Ask HN: What are your favorite blogs not about AI?

90 points by azhenley 2 days ago | 38 comments

Many of my favorite bloggers have stopped writing (or have drastically shifted topics). What are your favorite blogs?

I miss the 2009 era of blogging about personal projects or super niche factoids.

idontwantthis 2 days ago |
acoup.blog is the only blog I check individually.
biztos 2 days ago |
That's a great blog/website! I always forget where it is because of the weird domain, but now I'm adding it to my RSS aggregator.
jihadjihad 2 days ago |
https://www.johndcook.com/blog
verdverm 2 days ago |
https://foreignpolicy.com/podcasts/ones-and-tooze/
technically a podcast, occasionally about Ai, learning a lot about economics and history
matheusmoreira 2 days ago |
My favorites are:
http://wingolog.org/
https://www.journal.stuffwithstuff.com/
https://ciechanow.ski/
https://ellesho.me/
> I miss the 2009 era of blogging about personal projects
I've been doing that. Not sure if I've made it into anyone's favorites yet.
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/
deepsummer 2 days ago |
An RSS (Atom...) feed for your blog would be nice.
matheusmoreira a day ago |
I do have them!
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/rss.xml
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/atom.xml
If it doesn't work, please reply and I'll fix it!
bluefirebrand 2 days ago |
My favorite blog for a long time was Shamus Young over at https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale
He passed away a couple of years ago unfortunately but there's a lot of stuff there that is pretty interesting. He has some awesome stuff about procedural generation
It's really more of an entertainment blog than an information one but there's still some really interesting stuff there.
Rest in Peace Shamus. You made a huge impact on a younger me
fraXis 2 days ago |
Not a blog, but a podcast, but I love "The AI Daily Brief," and I listen to it daily because it keeps me up to date on almost everything happening in the AI universe.
https://aidailybrief.ai/
joshdavham 2 days ago |
OP is asking about “blogs not about AI”.
Cider9986 2 days ago |
[flagged]
bicepjai 2 days ago |
Hahaha. Attention span is in characters now. It’s just funny, thanks for sharing.
calvinmorrison 2 days ago |
hey buddy we call them tokens here
_caw 2 days ago |
Inigo Quilez's (of demoscene fame, highly talented graphics engineer) blog is one of my favorites: https://iquilezles.org/blog/
It's a time capsule from that era.
geekman7473 2 days ago |
Raymond Chen often makes it to the front page here, but in case you haven't seen it: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
This is my favorite from him: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220426-00/?p=10...
chegra 2 days ago |
For a while, I stopped writing. But, I have recently started writing again.[1] My old blog can be found on the wayback machine[2]. These days I am writing about using invariants as a means by which to predict the future[3], before I was doing summaries/notes of books.
[1] https://www.chestergrant.com
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/chestergrant.pos...
[3] https://www.chestergrant.com/where-is-ai-taking-us
RuleOfBirds 2 days ago |
OP asked for blogs not about AI. You shared a blog you wrote about AI.
chegra 2 days ago |
It's one post of many.
Most Viewed:
1. Summary of No by Jim Camp - https://www.chestergrant.com/summary-no-the-only-negotiating...
2. Summary of Never eat alone by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz - https://www.chestergrant.com/never-eat-alone-by-keith-ferraz...
3. Summary of Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande - https://www.chestergrant.com/summary-fate-of-empires-by-sir-...
4. Summary of Fate of Empires by Sir John Glubb - https://www.chestergrant.com/highlights-from-the-checklist-m...
5. Summary of Don't make me think by Steve Krug - https://www.chestergrant.com/summary-dont-make-me-think-revi...
RuleOfBirds 2 days ago |
But OP asked for content not about AI. If you have content not about AI, wouldn't that be more helpful and to the point of the request?
We're drowning in AI slop and slop about AI, someone asked for a bit of reprieve, and you reply with direct link to your post about AI.
EDIT: I see you edited your comment ;-) I'll leave mine, but I'm not feeling inspired. Maybe others will be. Good luck!
dado3212 2 days ago |
I write a blog that’s not about AI, though is very technical.[1] For non-self promotion I’m a big fan of Jenn’s, who I got introduced by the first Inkhaven cohort.[2]
[1]. https://blog.alexbeals.com/ [2]. https://jenn.site/
pryelluw 2 days ago |
If this is too much feel free to downvote.
My clean comedy newsletter: https://substack.com/@yelluwcomedy Funny essays about nothing and everything. No AI produced writing.
biztos 2 days ago |
Marginal Revolution is nominally about economics, and it's not entirely not about AI, but AI is a fairly small part of what they cover:
https://marginalrevolution.com/
I follow a fair number of people who would, back in the day, have been classic bloggers, but are now doing Substack, and rarely even mention AI. Here's one I like enough that I actually pay for it:
https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/
jazzpush2 2 days ago |
[flagged]
fooqux 2 days ago |
This is probably a bit niche, but this guy writes about developing and using Darktable and I wish I had a fifth of his knowledge.
https://avidandrew.com/
kiddico 2 days ago |
Very cool, thank you for sharing!
speak_plainly 2 days ago |
Thanks for all the links, I love feeding my RSS reader.
I really like this: http://blog.beforemario.com updates are rare these days, but they cover Nintendo corporate history and products before the company got into video games.
rochansinha 2 days ago |
https://ciechanow.ski/ - The coolest blog on how things work but hasn’t seen any activity in a while.
run2arun 2 days ago |
Arts & Letters Daily - https://www.aldaily.com/. Not a blog though. Might have AI-related articles but covered from a non-tech angle.
subset 2 days ago |
Iago Leal's blog: https://iagoleal.com/
Some incredibly interesting perspectives on maths and computing
vinhnx 2 days ago |
Making Software https://www.makingsoftware.com/
squirrellous 2 days ago |
Here are some that come to mind right now:
https://research.swtch.com/
https://danluu.com/
https://apenwarr.ca/log/
zloy88 2 days ago |
Honest question, is blogging even still a thing? I don't read any blogs honestly. I feel like blogging in 2026 is a very niche thing. Maybe I am wrong, it's just my impression. People are so "short-lived" that too much information at once seems not to be popular anymore. People want to get spoon fed all information they need, especially since AI - no?
benterix a day ago |
> People want to get spoon fed all information they need, especially since AI - no?
It's definitely true to some extent, but you can't generalize "people" to some uniform group, we have various needs.
paulcole a day ago |
No, it’s not really a thing in any significant way.
This guy is 17 years older than he was in 2009. The world moved on to YouTube, TikTok, etc.
A teenager today is almost certainly not going to set up a blog to share their thoughts with the world.
Most questions of this nature are just “how do I feel like I’m 23 again?”
EDM115 a day ago |
Well I do have a blog of my own [1], although I haven't posted a new article for a while, with 2 in preparation for way too long lol. There's also a Telegram section[2] which just mirrors the posts I make there, much more informal, and this one also haven't been updated in a while.
[1]: https://edm115.dev/blog
[2]: https://edm115.dev/blog/telegram
stevekrouse a day ago |
https://worrydream.com
https://macwright.com/
https://www.petemillspaugh.com/
https://www.geoffreylitt.com/
https://maggieappleton.com/
https://www.robinsloan.com/
https://thesephist.com/
https://wattenberger.com/
http://conal.net/
https://www.todepond.com/
https://devonzuegel.com/
https://nadia.xyz/
https://adamwiggins.com/
http://glench.com/
https://ncase.me/
Classic from my old Haskell professor: https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...
dieselgate a day ago |
It not updated anymore but the art blog https://www.butdoesitfloat.com has brought me a lot of joy; the quotes that go along with each post are good too
jdw64 11 hours ago |
my homepage https://www.makonea.com