Why a blog and why now?

Do I have tons of ideas for posts for this blog? Yes! Will I actually write any of them? Maybe!

My main motivation for finally launching a blog is the proliferation of generative AI, and in particular, language language models (LLMs). My academic background is in linguistics and psychology, and I have years of experience working as a researcher in the field of psycholinguistics—with a specific focus on phonology, language acquisition, and how written language is processed by the brain. I have a lot of thoughts about many of the claims currently being made about LLMs, and I need a place to write them down.

Spoiler alert: It’s not likely that any of that commentary is going to be positive. The people promoting these things seem to be doing so with a very poor understanding of how language actually interacts with the other processes in our brains to produce our experience of cognition, and I’m not going to be shy about calling out empirically-unsupported bullshit.

The purpose of this blog is really for my own future reference. The primary reason for wanting to start actively blogging is to have a place where I can host documentation for my own personal projects and have a place to put things I want to be able to link to. I’m not expecting anyone to read this, but if you do, I hope you find it interesting. If you don’t find it interesting, I mean… I warned you.