Thinking in Years, Not Posts

I'm 56 years old, and for too long I've let silence do too much of the talking for me.

When you don't say much publicly, people naturally fill in the blanks. They decide what you believe, what you're about, what you know, what you've done, and sometimes even what you're capable of.

Those days are over.

Ron's Notebook is partly about changing that. I'm not trying to become a conventional social-media personality, and I'm not interested in filling a feed simply because a feed exists. I want to create a durable record of what I actually think, what I'm actually building, and how I approach the things I work on.

That is also why entries here will increasingly come with provenance.

For substantive Notebook entries, I want the original source preserved, an archival PDF made available, and cryptographic hashes published so that copies can later be checked against the authenticated record.

A SHA-256 hash does not make a file impossible to alter. What it does is make alteration detectable: change the file and the hash changes with it.

The idea goes beyond proving that a PDF hasn't changed.

I've had concepts and ideas over the years that existed in my own work long before similar things appeared elsewhere. If an idea matters enough for me to put it into the public record now, I want there to be a durable and independently checkable record of what I actually said and when I published it.

The same applies to technical work.

If I say something was built, tested, or demonstrated in my lab, I want the supporting record to exist. If somebody else's work contributed to it, that should be credited. If I didn't create something, I'm not interested in pretending that I did.

The point isn't to claim that every thought I write down is revolutionary. The point is to establish an independently verifiable record of what I actually said and when I said it.

There is a larger philosophy behind this:

I think in years, not posts. Nothing here is accidental, and nothing important is published without considering what it will mean later.

That applies to the projects, the documentation, the preservation strategy, and this Notebook itself.

Over time I may add stronger forms of independent timestamping to this provenance chain. Blockchain anchoring is one possibility, but there is no reason to turn this site into a cryptocurrency project. If we use a blockchain someday, it will simply be another independent way of proving that a particular cryptographic record existed at a particular point in time.

For now, the important part is simpler:

Write it.

Publish it.

Preserve the original.

Hash it.

Back it up somewhere I don't control from a single machine.

And leave a record that can still speak for itself years from now.

— RLS