I have decided to start a blog — about everything and nothing in particular. This has been a project I have been thinking about for quite a long time, and there are many reasons that finally pushed me to cave in and throw myself at it. Mainly, though, I am doing it for myself.

I have always been drawn to new side projects and hobbies — ways to express ideas and creativity that otherwise are left to sit and seethe in a corner of my mind, desperately calling and begging to be let out.

Since I moved in 2019 from Trento (Italy) to Bergen (Norway), I have picked up many different new hobbies, and gave it a go to several side projects. Sometimes they were motivated by a need — learning to cook Italian dishes after moving abroad, starting to brew beer to have cheap, delicious beer, or studying nutrition and training to start a journey into a healthier life — and other times they were pure curiosity, like trying oil painting à la Bob Ross, photography, or woodworking.

In 2022 I started a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Bergen — which I am now three quarters of the way into completion — which has shifted my perception towards hobbies and free time. Suddenly, anything that I could not justify as having enough usefullness in my life was not as attractive as it once used to be. After all, that’s all time I could be dedicating to working on research and writing my PhD thesis, or doing something otherwise useful or necessary. And that corner of my mind — where ideas for side projects live rent-free — started growing overcrowded.

This blog is an attempt to push back — at least partially — against that productivist view. To force myself to embrace projects that are not purpose-driven, and to satisfy the need to share what I care about with the people around me (and with kind strangers on the internet).

The way I work also changed during the PhD. After completing the educational module of my PhD project — which consists of a number of study points acquired through relevant courses — I found the introverted side of my personality taking over. Classes had been an excellent excuse to meet and interact with others — lecturers, students, or fellow PhDs — in a Scandinavian society that is otherwise somewhat tepid socially. The size of my research group — fairly small — and the fact that I most of the time work alone or with my PI did not help. So I intend to poke the comfort bubble around me and let something out.

Ultimately, I am so done with LLM-generated content. Don’t get me wrong, I use LLMs regularely in many situations, and for many tasks they deliver and speed up my workflow. But as with everything, there is use and there is abuse, and the enshittification of the web that followed the rise of LLMs now seriously bothers me. Just the other day I was researching a travel destination and was met with dozens of AI-generated, ad-ridden sites and several hour-long “documentaries” that were basically glorified slideshows of images and clips scraped from the web with an AI-generated commentary. A million of these works may be published in the time it takes me to even think about writing a new blogpost, but the web used to be a place where unlimited information and knowledge was available, and now it is just a huge pile of information without any wisdom. I don’t want to pretend I have any great wisdom to offer, but I believe there’s value in sharing original work, however small it may be.

And yes, I have finally decided to learn how to use em dashes. That’s not an LLM.

I intend to make a collection of either short or long posts on anything I am doing or working on that I find worth sharing. Probably skewed more towards non-academic topics, to stay true to the main goal of this project. So expecta a lot about cooking and baking, woodworking, beer brewing and similar things, although occasionally something about my actual work might make its way into the blog.

Happy browsing.