16 Mar, 2026
It's not uncommon for new zettelkasten users to ask how to “find connections.” Unfortunately, they're asking the wrong question. Connections aren't hiding in your zettelkasten waiting to be discovered. Connections are established as a result of two or more informational units interacting with one another. What you're actually looking for are candidates for interactivity, informational units that can be brought into proximity and examined.
06 Mar, 2026
[Reading about people's experience of how using AI to perform their job tasks quicker doesn't yield them having more free time, but instead creates a new quota for producing more in the same time.] Reminds me of something I heard many years ago. >>> When making profit is the dominant intent of a company, a worker doing something faster doesn't lead to the worker doing less. It leads to the worker producing more in the same time. If doing more yields too much of the thing produced for the market to handle, the company either A. creates more need for the more produced (fabricates necessity), or B. creates a new need for a new thing (invents necessity), which leads to a new thing for you to produce. Rinse / repeat. A worker doesn't get off the wheel in a capitalist society, unless they cease to be a worker.
26 Feb, 2026
Lately, I've been experimenting with different analogies to help explain what happens when we make connections between ideas captured in our zettelkasten. Over the past few months, I've explored what feels like a never-ending number of candidates: metal conduits, friction, chemical reactions, magnetism, cooking, legos, clapping, lighting fires, constructing sentences and syntax, making music, having conversations. I even looked at "clapping" as an analogy, in the sense that two hands come together to produce a sound.
14 Feb, 2026
The more (and more and more) people I encounter totally confused by the terms "atomic," "atomic note," and "atomicity" in regard to note-taking, the more I feel these terms should be retired. We don't need them. There are far better and more interesting ways to discuss what constitutes the "single idea" captured in a main note.
02 Feb, 2026
I'm deep into writing a chapter on serendipity, exploring what researchers Stephann Makri and Ann Blandford discovered when they interviewed people about their serendipitous experiences. Turns out, it's just as Horace Walpole said when coining the term. Serendipity isn't just a happy accident, but a process requiring both agency and chance.