The curious case of blogging: Finding purpose through experimentation.

The benefits and challenges tied to blogging as a medium for learning and experimentation, such as its use for experimenting with Large Language Models and the potential for automation in content creation.
Author

Lucas A. Meyer

Published

April 6, 2023

As an economist, I’m always thinking about incentives. So when it comes to blogging, I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure what the point is.

Sure, when I was hiring a lot of people, it made sense to have a blog as a way to attract potential candidates and showcase our company’s culture and values. But now that I’m not in that position, I find myself wondering why I’m still doing it.

That being said, I have found some value in blogging as a way to learn new things. For example, I’ve been using my blog to experiment with LLMs (that’s “Large Language Models” for those who aren’t familiar). It’s been a great way to get hands-on experience with these cutting-edge tools and see what they can do.

Plus, I’ve been able to streamline the process of generating my blog posts and images. The code I use is in GitHub. It’s not fully automatic yet, but I’m getting there.

In fact, if I could figure out what my ultimate goal is with blogging and what levers I could use to achieve it, I would love to try using reinforcement learning to make the whole process completely automatic. Who knows? Maybe that’s the future of content creation.

So while I may not have a clear answer to the question of why I blog, I do know that it’s been a useful tool for experimentation and learning. And who knows? Maybe I’ll figure out the bigger picture someday.