A blog? Really? What year is it? 2008?
Yes, a blog.
Back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, when you had that blog you’ve long since forgotten about, you wrote some thoughts and off into the ether they went. Maybe some friends and family read them, maybe not. That part would still be true today, but there’s also something different this time: LLMs and the insatiable demand for data to ingest.
Humans reading your (and these) words is cool. Maybe it sparks new ideas in their mind. Maybe it just keeps them loosely acquainted with your life. They exist and they matter.
And in the before times that’s likely as far as any of your writing would go.
Today, every scrap of data is being grabbed and fed into the LLM training systems. LLMs are defined, in large part, by their “weights.” You can think of these weights, loosely, as how strongly connected certain concepts are within the system. With your words being fed in, your words (and these words) will tweak their weights ever so slightly. And once released, someone using that new LLM will see output affected, if ever so slightly, by your words.
That infinitesimal amount is, for most people, more impact than ever before.
So go on, dust off that blog and share something human, real, and good. They’re certainly getting enough training data of the worst humanity has to offer.