Why This Blog

In two weeks, I’ll turn 30, and I’m starting to worry.

Over time, I feel like I’m losing the ability to organize my thoughts the way I did during my university years. Not that I was ever a brilliant thinker or a master of writing, but I can’t help but notice that, some time ago, I had less trouble putting my ideas down on paper.

Lately, I’ve been asking AI assistants a bit too often to tweak and reorganize—where needed—the texts I write. I have to admit that, more often than I’d like to acknowledge, they’ve done a better job than me. The upside is that I can still tell when their suggestions are better or worse than my original version.

In recent years, I’ve had the feeling that I haven’t accomplished much. But that’s not really true: I’ve moved to a different country, truly learned to speak and write in English, picked up German (more or less), learned and ended up working in a completely unexpected profession, finished projects, ran a marathon, secured a stable income, and got a nice apartment—and I could go on. However, I only realize what I’ve done when I find traces of this journey in the rare photos, the few scattered objects, and the chaotic notes I leave around. So, I figure that to stop feeling this sense of unfinished business, I need to leave behind more traces of my passage.

It looks like we’re heading toward a world where search engines generate overviews of topics using LLMs that summarize articles—articles that were, in turn, written by other LLMs. And on top of that, these articles tend to be verbose, rhetorical, bloated, redundant, repetitive, reiterati… – stop – and seem to be addressing readers who need a refresher on what a vibraphone is while reading a spectral analysis of Le marteau sans maître. In other words, search engines are becoming highly efficient noise generators.

With this blog, I’d like to create something that, if I weren’t the one writing it, would make me say: “How strange—I just read an entire article and didn’t completely waste my time!” That alone would be quite satisfying.

Let’s hope this doesn’t end here.