October 2026

after multiple listens to the new kaizen album. i still can't form a proper opinion on the various tracks. one thing i can say for sure though, is i am enjoying ALTER EGO. the rest of the songs, however, are still not quite clear to me.

for the majority of the years as a teacher (6+ years and counting), i have spent countless hours trying to make good worksheets that would help my students learn different topics and lessons. it took hours at times (literally) to make one worksheet. and you know what’s even more frustrating? it was not always good. so after hours of searching the web for similar worksheets for inspiration, a couple more minutes looking for suitable clipart or images, and then some more minutes browsing websites for texts and dialogues that would fit the lesson (even writing my own texts when nothing satisfied my needs), after all these minutes and many attempts, i would, most of the time, end up with a frankenstein worksheet that sometimes worked and at times failed. with years, of course, and experience, i managed to find a rhythm and a method. i would only need maybe 45 minutes to come up with an effective worksheet. even then, i often found myself stuck in the same loop and formula, which made my students feel bored instead of challenged.

LLMs are popularized

i gave all of my work to large language models and asked them to analyse it, keeping what works and dropping what fails. i used the official guidelines to ground the AI in actual theory. EFL theories were given as a context through which the AI views all the prompts and requests. and now, in less than 5 minutes, i can get a very good worksheet that, most of the time, needs only a few interventions on my side to make it usable in class. my time is freed, and i can think of ways to fully engage the students in class instead of spending most of my time designing worksheets and lesson planning. the tasks are now automated: i give my feedback and insights, and the AI does the rest. it feels like i have my own personal assistant, and a very capable one at that. it can turn any idea i have into reality with no hallucinations and no fake products, because everything it produces is grounded in ministerial guidelines, years of my own experience and products, and, most importantly, because i double-check everything it gives me. this reduced the task of coming up with new worksheets from a matter of hours to a matter of minutes. i am so glad i got to experience this. it would not feel as magical had i not struggled for years to make new worksheets and teaching materials. i would not trade it, though. i would not trade the years spent struggling for anything else. thanks to those years, i am now fully capable of utilizing the full capabilities of AI.

back in 2008, i made this ppt file with all sorts of journal entries, photos of my friends, and other nostalgic things. the password i used was a long name from a movie i watched. i remember what the password was but i forgot how i spelled it. now, i have the file still intact from the 2008 era but it's impossible to brute force. i tried every tool and every trick. even the most advanced LLMs did nothing for me to help. this will be my benchmark for AGI and ASI. if an AI cracks the password, that's AGI to me 😅