Despite the simplicity of the title, I think what I have to say here could be of quite some importance, both to a potential specialist, and to the industry overall. I have stumbled recently onto Bertrand Russell's essay on "useless knowledge" and was very impressed. As someone who is working in IT on and off for almost two decades, while also having qualifications in humanities, I relate to the concept a lot. I remember when I first started studying Modern Greek with a group of friends. I was invited and my first thought was "what for?" and than, since I was a young student and had time on my hands and curiosity, I was like "why not?". And indeed so. Why on earth not? And while Modern Greek per se doesn't necessarily give me an edge in IT, it does give me a direction of an edge. Similarly, when it comes to my Art History background. Being exposed to different linguistic systems (I speak 6 languages), as well as paying close attention to art (visual and in general) in order to understand similarities and patterns, allows me to be able to not only step back from the topic at hand, be it IT or any other, but to look at it both at a very high level (as if from space, I always like to imagine) trying to identify patterns (similar to e.g. clothing patterns in artistic representations) and what I like to call "issue nodes" (points of convergence of different issues, which if solved, would contribute to the solution of multiple issues), and in very great detail (e.g. as looking at specific rings on the fingers of a specific character in a visual representation) and understanding how the specific details join to create the whole. I will not say that I see all and understand all. A lot of things go unnoticed to me unfortunately and will keep on doing so. However, I need to keep training and staying astute and trying to notice more. But training, means to me here, a holistic approach. Both staying up to date to some of the latest LLM/AI developments, while also keeping an interest on developments in research, art, linguistics and so on. All are products of human creation, just different aspects of it. And I have come to believe that the understanding of each is complimentary to better understanding others of them, and to even maybe getting a chance at a briefest glimpse of the image of the whole. 2026-05-03