Blogs by Humans
Last updated: Jul 27, 2025.
I love writing code with Claude. I’m excited about the possibilities of AI in building many kinds of software. I never want to read prose written by AI.
This is not a contradiction for those of us who relish the aesthetic qualities of prose. I empathize with people for whom writing is a chore, or they’re being forced to write something (like corporate paperwork) and thus want to just get it over with using AI assistance. But if you’re putting your writing on the Internet and want people to read it, you should learn to write. When I sit down in the morning with a freshly made cup of coffee to read something, I want the writer of that piece to have put in more effort than I did in making that coffee. Life is too short for anything else. There are still Dostoevsky novels I haven’t read, and someday I want to read Moby Dick.
“What if there’s valuable information in an AI-assisted post, don’t you want to read it?”, you ask. No. Information is not scarce. If I just want information about something, I’ll ask ChatGPT!
I want to read to understand a specific person’s viewpoint or their life experience. If prose is crafted well, it allows for transmission of an arrangement of concepts from one brain to another. If it’s crafted really well, the writer takes you on a journey, a chain of thought and imagery that produces a feeling.
Let me illustrate with two examples. The first is an article that pushed me to write this post: Why Elixir? A Rebuttal to Common Misconceptions.
I don’t mean to pick on this specific person, but there is zero value to me in that article. It’s almost entirely written by ChatGPT. Worse, it starts off by pretending to be a personal account:
I am sick and tired of having to justify “Why Elixir?” so I decided to write down all of the reasons why in one spot!
I already have some opinions about Elixir. I’m aware of its features. If I wanted a bland sales pitch about why it’s so great I could have typed into ChatGPT: “give me 10 reasons why Elixir is a great language”, which I’m sure is pretty close to the prompt used to generate that “essay”. I also found it somewhat disheartening that there were only two comments on the HN thread pointing out that this was AI slop. This is probably a combination of people not reading articles before commenting and the average person being absolutely terrible at identifying AI-written prose.
In contrast look at this post about training an LLM on 10,000 GPUs by Soumit Chintala, one of the founders of PyTorch. There is an incredible amount of hard-won knowledge packed into that short post. I don’t care that it hasn’t been polished into a 2,000 word essay. I would rather read bullet points written by someone with something worthwhile to say than lazy slop.
All of this is preamble to share a list of blogs that I love. These are by people I trust to put in the effort to write well. For each blog I’ll also include one great post that can be your entry point.
In alphabetical order of their first names.
Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History: psychology, the scientific method.
Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs
Brian Potter, Construction Physics: essays about everything we build in the physical world.
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab
Henrik Karlsson, Escaping Flatland: personal essays.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
Nikhil Suresh, Ludicity: “Office Space” for the 21st century?
Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug
Patrick McKenzie, Bits About Money: software and finance.
Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf: Book reviews that are illuminating by themselves. I also love that they review books published years and decades ago.
REVIEW: Sick Societies, by Robert B. Edgerton
Yuxi Liu, Yuxi on the Wired: deep dives into AI, math, physics.
The Backstory of Backpropagation
Speaking of Moby Dick, what language model would ever write this delightfully improbable paragraph?
I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.