Vlogigng from Bing and vim to YouTube and Github Pages
I've been blogging and vlogging since 2007, sharing my thoughts and ideas without worrying about editing or technical matters. I use YouTube and blogging to express myself and get feedback, and I don't edit my videos for views. I write and publish my work in vim, and use Bing ChatBot to format it in markdown. Join me on my journey and read my work to get insight into my ideas.
Exploring my Ideas with YouTube, Blogging, and Vim Since 2007
By Michael Levin
Friday, March 17, 2023
I’m not one of these slick YouTubers angling to make YouTube their main source of income. No, I really just use YouTube as a sounding-walls for ideas, mostly for myself, and yes it’s nice to share and get feedback. But mostly for myself, so no I don’t edit. Editing my own video to drive up views and such small compensation for my work would be colossally stupid when the nature of the work I do lets me earn so much more (or I should say more reliably) without hitting some sort of YouTube algorithm jackpot.
And so, I vlog, I vlog, I vlog. Same for blogging. Even more so, because it’s so darn easy for me to write into vim (journaling) just like thinking out loud. It’s hard to imagine why so many people still use proprietary software like Word or Google Docs for this purpose. Habits and brainwashing. It’s always habits and brainwashing in almost every field ripe for disruption. Elon knows that and is exploiting it to the max. If you can reduce things to first principles and reconstruct process fresh, you’ll cut the fat.
I basically live in vim, and I publish profoundly easily from vim by just hitting a keyboard shortcut that updates my files on Github. I keep my journal in markdown format by default, and so this gets formatted into a fully styled website from plain text files (that’s what markdown is). You can mix in HTML for more control, but the amazing thing is that The New Bing ChatBot gives you already pre-formatted markdown when you copy/paste its answers including full URLs to the citations so it’s uniquely useful for the way I blog.
I’m over 1000 videos in YouTube since I started in 2007. Yes, I was among the first wave to jump on the YouTube bandwagon. But unlike so many that got infatuated with it as an alternative revenue stream and side hustle, I really only took note of it as an important new trend in tech in which I have to keep immersed, least I talk the talk without walking the walk. And so I do YouTube and you get a uniquely Algorithm-pandering-free perspective.
Part of my uniqueness is surely how I work and do this sort of publishing without much thinking about editing, or really any technical matters at all outside what already comes naturally to me and is quite timeless habits. See, it takes so little actual physical motions to publish both text (like this) and video outside what I do for myself anyway to compose my thoughts, that I might as well do it. And I might as well share it with you.