I am indeed learning, working to close those gaps.
For automated testing, I'm in the middle of reading Developer Testing by Alexander Tarlinder, with xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros coming close behind. I'm also working through Test-Driven Development: By Example with my wife as we have time.
For SQL, I read Grokking Relational Database Design by Qiang Hao last winter, and I started SQL Queries for Mere Mortals by John Viescas this week. Sadly, my flub with "left inner join" was not a joke.
For OOP, I've been on a whirlwind tour: OOA&D With Applications by Booch et al., Object Thinking by David West, POODR and 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz, Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans, IDDD and DDDD by Vaughn Vernon, Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen, Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin, and Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck. Still on the docket are Design Patterns by the Gang of Four, PoEAA by Martin Fowler, Smalltalk, Objects, and Design by Chamond Liu, and Object Design by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.
> confessing that you don't know something and gleefully stopping there is not much better [...] we shouldn't let shamelessness about what we don't know limit us either
I promise you, this was not gleeful and this was not shameless. Shame and fear affected me for months on these issues. And I'm not stopping there... From the end of the article: "I’m going to continue to work on skill building, but now I feel free to write about it. If [...] you’d like to help me fill [my knowledge gaps], [...]"
> if you want to write a blog about a topic, then part of the requirements here is that you do hold yourself to a high standard
A high standard of writing, maybe. But plenty of great stories come from those who are striving for a high standard, not just those already in the upper echelon. It's what makes this place different from academic journals.
Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.
The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary. The length of the German dictionary is irrelevant because: Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte
It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.
* DHH said some things on his blog that some people believe to be deeply racist / fascist (not going to unpack whether they were or not because answering that question is irrelevant to the fact pattern; consult other threads for that debate).
* A Ruby conference run by Ruby Central was asked to deplatform him. Since he's the creator of Rails, they declined.
* In response to their decision, a major sponsor (Sidekiq) pulled out of supporting the conference and Ruby Central in general, to the tune of $250k a year.
* This created a "blood in the water" situation where Shopify hit Ruby Central with an ultimatum: they would back-fill the lost sponsorship for oversight control of Ruby Central (and the gem repository they maintain, rubygems.org). And if Ruby Central didn't take the deal, Shopify was going to pull their funding also, leaving them in dire straits (this, BTW, is a fairly common corporate tactic when multiple partners share support of a service that doesn't independently generate revenue. Look for it in your own business, startup company, and nonprofit dealings!).
* Shopify now de-facto controls rubygems.org and people immediately started backing towards the exits because corporate takeover tends to be a harbinger of enshittification. As if to prove the point, Shopify's folks immediately ham-fisted the access controls, yanking several gem creators from the admin roles of the gems they created. They claim this was a mistake; several in the community do not want to give them a benefit of the doubt they are not believed to have earned.
* Community members are standing up gem.coop as an alternative gem repository.
> Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions.
It's probably to her chagrin because these aren't bit flips. They're slow changes in a living culinary repository that others have almost certainly ACK'd with their tastebuds over the years.
It's like you just made a bunch of unrelated commits on the main branch and slapped the commit message "fixed corruption" on it. Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! :)
Do the responsible hacker thing here: fork your reproducible recipes into your own personal repo. Then you can reproduce them till your heart's content in the comfort of your own kitchen. And your mom can ask you for them if she ever wants to merge them into the main branch. (Narrator's voice: she doesn't.)
I'm just here to answer your direct question. As a general rule, I don't carry opinions on celebrities, Charlie Kirk included. So this is a relatively objective summary of what a critic of him who goes digging would be most likely to find. In my own personal opinion, you generally won't find "smoking guns" in terms of black-and-white obvious calls to violence from Charlie Kirk.
Critics would likely point to:
- Helping organize January 6th, claimed that "The team at Turning Point Action are honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president."
- Glorifying Kyle Rittenhouse: “You’re a hero to millions, it’s an honor to be able to have you.” as well as supporting the man who attacked the Pelosi household.
- At an event in Nampa, Idaho (Oct 25, 2021), an audience member posed an alarming question during Kirk’s Q&A session. Kirk did denounce the idea of shooting political opponents – but notably, he did so on strategic grounds rather than moral ones. The man in the audience asserted “this is tyranny” and asked: “When do we get to use the guns?... How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” – referring to Democrats purportedly stealing elections. The crowd cheered and applauded this direct call for political violence. Kirk’s response has been controversial. Kirk immediately urged the audience not to resort to violence “because you’re playing into their plans, and they’re trying to make you do this”. He warned that any violent uprising would give the left a pretext to crack down: “justify a takeover of your freedoms… the likes of which we have never seen”.
- During a special livestream of The Charlie Kirk Show on March 30, 2023, Kirk vented fury at Democrats and the “tyrannical” Biden administration. He claimed those pursuing Trump were “acting like Stalinists” and warned “we must make them pay a price and a penalty”. Referring to Trump’s indictment, Kirk declared, “They crossed the Rubicon… They have declared quote-unquote the Roman Civil War.” Media Matters characterized Kirk’s post-indictment monologues as “noticeably more incendiary and alarmist” than usual, reaching a “dangerous new level” of extremist rhetoric. Calling political opponents “Stalinists” and alluding to civil war was seen by critics as flirting with incitement, even if Kirk was ostensibly talking about legal retaliation. Commentators warned that such language – framing routine legal processes as a literal war – could egg on unhinged followers to view political conflicts in apocalyptic, violent terms.
- On his March 31, 2023 broadcast, he told his audience: “We are living in an enemy-occupied country. They have taken over the government and we have to think as dissidents." Describing fellow Americans in power as an “enemy” occupier is the kind of dehumanizing language that often precedes or incites political violence. Critics noted that this phrasing encourages listeners to see themselves as insurgents in their own country.
Charlie Kirk didn't really issue direct/unambiguous calls for people to commit specific acts of political violence. But critics would generally agree that his body of work created a comprehensive "permission structure" for such actions. This was achieved through a three-pronged rhetorical strategy:
1) He provided an ideological justification for lethal force as a necessary and rational political tool, primarily through an absolutist and insurrectionist interpretation of the Second Amendment.
2) He engaged in the systematic dehumanization of his political, racial, and religious opponents, casting them not as fellow citizens with differing views but as existential threats to the nation, Christianity, and "Western civilization" itself. He described the political landscape as a "spiritual battle" and a "war between diametrically opposed worldviews which cannot peacefully coexist". During an appearance with Donald Trump, he claimed that Democrats "stand for everything God hates". In another segment on his show, he asserted, "The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse". Also objectifying/dehumanizing along racial lines: "Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that's a fact". He publicly referred to George Floyd, a man whose murder by police sparked a global movement for racial justice, as a "scumbag". In a tweet shortly before his death, he wrote, "Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America". "We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately"
3) He offered explicit endorsements of specific violent acts and issued calls for extra-judicial retribution, which served to normalize violence as a legitimate response to political and cultural disagreement. Kirk advocated for "bailing out" David DePape, the man convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the brutal hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of the former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Praising Kyle Rittenhouse as a “hero”. Critics argued that by hailing a shooter as a hero, Kirk was sending a message that “taking up arms” against perceived opponents is admirable.
One of TPUSA's most notorious initiatives is the "Professor Watchlist," a website launched in 2016 that lists the names, photos, and alleged offenses of academics Kirk's organization deems to be promoting "leftist propaganda" or discriminating against conservative students. While TPUSA framed this as a tool for transparency, its practical effect was to create a digital blacklist. The criteria for inclusion were broad, often targeting professors for their scholarly publications, social media posts, or any discussion of race and politics. The predictable and documented result of being placed on this list was subjection to "campaigns of online harassment".
To critics, the watchlist is an example of how Kirk built, deployed, and maintained over the long-term an infrastructure to enact his political will through mob dynamics and intimidation.
I didn't get a CS degree to begin with. I recommended against CS degrees to both my kids, even though one of them is into coding; a degree in some other discipline pairs nicely with self-taught programming skills, and a lot of my colleagues have gone that route.
So I think the real question is less "should you get a CS degree" (I would have said no in 2015 too), and more "should you plan for a career in software development".
Morale is low because leaders think AI can do that amount of work, but it can’t actually (at least not yet). This both means that they don’t hire enough people to do the work needed, while also “drive by” insulting the intelligence of the people they are overworking.
1. One cannot not communicate
2. Every communication has a content and relationship
aspect such that the latter classifies the former
and is therefore a metacommunication
3. The nature of a relationship is dependent on the
punctuation of the partners' communication procedures
4. Human communication involves both digital and analog
modalities
5. Inter-human communication procedures are either
symmetric or complementary
Re: (1), the "mere" act of using AI communicates something, just like some folks might register a text message as more (or less) intimate than a phone call, email, etc. The choice of modality is always part of what's communicated, part of the act of communication, and we can't stop that. Re: (2), that communication is then classified by each person's idea of what the relationship is.
This is a dramatic and expensive way to learn they had different ideas of their relationship!
Of course, in a teacher/student situation, it's the teacher's job to make it clear to the students what the relationship is. Otherwise you risk relationship-damaging "surprises" like this.
Even ignoring the normative question of what a teacher Should™ do in that situation, it was counterproductive. Whatever benefit the teacher thought AI would provide, they'd (hopefully) agree it was outweighed by the cost to their relationship w/ students. All future interactions w/ those students will now be X% harder.
There's a kind of technical rationale which says that if (1) the GOAL is to improve the student's output and (2) I would normally do that by giving one or more rounds of feedback and waiting for the student to incorporate it then (3) I should use AI because it will help us reach that goal faster and more efficiently.
John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes:
”It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.”
The act of receiving and incorporating feedback is not "inefficient", especially not in a school setting. The consummation of that process is part of the goal. Maybe the most important part!
It is 80/20 again - it gets you 80% of the way in 20% of the time and then you spend 80% of the time to get the rest of the 20% done. And since it always feels like it is almost there, sunk-cost fallacy comes into play as well and you just don't want to give up.
I think an approach that I tried recently is to use it as a friction remover instead of a solution provider. I do the programming but use it to remove pebbles such as that small bit of syntax I forgot, basically to keep up the velocity. However, I don't look at the wholesale code it offers. I think keeping the active thinking cap on results in code I actually understand while avoiding skill atrophy.
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
Not guessing is perhaps the most important thing to the business.
I developed a lot of my problem solving skills in semiconductor manufacturing where the cost of a bad assumption tends to be astronomical. You need to be able to determine exactly what the root cause is 100% of the time or everything goes to hell really fast. If there isn't a way to figure out the root cause, you now have 2 tickets to resolve.
I'll throw an entire contraption away the moment I determine it has accumulated some opacity that antagonizes root cause analysis. This is why I aggressively avoid use of non-vanilla technology stacks. You can certainly chase the rabbit over the fence into the 3rd party's GitHub repo, but I find the experience gets quite psychedelic as you transition between wildly varying project styles, motivations and scopes.
Being deeply correct nearly all of the time is probably the fastest way to build a reputation. The curve can be exponential over time with the range being the value of the problem you are entrusted with.
They're clearly thinking much bigger, like returning to a model where tariffs are the primary mode of funding the government, and nuking whole sectors/devaluing the dollar to make US exports more competitive with a desperate potential workforce. Not a particularly compelling plan in my view but it has its own internal logic.
Just a note that you can buy that "Visions of Daniel and John" apocalyptic timeline chart online from a bunch of places and, of course you should. What better way to greet guests?
Only tangentially related, but for anyone interested in the idea of a simple, quick Python-like scripting Lisp, there are two Clojure-style languages to look at:
1) Hy (https://hylang.org/, compiles to Python bytecode, usually slower than Python but compatible with all Python libraries)
2) Janet (https://janet-lang.org/, very light Lua-style embeddable VM ~1 Mb, roughly twice as fast as Python for similar ops, very easy C interop)
I read _Dracula_ afterwards, and I think this perspective is 100% correct, and perhaps the single largest theme from Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ which has been thrown out by successors.
(For fellow Gene Wolfe fans: I was reading up on this topic earlier because of "Suzanne Delage", where I interpret (https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage) as an inversion of _Dracula_ - in "Suzanne Delage", the protagonist & his allies are defeated by Dracula due to a lack of coordination/technology, in contrast to the successful protagonists of _Dracula_.)
If you have a strong enough “Why”, then you can tolerate any “How”.
Wanting to be your own boss, or having the ability to freely travel the world are both a great “Why” to create the activation energy to take the risk and start. But in my experience, it’s rarely a strong enough motivator to help someone persist through 4+ years without any meaningful wins.
The strongest "Why" usually involves serving something other than yourself. For some founders I’ve invested in, it’s a specific group of people (e.g. patients with a particular disease), or protecting something specific about the natural environment. Those people I have seen tolerate extreme suffering - to the point that I have had to physically bite my tongue in conversations where I wanted to tell them to stop and give up (but I never did - better a cut tongue than adding my opinion/ego to their burden). Some of those founders ultimately failed, others found enough wins and are still going (and suffering), a tiny number experienced wild success.
So if you want to persist, then an interesting question is "Who" or "What" are you serving besides yourself?
A separate but related question is how long can your personal cash flow sustain this?
My sister in law writes recipes. She has a recipe column in a newspaper and wrote a few high quality recipe books. I saw them in a bookstore. So she's reasonable successful. Her pieces are charming, her recipes inspiring.
The thing is. At a birthday party when I was talking to her, she confessed to me that she never actually tries her recipes. When it's time to do a new piece, she sits down at her computer and makes up a recipe. She is experienced and knowledgeable she it usually turns out ok. But if you make her recipe you may well be the first one to do it. What is worse, she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this.
So if you cook from a recipe you'll have to adjust to realities and modify it were needed, because the recipe writer sure as hell didn't do it for you.
I have worked in remote-first organizations for more than 15 years, mostly at technology companies, both as an individual contributor and a manager. By dint of my role, I also get to meet with companies of all different sizes all over the country and see companies who are fully remote, hybrid, and fully on-premise. I have literally talked with hundreds of companies across the world and got to observe the differences.
There are some leaders who simply can't function in a remote environment. However, this is a flaw of their leadership and the organizational culture, not a problem with employees or their preferences. It is a problem with personal fear, inflexibility, and lack of vision more than anything else. My experience is that the older people are and the longer they have worked at a company, the more issues they have with remote work.
We proved during COVID that we can function just fine remotely. It benefits the employees in a hundred different ways. An organization that wants people to come to work at their detriment is one that doesn't value their people, and this is how they are expressing it.
The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of "focus work" a day on average. I simply didn't have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted at the maximum rate allowed by our organization.
My least productive years happened when I was working far longer hours, stressed out and miserable in a company with a "hustle culture" and very poor internal communication/documentation habits in my opinion.
My opinion is that you should prioritize your own wellbeing and if you feel that the company culture (or your manager) is preventing you from working in the way that you find most enjoyable, go find a different job.
Don't be pressured into working longer than you want or in ways that you don't like, thinking that it will help your career. Your quality of life is more important and you may actually be more productive doing things your way.
Note that dungeon (the source port from the mainframe game that eventually became Zork) has been open sourced for much longer. At some point it was machine translated from F77 Fortran to C~90, and comprises some of the most terrifying code I have seen:
I think there is one interesting angle to this problem.
I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge.
As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to the problems and logic behind all those new solutions. Understand how we come to have JavaScript and the browser mess we are in and so many other curious features of todays digital world.
I understand pretty much all of the layers of the computing from how CPUs achieve some of the things they are doing to bus protocols, to instructions, physical memory, low level OS internals, high level OS internals, virtual memory, userspace platform communication with OS, programming language runtimes and linking, shared libraries, IPC, networking, virtualization, etc.
The issue, as with any automation, is that new players on the scene (younger devs, devops, etc.) simply have no chance to learn the same things and go trough the same path.
For them, spending a decade working with a low level programming language before you jump into high level programming language is simply not an option.
We, people who really understand the technology that the world runs on, are a slowly dying breed. We are still here as tech leads, managers, directors, business owners. But there will be a point in time when we will go on retirement and there will be only precious few people who had perseverance to really understand all those things by diving into obscure, historical manuals.
I'm a gun owner and I believe in the rights of citizens to be armed, but I'm still not sure this is a good argument. On principle, anything that causes unnecessary deaths should be curtailed unless the benefits somehow outweigh the damage. We still have people driving cars who kill each other every day by accident, but there's a general feeling that it would be better to do away with that if we could find a way to eliminate private transportation without destroying our economy in the process. To make a strong argument for firearms ownership requires not just downplaying the harm but actually explaining why the public good of an armed populace outweighs the many and obvious evils it inflicts on innocent people. That's a much tougher case to make to someone who's lost a family member to gun violence, but nonetheless it's a case that needs to be made (in my opinion) if we're going to remain an unruly bunch who won't be led down the road to either a right-wing or left-wing police state.
[edit: Just to clarify, I think there's an equally strong argument to be made about freedom of movement as a societal benefit, and an individual right, that outweighs the harms caused by humans driving their own cars.]
I’d be remiss not to mention that we (Pimoroni) sit right at the hacker end of the E-ink scale with stuff like Badger2040W [1] and Inky Frame [2], both of which pair (small and less small) E-Ink panels with the RP2040 microcontroller so you can BYO software.
The biggest roadblock to these being super compelling is update rate. The black/white screen on Badger can be driven pretty hard, but overdriving it (a friend built a continuous E-ink zoetrope [3]) has consequences.
Inky Frame’s 7 colour display is awesome for dithered artwork (missing cyan and magenta notwithstanding) but very, very slow to refresh- ~30s after the panels were updated to incorporate an unskippable “clean” phase.
Faster, cheaper and bigger all seem mutually exclusive right now, but I share the authors passion for the format.
This is quite darkly hilarious tbh. And consistent with my experience of Blackpool.
I once went there on couple-week-long driving course when I was a teenager, hoping but eventually failing to get my license. I was put up in someone's house that was run as a sort of unlicensed b&b. The entire place, the curtains, the linen, the pillow,.. all smelled of old nicotine and damp. On my first evening I went out by myself to a fish-and-chip shop, feeling like a silly city boy in a greasy gritty concrete town. Stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember walking, late evening, lonely, on a bridge over the railtrack. The entire place felt deserted, metallic and concrete.
I went back to my room and ate the oily chips on my bed. After the first day with an old crusty – but perfectly lovely driving instructor – and a rather large heavy-haulage driver who was renewing a license, we went out for some drinks. Beers. Lots of beer. And they took me to a gay club – of which there are oddly many in Blackpool – because they thought it'd be a laugh. It was actually a massive spectacle for me. It was the first time I saw older men kissing, right there, by the entrance on a old tawdry sofa. I was still on a journey of coming out, so it felt oddly enlightening or validating or something. It was an old-england gay club – the type you hear about in the era of stonewall.
The entire town was like a time capsule to a poorer apocalyptic britain. Betting shops, cheap nail salons, boarded up derelict buildings everywhere! Even the beach was deserted. It reflected the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK. It felt like a shadow of its former self, but somehow, there was a old english magic to it that I can still feel. My nostalgia is probably getting the better of me, but I remember it fondly.
So yeh I think I understand this SLS thing. In places like Blackpool – forgotten remnants - you can feel the depression in the paving stones – the grey withering vitality – swallowing you whole.
The older I get, the more I agree with this rant. I used to be that guy putting cute unicode checkboxes in his test runner, telling myself I was making the world a better place because my software was nifty and clever. Now, I realize that, while that's nice to see, my time was better spent just solving the problem and then moving on to the next problem. Nobody was dying for animated tick marks and I probably ruined someone's experience because their terminal emulator or multiplexer had shitty unicode and escape code support.
It's a delicate balancing act, of course. The tinkerers are often the ones pushing tech forward with their incessant fiddling. But it comes at such an incredibly high cost. I mean, how many human lifetimes have been consumed by the shitty intricacies of dynamic linking alone. And for what? To solve a class of problems we haven't really had since 1992?
What a waste.
There's ample space in the software world for all kinds -- and arguably the industry is fueled by the blood of well-intentioned innocents -- but my increasingly jaded self just wants the shit to work so that I can close my laptop and get outside with my kids. The guy who spent 15 hours a day obsessing over The Right Way and code purity and ecosystems has aged into a man who firmly believes that less is much more, cuteness is a code smell, and solutions should be as self-contained as humanly possible.
The problem is to gain political power you have to out compete others for money and votes.
Understanding a problem, and being able to hold on to power while making the hard decisions is a classic unsolved problem in politics.
But it's infinitely harder with very few (two!?!) high centralized litmus-tested groupthink political parties, incentivized to lock up power unilaterally, and marginalize the power of other parties, not skills conducive to governing.
And also infinitely harder with unlimited spending by corporations (who are not citizens, and don't share the interests of citizens), where tiny groups of executives get to leverage all their companies resources toward tilting the political field in their favor, in order to get massive bonuses for feeding insatiable shareholder demand. But without reflecting any of the decency that shareholders might actually have.
It's the moloch beast. The whole system is the problem, but it's near impossible to improve the system's design because it will fight that at every step.
It mindlessly cares about its own survival. Which is how it came to be.
Even if every single person in the system actually wants to do the hard things that will keep the planet in good shape.
For automated testing, I'm in the middle of reading Developer Testing by Alexander Tarlinder, with xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros coming close behind. I'm also working through Test-Driven Development: By Example with my wife as we have time.
For SQL, I read Grokking Relational Database Design by Qiang Hao last winter, and I started SQL Queries for Mere Mortals by John Viescas this week. Sadly, my flub with "left inner join" was not a joke.
For OOP, I've been on a whirlwind tour: OOA&D With Applications by Booch et al., Object Thinking by David West, POODR and 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz, Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans, IDDD and DDDD by Vaughn Vernon, Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen, Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin, and Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck. Still on the docket are Design Patterns by the Gang of Four, PoEAA by Martin Fowler, Smalltalk, Objects, and Design by Chamond Liu, and Object Design by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.
> confessing that you don't know something and gleefully stopping there is not much better [...] we shouldn't let shamelessness about what we don't know limit us either
I promise you, this was not gleeful and this was not shameless. Shame and fear affected me for months on these issues. And I'm not stopping there... From the end of the article: "I’m going to continue to work on skill building, but now I feel free to write about it. If [...] you’d like to help me fill [my knowledge gaps], [...]"
> if you want to write a blog about a topic, then part of the requirements here is that you do hold yourself to a high standard
A high standard of writing, maybe. But plenty of great stories come from those who are striving for a high standard, not just those already in the upper echelon. It's what makes this place different from academic journals.