First Post: Purpose of my blog

You know, it's funny. Before writing this post, I asked ChatGPT for ideas for the blog's first entry.

Since the first post is a ribbon-cutting ceremony of sorts that sets the tone for all future posts (no pressure) I felt like I could use a little help.

It suggested I write about the purpose of the blog. I didn't want to.

So, I bargained with ChatGPT.

I argued that I already filled out my About page beforehand. "Isn't it enough?" I pleaded. I even pasted in the content of the page as proof.

The internet is full of useful information, but finding exactly what you need can be a challenge. With this blog, I hope to help others by sharing my notes, thoughts, and solutions to problems I’ve encountered along the way.

That’s the main goal, anyway. But don’t be surprised if you find a few posts about whatever else catches my interest. After all, what’s the point of having a blog if I can’t ramble a little?

I thought that summarized my goals well and I didn't think it useful to add more.

The Large Language Model agreed with me, and by leveraging my own chat history, ChatGPT proceeded to suggest titles such as How to self-host your own blog or How to make Cacio e Pepe the Foolproof Way, solutions to problems that I have solved before, thanks to its help.

As I was weighed the pros and cons of each suggestion, it finally hit me how helpful ChatGPT's ideas were.

Two years ago, I would have been flabbergasted at those responses, but now I even find myself replying, "You can do better than that."

Herein lies the catch, if you will: I don't even think I can really do much better than it!

In fact, in many aspects, any LLM will completely and utterly outshine me. It will effortlessly provide interesting insights and highly personalized solutions, albeit with occasional mistakes (or even full-blown hallucinations). It can already generate any blog post I ask of it, instantly.

Sure, AI-generated content lacks humanity and originality, but even without those qualities, seven million blog posts are published every day: for a long time, if not forever, my blog's only traffic will likely be from AI web scrapers and crawlers.

So why blog at all, then?

1. I was convinced by the Personal Knowledge Management community that smart note-taking is an iterative process whose end result is a product that can (and should) be published. An excellent analogy from photography is that printing your photos finishes the creative process.

2. I blog for future me, who I know will appreciate having a refresher when I will inevitably forget some information.

3. There is something to be said about writing for the sake of writing.

In the end, despite my reluctance, I still wrote about the purpose of my blog.

And that's why I am doing it. Not for clicks, but for the joy of writing. Sometimes, you just follow the words and see where they lead.