Subtitle: Before I Could Write Korean on the ZeroWriter Ink

It was the day before, the day I was reading Leaves of Grass.

I opened the book with some expectation because it was said to be the only Korean translation available in this country, but from the beginning, difficult sentences kept appearing, sentences that made me wonder whether the book would really have been praised so highly if it had been written like this from the start. Still, I could let that pass. Perhaps it was simply that kind of book. But when I reached the phrase “received the world of light,” I could not stand it any longer.

I searched to see whether the original text could be read online. Since it was an old book, the foundation had apparently made all of the books available. The files were easy to find, so I chose one edition, opened it on my phone, enlarged it, and began comparing the words. And when I actually reached the passage I had been reading, I had no choice but to conclude that the phrase should have been not “the world of light” but “the baptism of light.” I downloaded the original text so that next time I could compare it directly as I read, instead of only wondering about it.

The next day, I became exhausted from going back and forth between the book and the PDF file, and eventually ordered a copy of the original. There was one being sold at an online bookstore for 7,000 won. While waiting for the original to arrive, I began reading another book. It was just after that that I found out the ZeroWriter Ink had arrived at my house.

It was a crowdfunded product, but the box felt as if it had been properly packaged. What I am about to tell is a story about a tool for writing. However, unlike the advertisement from when the funding campaign began, the tool was not suitable for writing in every language. The website said that most Latin-based characters could currently be written, but it also said that languages such as Korean and Japanese would be supported in the next funding campaign.

Then what about this machine?

Still, it was not something I had received for free, nor was it something I had bought for twenty or thirty thousand won. I decided to try using it somehow. The first thought that came to me was to download the source code from the website and slightly modify it so that it would support Korean. I did not know much, but if I brought AI along with me, would something not come out of it?

In truth, I do not know programming well enough to vaguely think, “Would something not come out of it?” I can barely write Python code. Of course, I can do simple calculations or make the mouse click automatically. So if skill were measured from 0 to 100, I would not be at 0. Of course, that does not mean I would be anywhere near 100. I would not even be at 10.

But soon I learned that, contrary to the maker’s promise, even the code had not yet been released. It was open source, but its release had been delayed for various reasons. In the end, my hope of “slightly” changing something and writing with it disappeared.

But I was using Gemini. And then a small desire arose. That choice at that moment was the beginning of all this. Starting something modest with AI. Writing Korean on the ZeroWriter Ink. Above all, when I gave it the specifications, it immediately told me the hardware standards and coding language, so naturally I thought that if it was that much of an expert, it would not take long.

At the time, I did not think very seriously about coding with AI. So I went about it in a truly ignorant way. In fact, putting Korean into the machine itself was not that difficult. I did not even use VS Code. I simply opened the Arduino IDE, did as I was told, and asked Gemini:

“What should I do first?”

Gemini looked up the hardware specifications of the ZeroWriter Ink and told me to set this and that as the basic configuration. One quarter of the left side of the screen turned black. Then it began blinking endlessly.

People who have programmed before may laugh. At the time, I did not even know what a serial monitor was. It was only a month ago, but I have learned a lot since then. Startled, I quickly turned the machine off and thought for a moment.

“Should I ask Gemini about this situation and debug it, or should I quickly put the stock firmware back in and at least make it work in English?”

But this was literally the extreme of black-and-white thinking. It was the moment when I had to decide between making a machine I could use right away, and entering a period of waiting that might never lead to anything I could use.

Only the next product might support Korean, and this product might never support it at all. Crowdfunding always contains that possibility. People do not fund things because they are foolish. They fund them even while knowing that such a possibility exists.

In the end, I chose debugging.

Korean original: 빛의 세계가 아니라 빛의 세례였다