[kristopolous]

I made something like this over 20 years ago.

It also had full text searching of the contents of the page and also worked as a browser history.

I used it for a few years.

The real solution I saw in a roomful of butcher paper tucked in cabinets in the basement of a really dedicated guy who had a learning disability. He went through textbooks and had to come up with his own special syntax in order to comprehend the text by rearranging the contents on these giant rolls effectively making a hybrid between a mind map and a zui.

He had a "linking" idea that involved an indexing system where you'd get another roll of paper out of the cabinet earmarked with labels and then unrolled it to the "linked" region. Then he'd fold it back on a table and have them both side by side.

The general applicability was immediately apparent. I worked on it as a new way to browse the web over 10 years ago for a few months but then didn't stick with it.

I keep telling myself I'll work more on it but you know, anxiety and depression sucks. You can even use llms to do smart ontological labeling now.

The pieces are right fucking there. All I need to do is pick them up.

[jacknews]

You can also pin papers, photos, notes, etc to the wall or a giant pinboard, and then use red string and thumb tacks to link related items, etc.

[kristopolous]

Doesn't really work. The fidelity of the links is low. It needs to have an expressed ontology. It's a geometric and spacial language as bucky fuller wrote about. It's an extension of the written word that incorporates a semantic geometry.

This only sounds wacky because it's new. Let's put it this way. Our rules for the written word doesn't really go high up in the abstraction. In English we have a character set that serves as phonetic and a bit of a fuzzy etymology history and that's it.

We don't arrange the words in space differently depending on the expressed intent. There's no squares, circles or triangles that the words enfold upon. Lines or arrows are not part of the writing system.

But if you look at how students take notes, you'll invariably find many invent their own extensions to accommodate for this oversight. Shapes, colors, squiggles, and other affectations carry semantic weight. It's been invented and reinvented millions of times.

I've asked people whenever I see it in the past 10 years or so and almost nobody realizes they invented their own system. They are just doing "what makes sense to them". And there's lots of commonalities. People reinvent the same things.

Semiotics is a natural tool of expression, comprehension and understanding. The wall between it and the written word is an artificial construct that people naturally ignore in their personal writings. I hear people think others won't be able to understand their notes - it's just for them. You'd be surprised how universal these linguistic extensions actually are.

This interaction is an important tool in expressing the natures of corpi transclusions on the project we call the web. We've got the pixels to do it now. Let's go!

Anyways. I'm sure this reads like I'm a nutjob. And yes, I've talked to Ted Nelson about this. He doesn't seem to get it. My email is in my profile if you're interested.

The most important aspect to succeeding here is keeping it open, collaborative and free. The organizational structure has to mirror the desired organization of the output as Conway put it about 60 years ago.

[deepnet]

I am intrigued. Please can you link to more about your project and its inspiration. Or write on it, do you have a blog or social to follow ?

Sounds great, please so more - and tell others.

[kristopolous]

I've gotten quite a bit of positive feedback when I describe it. My previous solution was some heuristic system based on regexs with weights as super-parameters and the Wikipedia corpus. It was not amazing.

I think some kind of automated OWL system using all the modern magic that huggingface has to offer will produce better than trash results and is the way to go.

We're really just tokenizing and lexing here and it's just a matter of putting in the hours and getting people on board.

Some of my general problem is I don't care about money. I'm in this field to build a better future, not so I could personally live extravagantly. Benevolence, however, is not how society is organized.

[skavi]

Could you explain the linking system in another way? it’s not quite clicking for me.

What does it mean to unroll the earmarked “indexing” roll to the linked region?

[precompute]

That sounds like Zettelkasten + Transclusion.