Change Winds Blowing

I’ve been sitting on a fence for several months now, and it’s starting to get a bit uncomfortable. Back in March I opened branch office over in Substack land. Ever since I’ve been trying to figure out whether to shift operations there or remain here. (Or try to do both more or less equally.)

A complicating factor is that, despite both Substack and WordPress being blogging platforms, there is something of an apples and pumpkins comparison. They have, for me, contrasting pros and cons, mead and poison.

Change is hard, but it can also be invigorating, and it might just be time.

[This post isn’t entirely a self-indulgence about this blog, just the first half. I have some things to share in the second half. Feel free to skip down to the double § § if this part isn’t interesting (which I would totally get).]

There are several milestones I might take as harbingers of change. Just celebrated the 13-year blog anniversary (and my 11-year retirement anniversary). Just crossed the 1400-post mark, and just about to cross the 1200-post mark for regular posts (versus the 80 Sidebands, the 93 Brain Bubbles, or 33 posts in the Special Relativity series).

I’m also just 55 posts shy of “normalizing” the HTML (and other details) of my old posts (see the 13th Anniversary post for details). Completing that project, in my mind positions me better to export my posts and import them elsewhere.

Yeah, I’m thinking of taking my football and going home.

Well, not home, but to some other field. Or not. Damned fence. Can’t tell which side has greener grass, and both sides have their share of weeds.

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Part of it is that, on multiple levels, I’ve become ever less happy with WordPress over the last few years. I sometimes wonder if the originators sold the place and moved on, and now it’s being run by people just trying to make a buck. That happens with restaurants. The people with the creativity and vision move on, and the bureaucrats and bean-counters move in.

One big negative is WordPress’s apparent refusal to address a number of bugs I’ve submitted. There has been no action at all on any of them, yet they keep making (what I think are dumb) changes to the product. They don’t seem supportive of long-form blogging (which, admittedly, may be dying or dead).

There is also that this place is starting to feel like one of those downtown areas that’s been abandoned in favor of the suburbs (or a different city entirely). I’ve several times now gone looking for new bloggers to follow but haven’t found any that strike my fancy. (In fairness, or that seem interested in me or this blog.)

There are the handful I’ve followed a long time, but that group seems only to get smaller over time. So, on both a technical level and a blogging level, it does feel it might be time to move on.

Which then raises the question of what to do about this blog. Delete it? Abandon it to ads, give up the domain? Maintain it ad-free and keep the domain? Keep posting here indefinitely? If that last one (which I still lean towards even if I mainly move to Substack), what kind of posts going forward?

Lot of stuff hung up on this fence.

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Substack feels far more dynamic than WordPress, and — at least so far — I haven’t encountered noticeably any buggy behavior. On the other hand, Substack lacks many of the features WordPress offers, and it’s often in those features that the bugs reside. Feature-wise, Substack does much less than WordPress, but it seems to do it well.

There is also that Substack is ad-free for all. They apparently make their money from the pay-to-subscribe model supported for “newsletters” (what they call a blog). They even offer multiple subscription levels (including free). Each blogger (“newsletter publisher”) decides what they offer for free versus for their paid members.

While I have no interest in being paid (and — to be honest — paying to read someone on the internet’s writing — there’s just too much quality free content for that), the model seems effective for all involved. I’ll never use it myself (yeah, I’m a leach), but it seems to work well and may account, at least in part, for Substack’s dynamism.

I’m still in the old-fashioned internet mode of contributing content I think might be worthwhile to someone gratis and expecting the same from experts in other domains. I loved that model of sharing, and it still very much exists for the more academic and scientific bloggers. Freely shared knowledge. What a concept.

[Wikipedia, which depends on that model, is still my favorite website of any, and over time, it has grown to be an outstanding resource.]

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On the con side, Substack is much less capable than WordPress both for writing posts and for commenting on them. The lame commenting functionality is especially weird when contrasted with essentially the same thing in their Notes feed.

Speaking of which, the Substack Notes feed is, to me, both the best and worst feature of the platform. It’s essentially a Twitter-like mini- or micro-blogging system. It’s their forward-facing system, what you hit if you just visit the Substack website. It’s quintessential “social media” — the very thing studies indicate might be the potentially damaging aspect of the interweb.

What makes it best and worst to me isn’t anything technical. It’s personal and besides my disdain for social media. Notes is too damn addictive. That damned doomscrolling approach that is as bad as potato chips when it comes to trying to stop consuming. And the micro-blogging really appeals to my life-long tendency to be a clown.

In the last couple of months, I’ve spent more time on Substack, and I’ve really noticed my personal productivity taking a huge hit, largely because of all the social interaction on Notes. This can’t continue if I want to get anything done, and the problem of Substack Notes is part of my equation.

The contrast I just mentioned between Notes and blog comments is that almost identical mechanisms are in play, but blog comments are limited plain text. No pictures or videos, and no text effects like bold or italics. Notes allow all of that (yet are still limited in what they allow — you can’t embed LaTeX, for example). I do count these limits, especially the blog comment limits, as significant cons against Substack.

Blog posts are also limited but in different ways. Images must be centered, no wrap-around text of any kind, which I find annoying. Much more annoying is the apparent lack of an images library that would allow reuse of images. On the other hand, embedding LaTeX (for math equations) is a built-in feature, which I rather like. And footnotes are also built in. On the other other hand, I find the inability to tweak the HTML (or add some of my own, like a table) very limiting.

Ultimately, it forces one to a different (more primitive) kind of writing, something of a throwback to plain old text. In some ways, it takes me back to the early days of email and USENET when that was all we had. So, it does feel like going backwards, but it can also help one focus on the actual writing.

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Which perhaps isn’t surprising given that Substack seems focused on writers. (I get the sense it may have begun as a haven for writers. I’ve seen some Notes complaining about how the place has gone downhill.) There also seem to be a lot of philosophers there (I got there following @Tina to her new philosophy blog).

I’ve already found Neal Stephenson, Jim Baggott, and Robert J. Sawyer on Substack (all favorite authors of mine). Stephenson and Baggott use the platform for some interesting posts as well as publicity, so that’s been fun.

And very much what I mean about Substack being more dynamic.

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Bottom line, I more and more find myself making a home on Substack. (I do need to learn to manage my time on Notes better. Knowing myself, as the blush of “new toy” wears off, it’ll happen naturally. It’s kind of happening already.)

I haven’t really found my voice there, yet. I’m a little intimidated by the various domain experts and not sure what I can contribute. So far, I’ve been leaning heavily on humor along with some math and physics education. (But, damn, there are some pros on Substack doing the same. Which is yet another issue in that reading the posts of interesting experts is also cutting into my project time, both blogging and coding. I’ve even managed to get myself into a “class” on group theory. With homework!)

So, my Substack path is vague, but it seems clear I’ll be following it somewhere for now, I just don’t know where. My thinking about this blog is to hang on but maybe try finally more for the “dear diary” format I’ve reached for here but never fully grasped. It occurred to me that this could be a place to talk behind Substack’s back, so to speak.

A final consideration is that traffic on this blog has been on the upswing lately (not sure why), and I kind of what to see where that goes. Or at least try to understand what’s causing it.

So, I’m not going away, at least not in the immediate future but will be spending more (and more?) time on Substack. If you’d care to join me there:

Wyrd Smythe and Logos con Carne on Substack.

[Substack has two points of presence for blog authors, the author’s profile, and the author’s blog. That confused me at first. I was also confused by how Substack has you subscribe to blogs and posts but follow authors and their Notes (subscribing automatically follows but not vice versa). And authors can divide their blog into multiple “newsletters” (for instance) allowing readers to pick among them.]

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Back in the world of interesting things, don’t you just love it when science starts to take more seriously some off-beat widely disdained left-field idea you have defiantly favored for a long time?

Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, in his book The Emperor’s New Mind (1989), argued (with Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems as centerpiece) that mind cannot be computational. The argument goes back to Alan Turing (in the late 1940s) and Gödel himself (in 1951). Philosopher John Lucas popularized it in 1961, and the argument has come to be known as the Penrose-Lucas argument.

The general science consensus has been to disdain the idea on multiple counts. But now this from Sabine Hossenfelder:

And this from PBS Spacetime:

FWIW, my two bits: Firstly, we keep forgetting that chemistry is quantum, so at that level, everything is quantum. Secondly, lots of interesting and important chemistry in the brain (like neurotransmitters), so all the more reason to suspect quantum goings on. Thirdly, something as compact and contained as the brain almost certainly has a lot of field effect stuff going on. We know about the electrical aspect of this, because EEGs, but the more subtle quantum field effects are beyond our ken currently. They matter. Even further from our sight are any more localized effects on small groups of neurons.

So, I think the brain is likely a quantum device, but not necessarily a quantum computer. As the second video mentions, quantum computers are still algorithmic, so it’s not clear what advantage they might offer. That said, it does seem possible that, if computationalism ultimately proves true, it may require QC to implement.

I get a rush when theoretical physicists write about time being fundamental or, more rarely, about how information conservation just maybe isn’t a thing, and now this. Many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip but stay tuned.

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This was originally going to be a TV Tuesday post, and I was going to write about re-watching Mr. Robot (2015-2019; 4 seasons), but I find myself less inclined towards media criticism anymore.

Suffice to say that (A) I really enjoyed re-watching it, and (2) it’s a very different story when you know what’s really going on. It’s one of those stories where the first and second viewings differ completely (like The Sixth Sense). This also makes it hard to write about without spoilers.

I kicked off the re-watch because Amazon Prime had the fourth season, which I’d never seen. Oddly, I remembered the first season very well, but seasons two and three progressively less so. I recalled becoming somewhat disengaged by the show over time on the first watching.

But it’s still an extraordinary show in many ways, an excellent example of good TV. Despite some aspects I didn’t care for personally, the storytelling is outstanding throughout the series. Not a show for everyone’s taste, but well worth seeing if it is yours. I’m tempted to give it a low Wow! rating, but I think a strong Ah! rating is more on the money.

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In closing, I think it’s safe to say I may be posting here a bit less. Or not. Don’t wait up, though.

Stay safe, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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