Writing as moats for humans 4 minutes read — 24 Aug 2025

Most writing on the internet is AI-writing now. The dark forest theory of internet, a re-hash of a concept popularised by the sci-fi author, Cixin Liu referring to this hostile digital landscape where most content is written by the bots, and to escape from this cybernetic fake-ness, users retreat to hidden, invite-only "private" communities to escape this chaos. We live in this hostile. digital....

Read raw transcripts 3 minutes read — 26 Jul 2025

I opened up Claude one day, and asked to summarise Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment into one sentence; and it said: A young, impoverished ex-student named Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker to test his theory that extraordinary people are above moral law, only to be consumed by guilt and psychological torment until he confesses and finds redemption through love and spiritual awakening....

Essay Quality Ranker 3 minutes read — 07 May 2025

Ever found yourself with dozens of draft essays in Obsidian but no clear idea which ones need the most editing work? I did, and that's why I built EditNext - an AI-powered plugin that ranks your markdown files based on how much editing they need. The EditNext plugin uses LLMs and linguistic analysis to evaluate your drafts, providing a prioritized list of which documents deserve your attention...

Vibe writing maxims 3 minutes read — 02 May 2025

Some vibe-writing maxims: - While writing, have two windows open: one for the writing, and the other one for ChatGPT. Previously he used to consult ChatGPT a couple of times for internet research, but now the role has transitioned to be a more conversational thought partner, helping you riff-raff on the idea for the essay. (Let's say you're writing an essay about tarrifs, and you want to...

How I blog with Obsidian, Cloudflare, AstroJS, Github 3 minutes read — 25 Apr 2025

I’ve been refining my writing and publishing workflow to the point where it feels effortless. It combines Obsidian for writing, AstroJS for building the site, and Cloudflare Pages for deployment. Everything now lives locally, in plain text, structured neatly for both creative flow and technical control. And this is partly inspired by Kepano's adherence to the local, plain-text format: > File over...

Public gardens, secret routes 3 minutes read — 19 Feb 2025

When you land on a site, you are treated with various hyperlinks. Based on the UX choices you make, you might end up preferring one over the other. You might get the job done, and head back to your earlier Chrome tab. Nothing out of the ordinary. It's an internet search as usual. But what about those pages which have no visible links on the site you just searched. It’s hidden in plain sight, but...

Writing in Future Past 4 minutes read — 17 Jan 2025

We lack frequent usage of the future past tense in modern discourse. When I was recently drafting my new year resolutions, I noticed the use of 'I can', and 'I will', and found myself questioning the format, especially when I see that I'm good at making promises, but end up being miserable at keeping them. I also observed that when I write "I achieved..." instead of "I will achieve..", I can...

Publish Originally, Syndicate Elsewhere 9 minutes read — 16 Jan 2025

Writing for yourself on your personal website is the purest form of self-expression on the internet. It avoids any trappings from the algorithmic maze. And there are no digital echo chambers. It's just you and your ideas in your own cozy little garden. We're witnessing the renaissance of personal websites. As social platforms become increasingly unstable, more creators are rediscovering the power...

Writing is thinking 8 minutes read — 02 Jan 2025

My blog has had a median of ~2 visitors per day for almost two years (nowadays, it's only a marginal improvement). And I don't care. Writing is thinking. And this blog has served as a public notepad well enough. As Alexey Guzey points out — perhaps the best indicator of your online writing having benefits is when you are not too embarassed to tell people. "Oh, BTW, I wrote about this/collected...

Read writers who operate 6 minutes read — 29 Dec 2024

We have more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds, and books on ornithologists written by birds. Taleb eloquently describes this as the key problem of knowledge, or in other words as epistemic arrogance. Strong corollary can be drawn with various disciplines, including entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs simply spend more time doing entrepreneurship rather...

Trees, Branches, Twigs and Leaves — Mental Models for Writing 3 minutes read — 21 Dec 2024

What differentiates a good essay and a great essay? — With a great essay, you can see the larger tree that connects all those branches, leaves, and twigs together into a single unit of a 'tree'. A bad essay is where you only see the random assortment of leaves and branches. You don't see the larger tree among the branches. While listening to one of the podcast episodes from David Perell's Writes...

Compound Interest of Private Notes 5 minutes read — 11 Dec 2024

Strongly recommend everyone to keep private notes about people. These could even be some random jotted keywords: "served in the navy", "capuccino lover", "biker", "loves going on long walks", and so on. When private notes accumulate over time in the form of a database, they start showing emergent properties. As Derek Sivers rightly points out in his essay: having your own database is one of the...

Beauty of Zettels 4 minutes read — 06 Dec 2024

I've tried various tools and systems for online writing, but nothing beats the power of Zettels. What are they, really? You may ask. They come from the Zettelkasten method, developed by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who was incredibly prolific. He wrote around 70 books and 400 peer-reviewed articles in 30 years. That's a lot of writing. How did he do it? He credits his Zettelkasten....

Exploring "smart connections" for note taking 4 minutes read — 02 Dec 2024

Not starting with a blank slate has been a great productivity boost in my writing. I wrote 50K words in 2024. And I can safely say that these 50K words have been written in a well thought manner, instead of an AI generated word salad. All this, because I've been exploring this neat little plugin called as Smart Connections on Obsidian. It is a tool, and I wouldn't be naive enough to say that...

Repetitive Copyprompting 3 minutes read — 15 Nov 2024

While designing health campaigns for Noora health's work in Indonesia and Bangladesh, I was overseeing the health communications strategy for pregnant and newly-delivered mothers. There were messages in a specific format that needed to be rewritten in a more easy to digest Whatsapp format appealing to the people of Bangladesh. My usual default response to such tasks would be to open a tab on...

Hyperlinks are like cashew nuts 2 minutes read — 15 Nov 2024

Take a small block of paragraph and sprinkle 8-10 hyperlinks in it— Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec tristique elit sit amet diam fringilla posuere sodales a leo. Cras auctor efficitur purus in suscipit. Sed ornare lectus at nisl dictum semper. Donec efficitur lorem in nisi dapibus condimentum. Ut ex tortor, aliquam at facilisis vitae, porttitor maximus sapien. Duis...

How to spot human writing on the internet? 7 minutes read — 20 Aug 2024

In the classic Turing Test, a computer is considered intelligent if it can convince a human that it’s another human in a conversation. At that time, human-generated content dominated the internet. But that was a decade ago. Today, the landscape has shifted dramatically. AI-generated content now rivals, and in some cases outpaces, human-created material. According to the 'expanding dark forest'...

Minto principle for writing memos 3 minutes read — 12 Dec 2023

Initially popularised by McKinsey consultants to draft internal reports, this became quite widespread as a global standard for business writing. Start with the main statement, draw some conclusions and provide some data/facts and figures for further understanding. This could be a simple way in which most Slack updates could be arranged as the format prevents us from becoming too verbose. Not just...