A new personal brand

Dear concerned reader,

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn now (in avoidance of Twitter, I get a lot of my tech news from here), and it's pretty obvious that 90% of posts are either completely one-shotted by LLMs, or at the very least strongly guided by them. In that regard, I've begun to value concision and clarity of written language in a search for an authenticity that most media platforms nowadays lack.

A look into my childhood

As a kid, I was pretty anti-social and spoke few words beyond what I thought I absolutely had to say. For those that have seen me present in the past and even more recently, you'll know I speak ridiculously fast to the point of incomprehensibility. This is definitely a weakness, and I've spent a lot of time trying to speak with more words throughout my teenage years. My dad would often be the first to point out that I was (in his perspective) a bad communicator for not being verbose enough, or perhaps make assumptions too often on what could be deduced from my speech.

It's pretty evident in today's world though, that if you want to move faster, you can't afford to waffle your way around a problem.

Hackathons in the big '26

There is NOTHING I hate more in a hackathon than when I propose a solution to a problem, only to be met by something along the lines of "that's not a great idea; hmm lets think of something else to do with {insert what i just said} {insert silence because they actually don't have a different idea}". So much parroting, and you can really see when people start to speak like Claude. Like DeepSeek, people out of laziness will distill {some frontier LLM} and project it onto themselves subconsciously.

But it really got me thinking on my own perception of what intelligence is: the ability to pattern-match, scaling with depth. Given two seemingly separate ideas, how far can one go in linking the two together in a way that makes sense? I think this is the most abstract (and accurate) definition of intelligence I could provide, although I am neither a psychologist, philosopher, nor in possession of enough intelligence to say anything of higher value. So perhaps everything I write today is a consequence of a naive world-view.

On perception, intelligence, and what I want from myself

From there, I invite you to the thesis of this essay: there is no better, nor other way, to become the person you want to be, and to be perceived as you want to be perceived, than to pretend you are that person until it becomes true.

For me, that person is not a parrot of LLMs, but someone who has a "crazy" sense of human authenticity to them, someone that is direct and that you don't need to guess around. As a side effect, I hope to be perceived as intelligent.