Thoughts
Ideas isn't working.
One of the things that I hate is when things get "stale." That's what I'm trying to avoid with Stop Worrying (todo-list items get stale if they sit on your todo list for a while), with The Modern Minimalist (projects get stale if they're not updated), and with Ideas (blog posts get stale). The definition of stale is not "old" and it's not "haven't changed in a while" and it's not "broken." It's basically, "would never be created today." If you report a bug in a project, and that bug would have been fixed if it were reported 1-month into development of the project, but it doesn't get fixed now, then that means the project is stale. It has to do as much with a deviation from the author's intentions as it does with time. With the TODO list, an item on the TODO list is stale if it no longer makes sense for you to do it.
The idea behind Ideas was to un-feature posts when they were stale. The idea being that there shouldn't be anything on my website that I wouldn't say today.
The first problem is that things go stale very slowly. This is why "going stale" is such an insidious problem. You don't wake up one day and decide you suddenly aren't interested in building a bird house. If you did, you could remove it from your TODO list that morning. But your interest fades slowly. So that in 3 months you look at your TODO list and it's winter and there aren't any birds outside and you think "why do I have 'build a bird house' on here."
The second problem, perhaps the bigger problem, is specific to blog posts. The problem is that once I've said something I no longer feel the need to say it again. And so I wrote the Docker post, it got a few hundred comments on Hacker News. And I would NEVER write that post today, because I already wrote it. It doesn't make any sense for me to re-write it and re-submit it. This is the opposite problem from the one that you have in software design: you have code that you would never write today but you keep it around because you've already written it and it's sunk-cost-fallacy.
So my options are to say "hey, blog posts aren't meant to be continuously used/read/referenced, it's fine for them to go stale" or "the only good posts are those that can be continuous used/read/referenced."
I'm leaning towards the second but it still feels unsatisfying.
Maybe knowledge doesn't go stale in the same way, but instead calcifies in a way that allows further thoughts to build on it.
[minutes of thinking here]
I think a lot of what I'm writing down are realizations that I've had that are significant. And realizations by nature become not-realizations after you've understood them and have been thinking about them for years. But it doesn't mean that they're less significant or less important.