In short: learning
This is a place for me to jot down my thoughts, across various things: projects, research, opinions about good scientific visualizations, maybe even movies.
But why writing??
I was motivated to start writing when I started exploring the AI safety space, and learned that concise, transparent reasoning without LLM use is a highly valued skill. I never regarded myself particularly eloquent; I always thought I best communicated through figures, drawings, and charts. However, in the age of AI, where both real research and pseudointellectual content11 probably much more of the latter, and a lot of poor quality ones in the former flood the knowledge pool, human cognition is at risk, and language is at its core, both as the learning mechanism and its indicator, and accountability as its consequence.1 probably much more of the latter, and a lot of poor quality ones in the former
Thus, here, I write to the best of my honest ability. I still use AI, but for:
- technical tasks, like programming and creating visualizations,
- administrative tasks, like to-do lists and organizing ideas and material,
- identifying that word at the tip of my tongue.
I’ll let myself have that last bullet when it comes to writing, as it’s incredibly frustrating whenever that happens, but everything else will come from my own efforts, so please bear with grammatical errors and misspelled words. I write not only to improve the way I communicate, but also to establish my voice and ground my identity. I fear that widespread AI use collapses humanity’s diversity and creativity into the average, into mediocrity22 It’s not that I seek to be exceptional or anything, I just think that a world of dirac-deltas won’t be very interesting to continue living in. If I had to choose between badly but uniquely human-drawn cats, and accurate AI-generated drawings of cats, I’d take the former..2 It’s not that I seek to be exceptional or anything, I just think that a world of dirac-deltas won’t be very interesting to continue living in. If I had to choose between badly but uniquely human-drawn cats, and accurate AI-generated drawings of cats, I’d take the former.
So this space is for learning, and improving; If I do start coming up with compelling work and feeling more comfortable being perceived, I’ll probably post in on Substack or somewhere more exposed.
Structure
I structured this similar to a laboratory journal: chronologically ordered entries, with a few tags on the exact topic, and with some space for adjacent thoughts and footnotes (well in this case, sidenotes33 like these! ^^).3 like these! ^^