This is a digital garden — a living, interlinked collection of evergreen notes, tended over time and grown in public. I believe this newer style of content packaging has a lot of potential compared to the traditional methods.
Traditional understanding has been conveyed and transferred through writing (books, blogs), audio, or video (YouTube). Read an article, take some insight from it, append it to your intuition and understanding. Watch a video, do the same.
Example: my original thought, “Intuition Networks”
Originally when I wrote this article, I did not have an understanding of what a digital garden was. I had not heard of the term. Nobody had ever mentioned it to me. I wrote it, had AI review it, and maintained it for some time. I thought the idea was novel. I thought it would make this content stand out. My eventual ascension of awareness led me to realize my own naivety.
This concept, this digital garden, was not linked in any way to anything that I’d understood in the past. There was no blog post or video or article that I had read that bridged the topic I was reading about with the concept of a digital garden. Why would it?
I hope this simple example of how I journeyed from a perceived innovation towards a known concept shows the potential value of embracing the digital garden.
Information slices and knowledge
Our intuition could be seen as this large blob of interconnected pieces of information that make up our brain. When we have some input, like a problem, our neurons fire on all cylinders and we sift through the scenarios in a moment. We generate clarifying questions to help us route through our intuition and lead us to the full understanding.
Think of our intuition as a three dimensional object. A large cube or sphere. It has uncountable interconnected pieces.
When we write a book or a blog post, we’re taking this large three (or N) dimensional understanding and slicing through it — putting into words a variety of concepts.
You can think of a book as a one or two dimensional view of a three dimensional object.
These information slices are great because we can read that blog, or read that book, and build it into our intuition by linking it around all of the various concepts we already know. But if we don’t know any of the concepts at all, that slice of information is meaningless to us. If I were to read a book about the political side of macro-economics, I would retain nothing - I know nothing about political science nor macro-economics. But I do know a lot about software engineering, so those tech books tend to really solidify my understanding of things.
Information slices have gotten us this far, but I don’t want to write blogs. I can’t convey what I want to convey in one slice. There is too much to convey. So instead, I tend a garden — a living, changing collection of interlinked notes. A contained multi-dimensional blob of information.
From this multidimensional blob, we can use an LLM to create an information slice that can tie into our own understanding if we so choose. I think of this as the future. It seems like the very same way we interact with an LLM’s internal knowledge. The LLM is always interconnecting concepts to convey those concepts to us based on how we shape the input.
This digital garden
This is a repository of information linked together through markdown links. Designed to be ingestable by anyone, especially an LLM. Use the LLM to create slices that help you understand the topic, fill in the gaps, and extend your understanding.
It’s never finished. I keep tending it — adding notes and revising old ones as the thinking grows.
Blogs, Books, and Podcasts are great. They really are.
I believe we can deliver complex understandings of systems or concepts as a git repository that people can consume directly or indirectly (via LLMs) at their own pace.
I also enjoy the idea that we can read the history of these concepts and how they’ve changed through the git commits.