These are a collection of my most salient contributions to the thought space of humanity. They update as I learn more about life, of course.
Most Code Has Yet To Be Written
As of 2025, computers, digital computers, are 80 years old (ENIAC). What we consider modern day programming languages are even younger than that. And most popular programming languages like Python are a little over 30 years old.
I believe that most code has yet to be written, and that the Googles and the Facebooks and the other megafauna of the software world are merely precursors to what software will be in the future.
If code can be equated to language and prose, then the discovery of programming languages is the discovery of a primordial alphabet of computation, and the Aristotle of programming or the Shakespeare of programming, et cetera, won鈥檛 be born for hundreds of years.
Parallel Reading
Reading one book at a time isn鈥檛 a good move. It鈥檚 much better to read multiple books in parallel. I read five books at a time, and whenever I finish one book, I replace it with another in the queue.
There are multiple benefits to this:
- It allows you to context-switch between multiple books to stave off boredom during a long reading session.That means that you can set aside 30 minutes to an hour for a reading session and switch between the books when you get bored.
- It allows you to see the connections between multiple books at once. If you鈥檙e narrowing in on an era, or if you鈥檙e trying to understand a topic, this skill set allows you to read about the same topic from a lot of different angles and allows your brain to join the concepts through its own subconscious interactions. (See "discursive reading")
- It makes it more likely that if you want to give up a book, you won鈥檛 feel guilty about it because you have multiple books that you鈥檙e reading at any given time. One book being lost won鈥檛 hurt you as much, and you鈥檒l be able to move on to better books.
A Personal Library Isn鈥檛 What You Think
A personal library is not the collection of items that you own in your library, the movies that you have, or the books that are on your shelf, or the records that are next to your record player. A personal library is the collection of why these materials resonate with you. It exists somewhere between a person and the material in the library.
The annotations are the point. The highlights are the point.
Commonbases are Commonplace Books
Commonbase and commonplace books both attempt to do the same thing: they force the author to use resonance to filter source materials into ledger-sized entries, and then for each of those entries, gives them an ontology to connect them to the wider network of thinking that an individual has over the course of their life. As such, it becomes a common place for multiple ideas, a communis loci.