Startagain: A Space for Settling Ideas Amidst Unpredictable Times

I decided to establish a web space where my running thoughts and personal ideas can be published, so they don't vanish right away into an endless stream of content. It will serve as a more permanent home and reference for ideas and reflections that need to be settled and shared.

As the decade began, I wished everyone a happy survival of the impending "roaring 20s," hinting at the turbulence that was in the air over the horizon. Of course, I had no idea that history would soon start running on steroids. It started off with a global pandemic(COVID19), shutting everything down and exposing our inability to predict any processes within it. We don't even have any random prophets to point out as having a good predictive power (well in Estonian context astrologer Igor Mang's yearly horoscope of 2020 was surprisingly good :). In the midst of chaos, a devastating war erupted within Europe creating true suffering in Ukraine. And then, as if things couldn't get any stranger, the aliens landed. Well, not quite – but we did make contact with a new kind of entity through LLM (large language models), fundamentally changing the way we interact with information and communication.

Personally, in June 2022, I successfully defended my PhD "Spatial adaptive settlement systems in archaeology. Modelling long-term settlement formation from spatial micro interactions" in quantitative geography and complex systems (fortunately, before ChatGPT was announced) in the University of Luxembourg. Now, having this done and armed with the invaluable assistance of a highly capable AI tools, it seems to be a good moment to dedicate some time to set up this web space.

I must confess at once, that the technological part of the web page was set up with a 11ty SSG system, which I had no knowledge of before and the process of setting up the web was guided by ChatGPT + my own knowledge of programming. I will have HERE a link to reflections on how this went, hopefully in the near future.