Influences & Inspiration
My biggest inspiration for creating this website was Gwern Branwen, who is an independent researcher and creator of the website gwern.net. I first learned about Gwern on twitter from his appearance on the Dwarkesh podcast, where he was brought on since he predicted LLM scaling would continue as far back as 2020. Outside of his influence strictly relating to his arguments, he’s also a clearly inspired writer. A fan of Borges’ polymathy, no stranger to esoteric topics from self experiments with sleep and drugs to meta-science to dark-net markets, and meticulously citing any and every relevant source (contributing to wikipedia), his writing is like a pragmatic, tech-focused David Foster Wallace.
In addition to Gwern, I’ve also been influenced by a number of writers, including but not limited to the list below.
- Karl Knausgaard (see my struggle 1-6)
- Borges (see ficciones)
- Aldous Huxley (see brave new world)
- Yuval Noah Harari (see sapiens)
- Cormac McCarthy (see outer dark)
Writing Resources
I’m a novice writer and enjoy reading about ways I can improve. This usually boils down to practical advice about avoiding perfectionism, splitting up arguments, and more, but they’ve been helpful to me nonetheless, so I thought I’d list them here as a source of inspiration.
On Writing
On What to Write About
On Building Arguments
Attributions
- Flexoki for color theme
- Young Serif font