Zilong's Tech Notes Notes on "writing"
Happy New Year! Here’s a quick recap of my New Year’s break:
I finished watching The King of Internet Writing, a video podcast by David Perell about what we can learn from Paul Graham’s writing. I’m ready to write more, and better, in 2026.
On New Year’s Eve, I was traveling with my partner in Chongqing. We ate spicy hotpot and walked through the hilly streets!
Chongqing's cityscape on New Year's Eve
I’m planning to add new features to this website. I created two GitHub issues, following Simon Willison’s approach to building features1:
-
Simon Willison’s blog post: How I build a feature ↵
Paul Graham’s post on X about writing. I started writing recently (as you can probably tell), so I’ve been reading a lot about it. What’s interesting are the comments under this post. People are sharing their own thoughts on writing, and many are surprisingly inspiring. Reading them makes me feel less alone in my writing journey.
I don’t know what still newer marvels will make writing twice as easy in the next 30 years. But I do know they won’t make writing twice as good. That will still require plain old hard thinking.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well
William wrote this in 2006. Nearly 20 years later, LLMs have made producing text easier than ever — yet concerns about AI-generated junk are growing too. Good writing remains rare and precious. It still needs to be written and rewritten, again and again, by humans.
Happy holidays! At the end of 2025, I’m starting a blog. I’ve already written several entries and feel confident I can keep it going.
Here I talk about my past attempts, the writers who inspired me, the motivation, the topics to cover, and the approach I’m taking. It’s my version of a blogging manifesto.