https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive: John Carmack’s journal plans. Interesting to follow the practices of someone productive and their organizational strategy. Self-tracking in Plain Text · Jethro Kuan https://writingcooperative.com/zettelkasten-how-one-german-scholar-was-so-freakishly-productive-997e4e0ca125 https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#why: Building a search engine for personal knowledge. also see https://www.gwern.net/Search#search Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

How do others do it?

In Defense of Inclusionism · Gwern.net: Why wikipedia is in decline and what might be done to recover.

My Writing Setup with Emacs. The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information - Fort… Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information? | Hacker News A Meta-Layer for Notes « julian.digital: What can we do with sticky notes around your computer? Self-Directed Learning (SDL) Ask HN: What is your learning strategy? | Hacker News My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file

blogging for free

pluma free blog focused writing place convenient, fast web pages express yourself quickly raw expression the cask https://txt.fyi/+/57688c94 anon we comments on any site reading and text editor focused writing. tilde. in gopher. collective. an excellent client for playing go

Search

• https://fulmicoton.com/posts/behold-tantivy-part2/ https://github.com/PoiScript/orgize

Motivation

Organization

I needed a way to better organize my ideas. Administering structure to my data was a good way to do this, and org-mode provides a good facility for this. Organize my notes better, as they’re visible to the public.

Accessibility

I’d like my notes to be easily visible to anyone. It allows me to easily share my thoughts and perspectives with friends or colleagues.

Publicity

This portal also enables recruiters or future collaborators to learn more about me, my skills and my interests. Perhaps I can build a following, inspire someone, or find an interesting job opportunity if someone stumbles upon this wiki.

Ideas

• tag hypothes.is notations with names of pages; show each one in a separate window when displaying the page.
• do the same for are.na channels; can display related blocks of a particular channel on the page next to some writing.
• Bret Victor’s website (https://worrydream.com) employs a dynamic home page that has individual articles float in windows on a film reel, but these articles can also be focused on and viewed full-page. The Tufte influences on the graphs and navigation are evident, and the full page view is so much more easily interactive and less distracting that it’s worth considering doing something similar for my site.
• https://metacademy.org/
• https://years.cblgh.org/ Briefly summarize what you’ve done each month and year! This is excellent for reflection, learning and growth. It can be easily contrasted with goals. I think that doing this on a monthly basis would be much more helpful than yearly; perhaps I could introduce some tags to the wiki that would help catalogue this.
• https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/remembrance_agents/: How do we remember - and continue to remember - these ideas for life?
• https://github.com/controversial/wikipedia-map
• https://www.brendanschlagel.com/2017/11/05/canonize-creating-personal-canon-template/ :: Add a personal canon; catalogue the things that have had the most impact on you. This could be difficult but it’s worth goingthrough the effort! Would be great to do some justice to each thing that’s inspired you.
• https://phse.net/values/ :: Cataloguing a list of values on the website seems incredibly value for myself or for others. These ideas are definitely admirable. (Making connections with other people has a higher return than making good work, it seems!)

Tools for Better Thinking

thread The most underrated problem solving tool is to type out and explain your thought process. Start writing down questions to ask others; as you explain what you have tried, you will begin to realize that there are more things left to try – some of which being potential solutions.

Type your question into StackOverflow to submit; you’ll be fearful of asking the question.

Rank factors; always express factors as positive attributes. After generating the table, the longest continuous line of check marks for each factor determines the choice (though this can be gamed…) State charts: easy to reason about state changes without the explosion of state machines. These are hierarchical state machines, in a sense. The Inversion Methods: The solution to many hard problems can be clarified by re-expressing them in inverse form. Crossline: structure your thoughts as you type and make cross-references.

mental models for making intelligent decisions tools for systems thinkers state machines for complex systmes enabling inventive problem solving analyzing and forecasting tool tools for better thinking .

Design

tags
Web Design,Design

The design of this wiki has gone through multiple phases.

I started with a Hugo template, adding browsing features in multiple panes to the site, but Hugo proved to be too complex of a tool to sustainably use in the long term.

The current iteration of this site is generated with a Pandoc-based tool I’ve written myself, as I felt I wanted more customizability. Eventually, I’d like to generate multiple front-ends for the website – so that visitors can view it as a wiki, as a traditional blog, a series of journals, or something in between – depending on how they view the website.

References

I’ve taken inspiration from several others who maintain wikis.

• Tommy Morriss first introduced me to the idea with his personal (private) wiki.
• Jethro has easily accessible articles and templates that I’ve made use of to put this together.
• 100 Rabbits publish all of their notes and information in a custom wiki framework. Logseq is a really cool tool for maintaining a personal knowledge basin that syncs effortlessly with GitHub. https://github.com/kormyen/memex

Further Inspiration

• https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes?stackedNotes=zUw5PuD8op9oq8kHvni6sug6eRTNtR9Wqma
• https://royniang.com/ has an excellent wiki with a ton of great ideas. Good style! Worth linking Personal Websites.
• Stanford’s psychology wiki is detailed and easy to navigate.
• Frank McSherry’s blog is maintained entirely by .md files in a journal with a simple markdown index. Git is the UI. https://twtxt.net/ is an interesting microblogging platform
• https://codeberg.org/Valenoern/bopwiki :: a small wiki implemented entirely in a DSL that’s been written in common lisp!
• https://blot.im/ :: blog with your favorite text editor, publish to the service. Basically a static site generator?
• https://azlen.me/ is an excellent second brain. They’re an admirable writer with loads worth following.

https://github.com/jackmcdade/secret-public-journal https://github.com/bphenriques/knowledge-base elisp wiki https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge https://github.com/karlicoss/beepb00p https://github.com/bennetthardwick/website https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge – i love the idea of visualizing the ralations of the notes as well as his rationale https://github.com/aceyoung9/garden https://github.com/binyamin/eleventy-garden

Notes

https://jlelse.blog/posts/wiki-approach/ cool wiki approach :: find the best method for me ! I think writing a blog post is the best way to help me organize my thoughts, i should get that infrastructure up. nextcloud notes is also a good option, but i do have to set up a nextcloud server to handle that https://dpitt.me/blog/2020/03/zettelkasten/ obsidian md knowledge base The Brain is a digital memory solution written and maintained by the brother of Acronym’s founder, Errolson,for many years. It’s not well known in the technology space, but it’s popular with creatives and researchers who often don’t intersect with the field.

organization

https://todaytakeseverything.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/the-bullet-journal-bulletproof/ doing things once a day and putting them in a bullet journal or something working with the garage door up :: why we should learn with wikis in the open.

weakty wiki

• site map!
• related tags!
• backlinks!
• resoures!
• activity graph for research or projects! i love how this wiki looks and feels uses PARA method of organizing information and a feed! god this shit is so good and a table of contents but everything is hidden out of the way! IBM plex mono is almost there - but not quite

hypothesis: a margin with conversations anywhere on the web! i cannot stress how cool this is, particularly the trick with the sidebar https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/ http://mindforger.com/: markdown-powered wiki software

concrete plan

learn to build small software! a wiki is the best way to do this.

• write a basic org-mode parser in ANSI C and C++ supports links, `#+title`, nested bullets, etc. fairly simple to start.
• with inspiration from devine’s wiki, integrate this parser into a service that parses things out to html, also written in ANSI C
• continue to rewrite in rust and other languages, like zig perhaps, for fun and to learn more programming
• experiment with a file format other than org under the hood; something with an equivalent level of expression but much simpler [i don’t use most of the features of org here anyways; org feels like it’s doing too much as a file format, and i use different subsets of the format in different ways]
  • would be cool to use a babel-adjacent technology to be able to convert to file formats compatible with other platforms on the fly.

experiments

• figure out the best way to do project management. learn more about the mailing list strategy adn see how that compares to a `TODO.org` approach that I’ve been using in a few of my projects to take notes and ideas.
• build hyper specific tools to interact with my wiki in different ways to enforce certain ways of integrating with it: adding a new idea, journal entry, or something similar for example. emacs is a nice interface and should be worked on, but it shouldn’t be the only one. small, portable `.sh` scripts could be fun to experiment with here.

ideas

List of artists and hackers using homegrown time-tracking tools https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden https://github.com/drichard/mindmaps https://joplinapp.org/ open source note taking and todo app local first self-hosted wiki tool (dendron) knowledge base from nikita second brain digital gardeners https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/exobrain https://github.com/jsjoeio/joeprevite.com notes for people we keep in touch with open source wiki Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead Kate on Twitter: "Making regexp -> NFA compilation faster by constructin https://github.com/schollz/cowyo neat, encrypted wiki! Code Samples - Impredicative Wiki Wiki bphenriques/knowledge-base: Personal Wiki Introduction - Everything I know This FTP site knowledge/wiki-workflow.md at master · nikitavoloboev/knowledge Building a digital garden Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create. Marcin Ignac on Twitter: "I’m fascinated by @andy_matuschak digital garden https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html

https://billdemirkapi.me/ https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring a webring for static site generators, allows for generating a webring from a list of RSS feeds to join the sites together kormyen/memex https://github.com/bphenriques/knowledge-base https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ http://okmij.org/ftp/ Memex 1.1 | John Naughton’s online diary https://mboxed.github.io/sodatsu/#home A gardening guide for your mind • Mental Nodes Collected Notes. https://bismuth.garden/now anotherPersonal Websites and wiki https://libarynth.org/start https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/#table-of-contents very cool, simple wiki with an indexable menu https://marcus-obst.de/wiki/Notetaking opinionated wiki advice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108466 iterative approach to notes

some new wiki ideas from issues

• ‘see the diff for this section’: click the button to see the page diff visualized over time. inspired by this: https://mbuffett.com/posts/bevy-snake-tutorial/
• show ‘last modified’
• estimate reading time
• add link to newsletter signup
• display stats on the main page:
  • number of words
  • number of pages
  • number of links between pages
• extract tags from each file and display things in sub-pages throughout the wiki according to tags. this needs some exploration, and could be interfaced with in addition to backlinks. this needs some investigation - how can i fuse with other distributed wiki ideas?
• (only with rust rewrite): support evaluation of code blocks during generation. integrate with nix to install and use the right programs to run
• (rust) export to gemini system, host on gemini server
• ways to visualize history throughout the file to show what’s changed over time! perhaps a ‘changed recently’ as well

goula.sh

https://goula.sh/ some excellent ideas

• millions of tags!
• lots of side notesz
• feature highlights throughout the notes, interweaving them with the writing can i write public texts on the web?
• uses links as nodes, cataloguing references to them throughout the writing. i can’t read too much into this though - or i will begin to lose creativity!
• tracking aesthetics on one wiki page: https://thomasorus.com/aesthetics.html
• love the time graph here! maybe I should spend more time tracking. i want a solution that does this in the background, though, to a degree…
• https://arcana.computer/catalogs/media-diet: track a more consistent media diet. perhaps this is possible with my review system in conjunction with git (and emails i have sent myself) ?

Making a Wiki: Ideas

Status Quo

Wikipedia

Pros:

• Single source of truth: it’s a trustworthy source. People know to get their data from here.
• Tons of information. Crowdsourcing has done the

Cons:

• Because it’s a single source of truth, there are constant fights over what belongs where that are often fruitless.
• There are also strong arguments that are made for information being ‘out of scope’ for wikipedia and belonging to a page or site that is more domain specific.
• The organization is bloated and inneficient. They really don’t need your donations.
• The servers are centralized and controlled by a single private entity with the potenial to hold data (partially - sans clever parsers) captive.

Wikia

Pros:

• Tons of information with moderators who are experts on their domains.
• Dedicated contributors, existing communities, easy to edit.

Cons:

• Divided into lots of different wikis with no interoperability between them.
• Tons of overlap between wikis (i.e. multiple star wars and minecraft ones, among other franchises and tropes)
• Typically used for casual and hobby interests rather than professional writing and work - why?

Personal wiki implementation

Pros:

• Super flexible.

Cons:

• Not a consistent or reliable source of information, as it’s typically controlled by one person.
• Can be disorganized and things can easily become unmaintained.

Goals

• Decentralized: share information from many sources without being controlled by any of them
• Open: should incorporate as many sources of knowledge as possible, and individual wikis should have tons of agency.
• Easy to use: it should be incredibly easy to contribute to and communicate with some sort of central wiki.

Information Sources

In order of priority:

1. Wikia sites (there are tons!)
2. Wikipedia
3. wiki.c2.org
4. Assorted third party wikis.
5. [perhaps] personal wikis
6. etc…

Fusing all of the Wikia sites into a single, cohesive wiki seems incredibly useful.

Feature Ideas

• shared & enhanced pages: fuse pages that cover similar or related topics together into one view.
• consensus: condense and share overlapping information, reducing the amount of duplication.
• interoperable: shift from one wiki to another easily.

Wiki IR related decentralized wiki idea (what we were talking about in chat, but not really what is above)

• uses wiki IR standard to link together many peoples personal wikis
• there is an engine at the center (or several?) that crawl the wikiverse and attempt to bring together pages that are similar
  • when pages are similar (by AI?, NLP measure), suggest several types of merging
    • suggestion ways
      • as part of wiki IR cli tool display suggestions
      • make tiny website dashbaord backed by small webapp that phones to recomender engine
    • types of page merging (between peoples federated wiki)
      • link at the bottom of page to other pages with similar content (like webring)
      • transclude entire other page to bottom of your page (and vice versa, both pages in the link transclude eachother)
      • suggest that pages are merged using git-esque strategy (pull request, text diff/merge tools like mergely)
        • q: where does consenus page live? on neither page? (next to ai engines) on one page? (one of the merge requesters ‘wins’, one conceceds), or both (they share :))
    • goals of merging
      • reduce information duplication
      • instead of conflicts of information being resolved in backchannel of wikipedia, consensus arguments are disputed publicly through pull requests and accepted/rejected page links
      • epic and cool

Conversation linking

• make conversations first class primitive of wiki, so that concepts are linked to discussion in which they are conceived
• can be as simple as citations linking to specific conversations
• uses matrix? hard part is technical challenge of implementation

Backlink fixing

• move/rename pages and update backlinks

Automatically backup videos/external sites

• https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup
• like gwern, to prevent linkrot

Provide tools to make good public/private separation

• so that people can have shareable personal wiki concepts/reference pages, while also having extremely messy private brainstorming (brainstorming=unformed,errorfull,shameless,indulgently bad, creative, risky)/exobrain wiki pages.

Syntax that is not static/markup

• I want a markup syntax like (move [otherpage]: " this concept deserves to be in other page, but right now i am in [firstpage] and don’t want to move all the way to otherpage in emacs so im gonna write this thought in a move block: this thought")
  • and that will append that thought to the bottom of other page once i save or run tool or something (linter?)

New types of syntax

• some syntax for assigning how sure you are of an idea, or how much you like it
  • font size???!
  • number of exclamation points vs question marks !!!

First class support for sorting lists

• idk how this would work but interactive sorting is underrated!!!

WIKI LSP

• breadcrumbs (https://i.stack.imgur.com/wu4kP.png)
• definition/lookup. like you can name concepts and hover for definitions?
• autocompletion of other page names

TODO accessible web

menu or dictionary to help people understand definitions in a comprehensible but noninvasive way