer’s shelf this afternoon. Now there are two.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois , August 12, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

I don’t go looking for trouble: it finds me .

I defy any close reader to make full sense of the background in this panel from today’s Hi and Lois . The looming black triangle is a standard Hi-Lo Amalgamated feature — I cannot object to its appearance here. The blue must be a wall; the green, the floor of a room devoid of furniture; the purple, another floor. The white must be a surprisingly large cased opening. The light-purple area must be a tile or faux-tile wall. The lined light-blue surface must be the side of a kitchen cabinet; the light-brown strip, a countertop edge. But the line that appears to mark the cabinet’s side from its front doesn’t align with the line that appears to mark the countertop’s side edge from its front edge. I’m reminded of the Escher-like hot-dog stand I noticed in my early days as a close reader of this comic strip.

A strip need not have the precise minimalism of Nancy or the intensity of detail of Zippy to be satisfying. But a comic kitchen ought to look better than this one.

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All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

At the door

[“Be Seated.” Zippy, August 11, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy offers a catalogue of diner delights.

What do I like most about diners? Their democratic hospitality.

Venn reading
All OCA diner posts : diner and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Out the door

From The Chronicle of Higher Education : “These Professors Are Retiring Early. Al Was the Last Straw.” An excerpt:

Many of the faculty members who told The Chronicle they had retired or planned to retire earlier than anticipated expressed frustration with several aspects of their jobs. All of them, though, said AI loomed large in their decisions.

They described feeling overwhelmed by the task of trying to catch students who are cheating, or the prospect of having to completely redesign their courses. They were tired of trying to persuade students it was worth the effort not to farm out their assignments to an LLM, large language model. And they found themselves questioning the value of their own work. What is the point of teaching, they asked, if students no longer seem invested in learning?

Not everyone is willing to believe that AI will turn the university into “a super marvellous place.”

This alligator rules

This alligator rules!

[Context here.]