There is a painful thought I fight a lot when I publish something on the Internet: is this shameful? Will people see it as pretentious? I am sure it won’t stop today, nor tomorrow.
I have dozens of repositories online, and most of them don’t work anymore. I feel some shame about it; I have the feeling it gives a bad impression. Still, my belief that they will be useful, to me and to other people, is stronger.
I keep telling myself that a) I do the right thing by sharing my experience, b) it is good to talk about it. It is in this spirit that I blog, share code, and do the other things of life.
I have the right to write a software trying to understand how OpenCog works, and call it culturIA. To think in terms of Intelligence Augmentation instead of Artificial Intelligence, after Douglas Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect (1962). To use that very same name for a versioned hypergraph, and then mix it with my grandiloquent blog engine (read: a blog that is not static html) that I call a personal knowledge base. I should feel free to put Natural Language Processing down because it is too hard for me today, and to pick it up again. I should feel free to say cyberspace transderivational search without feeling ashamed. I should feel free to reinvent the wheel (on my free time (at least)). To create a search engine, fail, and try again later. To think that I can do better than others, and to be shown wrong. I should feel free to be a creative mind.
I have the right to dream big.
None of this is shameful, and dreaming out loud is not pretension. Still, I don’t feel that way.
There should be a place for everyone, I hope one day I will be comfortable at mine.