If not now, then when?

Thanks, Elon.

I’ve been ruminating about when to start this substack blog up. I have committed this year to writing a book and blogging has necessarily taken a back seat. (The book is sort of coming along!). I’ve missed posting shorter essays about timely nonsense that I’ve been thinking about. But microblogging on Twitter has been a decent outlet for venting my spleen to a bunch of interesting random strangers and friends across the world.

Now that Elon has nuked Twitter, I guess that outlet is closed. Twitter dying is probably a good thing for everyone, so I’m not too upset. And it’s got me wondering if I can use this substack for microblogging. Can I post questions, rants, and shitposts here? Can I write blogs where I don’t obsess about the content for a month before hitting post?

I’m going to try it out and see how it goes. I will milliblog here. I’ll post Twitter threads but with better grammar. Maybe I’ll add some longer explanations and context. Maybe I’ll add some links to what I’m reading and listening to. (In case it wasn’t clear from the title, right now I’m listening to King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.) But I am going to try to write here without obsessing about every tiny detail of the presentation.

The next post will be a real post, expanding on a reinforcement learning paper I wrote a thread about yesterday on Twitter. And even though Twitter will probably be back online later today, I’ll still give this milliblogging a go for a week or so. Let’s see how long this lasts!