Drowning in information. Is this a low hanging fruit for LLMs that is close to being solved?
When I first encountered How to Take Smart Notes [3], offering up Luhmann’s lost art of the slip box, I thought this was the way. Luhmann created notes on primary sources he read like books or papers, but added links to them from topics as the connections seemed to make sense. He did it all on index cards filed in drawers that were hyperlynked manually but this made him a prolific writer still.
But there was no internet fire hose back then .
David Allen described [4] the tickler method in the early 2000s, perhaps a nod to email coming into the picture, as an additional source addibg ideas to your plate.
Wikipedia was born in 2000s too as a kind of global slip box for the world. Links and backlinks, made possible by HTML.
I adopted Logseq ( and its precursor rome research too) in maybe late 2010s. These were great for writing notes , interstitial journaling style, about what came across your field of view. But probably the crutch was , it is private and not public.
Github Pages and Hugo have helped me a lot, as of early 2020s, to write in public, as a form of mental health.
I came across [9,10] Corey Doctorow describing his own style, callinghing like the Memex method
extended quote from Corey:
“I do not use a chatbot. Um, so I have been a blogger for 25 years now. My my 25th anniversary. My first blog post is uh I think January the 13th of next month. So, um, other writers, they have little notebooks that are full of notes they’ve scribbled to themselves about thoughts they’ve had. Uh, I don’t have a little notebook full of thoughts. Uh, whenever anything seems important to me, uh, in any way, I write a blog post about it. Uh, and you know, there’s a lot of advantages to that. Not just that I can’t read my handwriting, but also that um when I write for a public audience, I apply rigor uh necessarily that I wouldn’t apply to notes to myself. I assume I’ll remember later what I meant and I don’t. And so that creates a kind of pneummonic soup of fragmentaryary ideas that seem important that I’ve fixed in my mind by the act of thinking them through and writing them out. Which means that periodically in this super saturated solution, some of these little particles will glom together and nucleate and a crystallization process occurs that gives me like a speech or a novel or a non-fiction book or a big long synthetic blog post that’s more like an essay or paper. Um, and uh, and so all of this stuff, it’s in a WordPress database. I can pull it back out again. I do that systematically. So every morning in my newsletter, I go through my old headlines from 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and one year ago on this day, and starting next month, 25 years ago as well, and I pull out all the headlines that seem important, and I um put them in the newsletter in a section called object permanence. Uh and um it refreshes me. It makes me remember what used to be important to me, what I used to think about things, what things caught my eye. It’s like if you’re working dough and it’s getting crumbly at the edges and you fold it back into the middle, right? All the stuff that’s at the edge of your regard is coming back into the center of your focus and and it it’s an extraordinarily fund process. It produces a lot of value. It produces value from the minute you start doing it and the value only goes up the more that you do it. Uh and so I still write a blog post almost every day… So um that’s my process. It’s like the blogging process. I call it the memex method. You know Vanavar Bush and in As we may think and I think it was 45 talked about having a memory expander, a thing that that captured all the stuff you’d read, all the ideas you’d had and helped you push them down the stack and then pop the stack at the right moment. That’s that’s what a blog is for me.”
Still drowning
I like all of the above. writing in public is great and Niklas Luhmann and his predecessors were right too. But it feels like we are at the cusp of something more we can do.
references
https://michal.piekarczyk.xyz/note/2026-01-10-dont-go-insane/
https://michal.piekarczyk.xyz/post/2021-04-10-book-summary-how-to-take-smart-notes/
David Allen tickler
Ali Abdaal morning journaling
Logseq
delicious
pinboard
Corey Doctorow on memex method, https://youtu.be/r_ktaPutkjM?t=2460
https://michal.piekarczyk.xyz/note/2026-03-08-reverse-mick-jagger/
Cal Newport Slow Productivity
Andrej Karpathy wiki