Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic had its sixth birthday last week! 💥 🎉 🎂
Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name “Pluralistic.” I didn’t know what Pluralistic was going to be, but I wasn’t writing Boing Boing anymore, and I knew I wanted to keep writing the web in some fashion.
Six years and more than 1,500 posts later, I am so satisfied with how Pluralistic is going. I spent a couple of decades processing everything that seemed interesting or significant through a blog, which created a massive database (and mnemonically available collection of partially developed thoughts) that I’m now reprocessing as a series of essays that make sense of today in light of everything that I’ve thought about for my whole adult life, which are, in turn, fodder for books, both fiction and nonfiction. I call this “The Memex Method”:
Looks like I first discovered Pluralistic back in January 2022. So not a super-early adopter, but I’ve been on board longer than the half-life.
The first segment of his post focuses on what he gets out of the hard graft needed to create Pluralistic on a mostly daily basis, both personally and professionally.
Making Pluralistic is several kinds of hard work. Over the past six years, I’ve become an ardent collagist, spending more and more time on the weird, semi-grotesque images that run atop every edition. Anything you devote substantial time to on a near-daily basis is something that gives you insight – into yourself, and into the thing you’re doing.
Off and on, I’ve been a daily blogger over the years. I even pulled off a posting run of 540 days in a row. I can heartily agree with this sentiment.
A third segment of his post, after documenting publishing tooling in the middle, is an extended screed about AI, its hazards, and its opportunities. Taken as a whole, this part could be a bit overcooked. I was amused that he uses AI in a similar way to me: copy editing.
There is one technology that has made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama – an open-source LLM – on my laptop. It runs pretty well, even without a GPU. Every day, before I run Loren’s python publication scripts, I run the text through Ollama as a typo-catcher (my prompt is “find typos”). Ollama always spots three or four of these, usually stuff like missing punctuation, or forgotten words, or double words (“the the next thing”) or typos that are still valid words (“of top of everything else”).
Instead of going fully local with Ollama, though, my homegrown copyedit tool calls out to a frontier model API. Invoking a local model is just a bit of reconfiguration away, so it would probably be a good experiment to try an open-source one for a while. I’m just a little too lazy to set up and keep running the local inference server, though.
In any event, cheers to Pluralistic and here’s hoping it’s around for many more years.
Hint: If you’re into Pluralistic, Doctorow operates a Discourse, not Discord, forum at chinwag.pluralistic.net. Fully open source, ’natch. Low volume, high signal.
Built using