No one reads on the internet

I was talking to my friend about starting to write more and the first thing he sends me was a study about how now one reads on the internet — apparently since 1997. I find that a little sad though I can't say I'm surprised. Lately I've been talking about raising a child in our modern high-stimulus, low-attention world and I'd like to contribute to the pool of deep, quality content that you can fall into for hours.

Recently, I've seen a bit of a trend towards longer-form content and more meaningful content. I think people do crave some substance to the content they're consuming and the bite size dopamine hits would leave people feeling empty over time.

This is the second rendition of this variant of my website. The first hadn't been touched for quite a while and I wanted to start fresh. As I've grown older I feel like I've gotten more grounded and my ego has been tempered a bit.

What I'd like to achieve

For this site, I want to catalogue some of the collected thoughts on many philosophical topics that I had delved deeply into over the years. I want to have a place where I can crystalize those thoughts and weave them in a succinct and coherent manner - something that I can share with friends and maybe even my children one day.

For the scientific topics, I think that they are both interesting and important subject matter for the road ahead. Understanding and being able to explain that knowledge to each other and future generations is the foundation of our ability to progress and thrive in the world. Simulation is the way we can talk to the natural world around us and learn to work together and thrive together. Visualization and graphics is the interface for us to viscerally communicate with that simulated world, and in turn the natural world.

The rest, especially the machine learning and math topics cover the foundations for the simulation work and will be critical skills in the coming world.

Engagement through interactivity

For the technical subjects, I think an interactive experience is critical to both understanding the content and keeping the casual reader's attention. The immediate feedback creates a deeper and more intuitive understanding. If something novel or unexpected happens, it's becomes a hook to engage the reader with the rest of the article.

Building the foundations

For those of you that are technically inclined and are interested in the logistics of the site itself, I'll briefly go over the setup here.

• Next.js - This is a well known React framework. I really like the server-side page generation which lets me code the entire thing in React and the parts that can be rendered to static HTML are. The seamlessness allows me to inject interactive components easily within my articles, something that was a point of friction in the previous workflow.
• MDX - This is a markdown variant that allows you to embed React components within your markdown. Next.js has built-in support for MDX, but I've also added some custom logic as part of the build step. When the MDX is compiled, I extract the headings and create a table of contents and also generate the metadata for the article automatically.