Why I Need This Blog
I started here about a year ago with the idea of putting down things that interested me, saving the most compelling and important I find on my way, and so on. My idea was to keep it primarily for myself, I thought if others happened to see it, that would be fine, too. Such a digital fingerprint of what ideas keeping me busy and what is going on inside my head. I’m a bloody writer. I write a lot of things down every day: I keep daily notes in the Notes app on my computer and in mobile, maintain structured records in Obsidian, use Notion for organised knowledge and trying to tie all it into a unified system (with a huge support from AI, of course). It’s a sort of "AI-native" abracadabra. Finally I also use a paper notebook and pen. And after all of that, I felt an urgent necessity to start a blog. Not just any blog, but one on a platform nobody knows -something incredibly simple and utilitarian. Without mobile apps and all the trendy bells and whistles. Instead, it must demands a certain level of discipline to use. In the world of blogging platforms, I wanted a typewriter in the age of neural interfaces. (I should mention that if I’d had this idea today, I’d probably just vibe-coding a site myself. But things turned out the way they did.) Of course, the claim that I wanted to keep these notes solely for myself is a lie. Naturally, I imagined that if I wrote clever, interesting things, everyone would think I was a cool guy, and my karma would skyrocket. In the past year, I’ve written almost nothing here. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is the fear of looking stupid, saying the wrong thing, and all that sort of nonsense. And a luck of motivation, of course. So, I pretty much abandoned the whole thing - it was the easiest solution. This is the point where I could just write, "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish!" But no. Early this summer, I realized that the volume of written content I was producing across several projects simultaneously had reached unprecedented levels. In fact, an LLM does almost all the work for me. Yet, the sheer volume of task briefs and comments I write myself is impressive. I do a lot of analysis, research, and explanatory content—usually on quite complex topics. Production speed is increasing, and amidst the resulting mass of material, I quickly lose track of where the LLM content ends and mine begins. That’s when I find myself with the idea about LLM-free space containing only my own work. Moreover, I already had such a space here. Why here instead of, say, the Notes app? Because this is an external, public-facing platform that imposes discipline: by declaring an intention, I commit to following through.
The rules of this place are simple:
- All the text on this site is written by me.
- I may write in Russian or English (depending on the topic, my confidence level, the phase of the Moon, the air temperature, and other important factors at the moment).
- I may use translation services if I want to post in more than one language. All of them certainly utilize AI these days, but that doesn’t count against the rule.
- If I do use a translation service, I will explicitly state so (e.g., "original text by me, Chinese translation by Google").
- There is an illustration on blog’s landing page I generated using ChatGPT. I created it long before I had my "epiphany" regarding the blog’s purpose. I like it, so it doesn’t count either—I’m keeping it.
- Otherwise, absolutely no LLM usage.
Why did I write all this? Just to figure out once and for all whether this makes sense. I don't fully understand it yet, but I'll find it out on the way.
Not a single LLM token will be used to write the original content for this resource.