4 ms·
Kinda a strange post that I don't quite agree with. Particularly: > You’re not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn’t be publishing in a blog, but wri
by sweetjuly 3y ago
Kinda a strange post that I don't quite agree with. Particularly:
> You’re not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn’t be publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
Blogs and self-pub are often the only ways some information is shared by nature of the fact that academic publications don't publish things that don't obviously advance the state-of-the-art.
For example, one area I'm close with is computer security. While academia does some quite interesting work here, most major journals balk at the papers which discuss security mitigation defeats unless they're particularly zany (say, breaking ASLR using transient side channel attacks). Blog posts which detail how these mitigations work (ex. Siguza's post on Apple's proprietary APRR [1]) and how they can be defeated (ex. Project Zero's post which builds on Siguza's work to explore how APRR can be defeated in Safari's JIT [2]) provide considerable value to both security researchers, people who develop mitigations, and software people in general who are interested in learning how attackers think.
These sorts of works don't really belong in journals but that doesn't make them any less valuable.
[1] https://blog.siguza.net/APRR/ https://blog.siguza.net/APRR/
[2] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/09/jitsploitation-three.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/09/jitsploitatio...
- Agentlien 3y agoAnother great example is graphics studies of video games, a trend started by Adrian Courrèges[1]. I learned a lot from his blog and it really motivated me to start doing my own similar analyses of games I enjoy. I mean, I'm already comfortable using these tools from work, so why not? Maybe I'll even post about it on my blog, sometime... [1] http://www.adriancourreges.com http://www.adriancourreges.com
- cyclotron3k 3y agoAll four of those bullet points are flawed, and I think that's the point. They are _perceived_ reasons to not blog, rather than actual, legitimate reasons. That's my take anyway.
- Agentlien 3y agoThat would have made sense if the second half would actually refute them. Instead it seems to assume they are truths but argue that you shouldn't care that your thoughts are unoriginal and others laugh at your stupidity.
- ginsider_oaks 3y agoThe point is that the first list is a series of (flawed) reasons that the author, and probably many others, have been discouraged from blogging. And even if you know they're flawed, it can still get in your head and discourage you, so the author provides a different list of reasons to still blog in spite of that. It's not meant as proving/disproving any of the points, but simply as motivation to keep going.
- isykt 3y agoThat’s only your take away because you read the entire post where the author negates all of these points and reaffirms his belief that blogging is worthwhile.