Thoughts on knowledge, tools, and AI.
Writing about personal knowledge management, building in public, and the ideas behind Harbor.
How Structured Knowledge Makes AI Less Wrong
Giving AI more context doesn't always help. The format of that information turns out to matter more than most people expect.
The Map You Stopped Building
GPS changed how we navigate. Search changed how we remember. Both made us faster and worse at the same time.
Second Brains and Why Most of Them Don't Work
The second brain movement produced thousands of Notion databases and Obsidian vaults nobody uses. The bottleneck was never capture.
The Self-Portrait You Didn't Sit For
Your notes contain two things: what you deliberately wrote, and what your patterns silently reveal. The second one may be more accurate.
The audience you forgot
Notes are written for you, with your context intact. The audience is now expanding — and that changes what good notes look like.
What Email Got Right
Email has outlived every tool that tried to replace it. The reason isn't habit or network effects. It's the schema.
What your mind keeps open
The hidden cost of knowledge you can't trust your system to hold — and what a note-taking tool needs before your brain lets go.
The Page That's Lying to You
Somewhere in your knowledge base, there's a page that is confidently wrong. The wiki format was never designed to prevent this — and most tools still aren't.
The Patient Reader
For eighty years, the economics of organizing personal knowledge were broken. AI fixed the wrong side of the equation.
What You Trade When AI Does the Remembering
Every cognitive tool trades capability for convenience. The question is whether you're giving up something you wanted to keep.
Your Notes Have a Half-Life
Medical facts expire in 45 years. Engineering knowledge in a decade. Your personal notes have no such warning — and your AI agent won't notice either.
The Forgotten Art of Knowing What You Know
Zettelkasten, commonplace books, GTD — what pre-AI knowledge systems actually got right, and whether AI is about to repeat the same mistake.
Hybrid Search and Why Pure Vector Search Is Overrated
The semantic search hype said BM25 was dead. It wasn't. On why keyword and vector retrieval work better together than either does alone.
Search Is Three Different Things
Full-text search finds words. Semantic search finds meaning. Structured queries find facts. Most tools do one of these and call it all three.
The People in Your Notes
Keeping structured records about people isn't new. What changes when AI can read them is subtler than it looks.
Write-Only
Most note-taking apps are excellent at capture and terrible at retrieval. Here's why that's a design choice, not an accident.
Otto's Notebook
A 1998 philosophy paper set the conditions for trustworthy external memory. Most AI tools fail every one of them.
Your Notes Are Full of Gavagais
Your notes aren't disorganized. They're full of unresolvable references — written for a reader who shares context that no longer exists.
The Chapter Your Knowledge Base Doesn't Know About
When a chapter of your life ends, your notes don't know. The problem isn't just stale facts — it's entire context frames becoming invalid at once.
SQLite as the Unit of Trust
The most deployed database in the world isn't Postgres or MySQL. It's a single file on disk — and that turns out to matter a lot.
The diver's problem
Godden and Baddeley's 1975 diving study reveals something uncomfortable about why your notes are unfindable six months after you wrote them.
The hearsay in your notes
Courts figured out in the 1600s that written statements and sworn testimony need to be treated differently. Your notes app hasn't.
Your Knowledge Will Outlast the Model
AI providers retired GPT-4 in early 2026. The memory you stored inside it didn't transfer. Here's the question you should have been asking.
What Feynman Kept in His Head
Every note-taking tool is built to capture what you know. Richard Feynman kept a list of what he didn't know yet — and treated it as his primary intellectual tool.