The book "Dreaming in Code"[1] can also be summarized in a couple of sentences, but you won't walk away with anything from that summary ... that's literature for you.

Also, sacrificing an hour of productive coding by reading good literature increases the chances that you won't grow up to be a dumb fuck.

Steve's articles may not be of much artistic value, but he combines non-fiction with fiction in a wonderful way, explaining his reasoning through plots and drama :) He gets personal, not being afraid to expose his feelings, and I really wish more people would do that.

[1] http://www.dreamingincode.com/

Since when do we downmod just for disagreeing with a post? I wasn't trolling.

My concern isn't invalid. Others have also noticed:

Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html

Another good article: http://fitnr.com/filtering-the-web-of-noise/

Don't misunderstand, I <3 Yegge and am glad he's back. His writing taught me stuff that should have been covered in my undergraduate education, and I still refer new programmers to his 'Tour de Babel' essay.

But am I alone in wishing writers would cut to the chase a little more so as to help their readers reduce the info overload and the task of filtering through it quickly?

It's not hard to spend an entire day reading through only the high-quality tech blogs alone, and find, as Paul mentioned, that you did a lot of 'fake work' and very little real work.

In my opinion, there really aren't too many high-quality tech blogs (or maybe there are, and I'm just not aware of them).

Steve's stuff is lengthy -- but it's also not posted incredibly often (he's not a career blogger), and I have yet to read much by him that wasn't intellectually or creatively satisfying, and afaict that's rather rare for tech-bloggers.

PG on downvoting and disagreeing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691