Hello world

Starting a blog is almost the most self-aggrandising thing you can do, second only to walking around with a giant sign on your forehead that says "I'M IMPORTANT" on it.

Tucked away in your own little corner of the web, you think your ideas are novel, important, and life-changing enough that you can actually get people to care.

That every time you touch the keyboard, gold leaves your fingertips, and every keystroke marks a new paradigm. Your raw, unfiltered expression pours out unto the world, and echoes back fulfilment. Triumph.

At least, that's what writing should feel like. It should be an unapologetic expression of you and your grand ideas. But at some point, writing became less about fulfilment and more about sheer output.

In the name of "efficiency", you chuck your thoughts into an LLM and use its substance-less, cookie-cutter, emdash-ridden output full of half-baked ideas, and by simply removing a few emdashes and putting a bit of "your voice" back into it, you feel ownership over that writing.

Much like the ship of Theseus, it's unclear by the end exactly how much of it is you, and how much of it is the machine. However, it is clear that a significant portion of you is lost.

Welcome to my very own self-aggrandising corner of the internet, where I try to resurrect the version of myself that I've slowly lost.

A corner devoid of the performance that we all need to put on to get ahead. All of the writing here is ChatGP-free, (a pun so terrible you know an LLM could have never thought of it). Just me, as my most unfiltered and authentic self.

You'll likely find that I'm a lot more annoying than I let on, if the pretentious yap about how LLMs are ruining our lives didn't convince you of that already.

Just to be clear, I'm writing from my own perspective here, which means I'm guilty of the things I'm talking about in this post.

The purpose of this blog is so that I have a place to write and think actively about things where my incentive to write isn't linked to my "output" or future prospects.

If you're a random person stumbling upon this, I hope you enjoy the stuff I write.

- Zahir