Oops, I’m anonymous. The kind of anonymity Tom MacWright calls out in his post Accidental anonymity, the kind that occurs when we fail to present our authentic self and risk judgement. For me though, the anonymity has been entirely intentional; the accident is my failure to realize its consequences.

I’ve been treating the web like a publicly visible sketchpad for about fifteen years, mostly in the form of mad science sort of JavaScript experiments. I’m self-conscious and uneasy about most of it, but not really about the technical stuff. I’ve worked through some course notes and obscure theses and managed to get some neat and intricate things working.

What I’m self-conscious about is that when I look through everything I’ve created, all I see is a gap between what I feel about the work and what I’ve said about it, the gap between my vision for my little corner of numerical-analysis-meets-web and the substance I’ve given to people. I’m good at piecing together tricky simulations. What’s difficult is to build something people care about because I’ve been vulnerable enough to give them a reason to care.

The progression wasn’t accidental. There was a time when I was publishing a bunch of NPM modules and trying to break new ground. Some of the work was pretty half-baked. Some was actually kinda neat. But as I saw my ambition diverge from my ability to deliver and saw what it meant to risk authenticity and accountability, I pared down what I presented until I was presenting things precisely because there was no risk, because there was nothing to be held accountable for. There’s lots of other stuff I don’t talk about, too. I thought of this as tightening up my standards, but I forgot that work free of risk is work free of meaning.

Tom’s post has been rolling around in my head for a few weeks, and truth is, when I went back and re-read it, I was surprised it was about LLMs.

Okay then, so would I feel bad if an LLM wrote a post for me? Right now, I’d feel bad because LLMs are terrible at writing things worth reading, but that’s different from saying I’d feel bad because I’ve lost something in surreptitiously substituting machine output for my own. The ability to push a button and will text into existence is new to me. Silencing my voice is familiar territory. To steal a petty insult, I’ve been writing slop since well before I had access to LLMs.