This site has gone through many forms, and comments have come and gone. Now they are back, made possible by commento++. Commento was popular and on my radar for a while, but the original repository has been dead for a while. Commento++ is a fork that has been dead for… a little bit less of a while. But it has a few improvements from the original, and as long as it’s stable I don’t care so much.

But the better question is not how, but why have comments? (Or why not to?)

I didn’t have comments for a long time, because I decided that this blog was a place where I didn’t care what other people said. It was a space for me to write and save things, just for myself. That’s fine, too.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for me to write on this blog, espeically in the context of generative AI getting so good at replacing mediocre writers. Paul Graham’s post Writes and Write-Nots resonated with me. The ability to write well is equivalent to the ability to think well. By continuing to write, on my own, I hope I can keep up my ability to think well.

And in many contexts, writing is also the ability to turn your thoughts into words and share them with other people. It is the ability to communicate. Writing in a personal journal might be good for my thinking, but I want to focus on my communication too. So, comments.

I’ll write articles on this blog with the intent of communciating my thoughts to my readers, few as they are. And since communication is a two-way street, I wanted some kind of commenting system to get feedback and discourse. So I hope you find my posts here engaging, and would be very happy if you left me a comment, too.