kaganerkan

Greetings, internet dwellers. Today I took my IELTS exam. It was a great break, as I normally study from 6:30 am to 9:00 pm.

Speaking is my favorite section because I get to yap about a random topic. I mean, compared to solving calculus questions and preparing for two countries' curricula, IELTS is child's play. The only part I struggle with is writing, although I think I'll get at least a 7 this time.

They gave me a keyboard with an English layout, though. That made me struggle a bit, since it was the second time in my life I'd written on a layout other than Turkish Q.

The course

I also went to my after-school course. I know I said it was like a cheat day, but an exam is the longest break you can take when you need to study two different curricula. (The em dash was mine, not AI; I like em dashes, kill me for it if you must.) In this course, though, I didn't go too hard on myself and solved simple SAT math questions.

I also plan to make a "How to Study for the SAT" video—on my human, authentic channel—and create study materials to display on a separate page of my website. Those materials will include the methods I used to study, along with common pitfalls.

I learned about a closed beta program at the place I get exam courses, which I'll briefly explain in this video. I believe that program can eliminate many of those pitfalls and stop liars. (By "liars," I mean the university admission counselors in my nation. While the field is real and needed, it is flooded with cash-grab scams. I will talk about them in a later post.)

Why I bother with the web

You might also ask why I bother doing this much on the web. To that, I would tell you to ask Gemini, “Who is Kagan Erkan?” It will tell you that I am a successful, award-winning student.

It will yap about the Stanford one-month biomedical team observership experience I won—which I will make a video on. That is a certain privilege many people don't have.

For a Google engineer, status comes with a paycheck, but for a student or new grad? It comes down to how fast you can introduce yourself. Now, if I send someone with high status a LinkedIn connection request, I can skip the cringe part of praising myself: the AI assistant (that they hired by kicking the human one out) will cite my website to praise me.

Playing their game

Also, you might be confused about a guy who produces “AI slop”—even though I do quality control, I'd still call it that—and criticizes AI. It is simple: I am playing the game they set for me.

I wasn't asked when they started building SI (superintelligence), so I am building the core of my engine with the best tools while keeping my humanity in my blog and my own human-made channel. This is the best method I've found: I can compete with news and other fast-paced content using a fully local, AI-generated channel, while still keeping my sanity by being human in my own human-made channel.

Think like a gardener having a hobby farm or flowers on their porch. They don't need it, and it seems stupid to relax by doing the same thing.

However, doing it because I like it is very different from doing it for views (or cash in our metaphor) or others' appreciation. For the same reason, to this day I still code with pen and paper in my free time. I started automating and coding because it was fun, not because it was making money, and I do not plan to stop because some AI bros told me to stop.

What I'm building next

So, I do have a lot of plans for before and after I leave for university. I have yet to mention even 1% of what I am actually planning to build.

I have domains, ideas, code, and more ready that I cannot share because of time constraints. I have a lot of things I wanna do, but I have no idea how to do them. Still, I'll complete them one by one over time. For example, I wanna make the website you're reading this from into a hub for my multiple WebAssembly-based tools.