Hyper Cyber

I wish school had taught me how to take notes properly instead of making me hate the very idea. It would have come in handy later in life.

Then again note-taking is hard to teach, because the trick isn't how to do it but what to write down. And a rule of thumb that helped me a lot is: write down what matters to you, not a generic synopsis. Those belong in textbooks.

But notetaking isn't just a memory aid. It's a meditative practice and a creative outlet; a tool for thought and a kind of poetry. Even a place to let rough ideas take shape before you commit to them.

Story doesn't just mean "fairy tale". Stories are what we tell ourselves and each other to make sense of the world and answer important questions like:

• who we are;
• how the world works;
• what truly matters in our lives.

One thing writing taught me is that non-fiction tells a story too. It made me a better writer.

What is philosophy, exactly? Wiktionary offers several definitions, among which: a comprehensive system of belief; a general principle; an academic discipline that seeks truth through reasoning rather than empiricism.

This last one is more useful than it sounds: turns out, a lot of useful truths are abstract, so you can't apply empiricism to them.

Mostly I'm interested in figuring out why we do certain things but not others, and why we do those things in certain ways but not others. That seems to fall under philosophy of mind, but I prefer to call it being self-aware and doing things with purpose.

Don't listen to advice about writing. Most of it is bad. In particular:

• outline if you like, but don't feel obligated;
• rewrite if you like, but don't feel obligated;
• write as long or short as the story demands.

That said, in my experience it's easier to add than to cut; if in doubt write sketchily and flesh it out later.

It's hard to say, because opinions vary; Bouncepaw has a good overview of recent discussions. Let's just say that originally, a wiki was a kind of CMS that worked differently from others, in a few key ways:

• There's a big button labeled "edit" on every page, right in the front-end; there's no separate "management interface" or other bureaucracy.
• To link between pages one simply marks up the words, usually in double square brackets; there's no need for special expertise, or a complicated GUI.
• Links can be added even before a page exists, and following the link to a non-existent page invites the user to create it right away.

Speaking of which, by default all users can edit any page, even each other's profiles; any errors are discussed and fixed ("it's easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission"). Page history and diffs help.

Nowadays the practice has changed. Wikis aren't as open as they used to be, as a general rule. Many are personal, and/or don't even use a wiki engine anymore. But the spirit of immediacy and simplicity has changed how we work with knowledge online.

Choice of engine matters. This wiki started out as a Gemini capsule, went through a PmWiki phase (twice), then became a TiddlyWiki instance, and now it's an org file.

This happens because each engine encourages a certain style and structure, shaping the text entrusted to it.

The internet links people together, not computers.

The first wiki was a community, and for a long time the two concepts appeared inextricable. Then people saw that wikis were good, and started using such on their personal websites. Early on these privately-run wikis were still open, but then spam became unbearable, so most of them were locked down, becoming essentially single-user. From there to their evolution into digital gardens there was only one step.

For me, the turning point was likely the release of TiddlyWiki, which can't even be edited online out of the box, but only when opened as a file from disk (server-side setups exist). As Bouncepaw points out, that can be a problem, because how do you edit your wiki on the go then? But as it turns out, I don't do that very often at all, and then there are ways.

Editing a wiki is still a very solitary activity when not even your friends want the editor password.

• People not used to wikis (even techies) get spooked by WikiWords and flag them as typos. Use free links.
• The Don't Repeat Yourself principle, a.k.a. DRY, sounds great… until your original source poofs. Redundancy is resilient.
• I once wrote that a wiki without the community is just an overly technical CMS. Even so, nothing can match the immediacy of a wiki. It matters.
• My first wiki engine was called WabiSabi. My second is named Brutal. What a difference ten years make.
• I love reading what wiki theorists wrote back when Wikipedia was new. But to someone from the distant future of 2021 it sounds hopelessly naive. They claimed to be writing a grand unified theory of online communities informed by their new, beloved medium, but in fact only described a brief moment in time.
• That said, they were right about one thing: an "everything wiki" doesn't work. It must have a focus, or mission. But it can be hard to articulate well.

HTML is a programming language. There, I said it.

It's a programming language because it lets people tell the computer to do cool stuff. In this case, show all kinds of things on screen. That's not much, you say? So what. It's fun. Meaningful. Often even useful.

So, you can't use HTML to perform computation. Big deal. It's been a long time since computers were all, or even mainly, about computation. Deal with it.

I like vector graphics because you can tell the computer, "here's a blue box, there's a red circle and on top of them it says 'geometry' in big letters". I prefer this way of thinking about art; it's not just splotches of color.

I like SVG because you can turn an image description into code much the same way you'd write a web page (in fact it's also a web standard).

Even better, with modern browsers you can embed SVG in HTML, thus making text and art equals on the web.

The age of big, impersonal directories has passed, but web curation is more important than ever. The big search engines have betrayed people. There's a new generation, but it will need time to catch up. And it's not easy to make a search engine.

A link directory can be as simple as one web page divided into sections. In fact an awesome list or blogroll is little more than that. Yet they hold the web together. And nobody needs permission to make their own.

Digital gardens are the modern term for what old-timers like me would call a personal wiki. There are many definitions. Some of them might even be correct. What matters is that the concept can prove surprisingly useful even when not applied directly as such.

For example: knowledge wants to be used, grown and connected. Add links to your pages. Then add stories to the links, so you don't forget what the point was.

See also: On Blogs and Digital Gardens.

Courtesy of Robbie Antenesse, I learned a new word. Sitelets are apparently those little websites with maybe a dozen pages that we need more of. The kind I made SlenderSite for. His own solution is called siteleteer: yet another wiki engine that runs in the browser. Except this one is different: it's fully handcrafted with no dependencies, so you can press Ctrl-U and see how it all works on the inside, data and code alike. Suddenly it's no longer magic, but simply some clever JavaScript. Just like the web used to be when we old farts learned our craft.

The internet is more than the capital-W Web:

• it's MUDs and the Gopher protocol;
• it's IRC and Jabber;
• it's good old e-mail too.

The internet is a meta-medium. The sci-fi dream we didn't know we wanted. It's been designed to withstand anything, and paradoxically that made it a target.

Plain text is the universal medium. That's both good and bad.

Good, because it can in principle express anything: prose, code, even art. It can be worked with universal tools, that don't need to know what it means, where it comes from or where it will go from there.

Bad, because structure is in the eye of the beholder, and text files have limited means of expressing what they're supposed to be. And computers hate ambiguity.

Marking up text has been a thing since way before computers. Think underlining a passage, or drawing a vertical line down the side. But in the digital realm it gained new dimensions, for at least two reasons:

1. It has to be in-band, because plain text has no concept of drawing lines or whatever.
2. A computer can act on markup, and render it as a link or spoiler, requiring interaction.

Nowadays the word "markup" has become almost synonymous with things like org files and Markdown, as opposed to HTML.

I don't like outlines. They enforce hierarchy and promote linearity. Any outline is by definition prescriptive, wanting to impose a predetermined view on the world.

And yet… directories work.

I don't get why people hate them. It's camel case by any other name: the recommended way to write hashtags nowadays (because it helps screen readers). Arguably they make for stilted text when forced where they don't belong; then again, cybertext has its own affordances.

For the past 15 years or so as of this writing, hashtags have become an indelible part of human culture, more proof that microblogging gave us means of expression we didn't know we needed. Many apps use a separate field for tags, which has advantages, but hashtags are markup: they belong in the text, and force the writer to think which words matter.

Actually some apps, like PmWiki, also point to page categories in-band, via special wiki links, thus gaining similar qualities.

Wikis exposed a problem with the web. Namely, that not all links are created equal. There are at least two types: internal links, that point to pages within the same application and can be easily checked for validity; and external links, pointing to an arbitrary address online that you can't vouch for in any way. The internal kind can be further divided into regular links, which point to other pages, and tags or categories, that set up an ontology.

Here's where things get interesting: the earliest wikis distinguished between internal (using WikiWords) and external links. As later engines moved to free links, something was lost. MediaWiki still does it right. Ironically, so do those that use Markdown, out of necessity.

Note how any modern wiki engine displays external links differently even if it uses a unified syntax otherwise. That's basically an admission that the distinction matters.

Code is mathematics brought to life. It must still communicate information to people, but also has a measure of concreteness: does it run? Does it produce anything like the expected output? This matters: the adage that if your code wasn't tested then it's broken holds true in my experience.

That said, what makes code tricky and the importance of notation ought to be explained a lot better to laypeople.

While wikis as a medium aren't as popular as they once were (or rather, they have faded into the background), the concept has also become entrenched in digital culture, and many apps borrow from it. The highly popular Zim for example styles itself as a desktop wiki, but it could also be said to be an outliner, or note-taking app. Domino, while being closer to a mind-mapping app, was explicitly inspired by TiddlyWiki, and preserves many of the same qualities. Other note-taking apps, often based on Markdown, allow for links between notes. See below.

"Content management system" sounds so pompous, but it's just a web app that lets people work on a website right from the browser, without access to the server or knowledge of how to make and upload pages. At least that's the theory; in practice, laypeople still won't touch them, while those who are willing to get technical can just as easily learn HTML and CSS. In fact they used to do it for fun in the Geocities era, and lately it's becoming a thing again.

Use of a CMS puts a burden of performance and security on the server, but there are advantages as well: automation of repetitive tasks like ordering and tagging blog posts, or the ability to post updates from anywhere, for example with a mobile device.

Wikis were the original CMS. The more conventional kind, exemplified by WordPress, peaked roughly between 2005 and 2015, and is now suffering a backlash.

An outliner promises to help navigate the inherent bureaucracy of outlines. For example, this document was created in Orgzly, on an Android tablet. But after the nth time frantically folding and unfolding sections, trying to locate a particular one, that promise starts to ring hollow.

Outliners work with outlines, that's just it. They are tools of the system.

Text editors are the universal computer software. That's both good and bad.

Good, because plain text is as simple as it gets. No moving parts. Only what you put there, no more and no less. Forever accessible.

Bad, because the text editor is a jack of all trades, but a master of none. Mastery matters. Also text files have no structure except what we attribute to them. And often it's not clear what the intent was.

People mistakenly assume that programming is the activity of writing code. A lot of misunderstandings and bad blood result from this.

• Fleshed out the preface somewhat; removed note about hosting.
• Updated the section on PmWiki, mainly to add explicit dates.
• Removed or updated a bunch of broken old links.

Added sections about programming and code. Pretty much just stubs now, but one has to start somewhere.

Fleshed out introductory text too, and the section on journaling.

This entry is antedated because I have little better to do on the last day of 2025.

As hinted at in the preface, over the holidays I picked up Emacs and Org Mode to maintain this document. It should make things much easier going forward. Other changes include proper timestamps on journal entries, and weeding out more legacy text that didn't fit in.

I bit the bullet and deleted almost everything in the writing section. Now to fill it up again with stuff that can be linked with the rest.

I changed the title of this file to something more specific, but mainly over the top (hopefully in a good way). Suddenly its point is a lot more clear, even though the mission statement hasn't changed.

In other news, I started adding links using the custom ID support recently implemented in Orgzly. Much better.

It's been a while since the last update. As of two days ago, this document no longer shares a name with the original wiki. I also deleted some old writing that now lives elsewhere, to make room for something more on-topic. Still not sure which way to go from here, but it's a start.

(This entry is backdated by a week because I forgot.)

I finally got rid of the Writing -> Thoughts section. It contained a couple of bad takes, only kept around as filler, and for lack of better ideas. They now live in my private notes again, until there will be some context for them at least. There's plenty of good writing here now, so that's hardly a loss.

Two days ago, I finally made a clean break between this document and the wiki it's based on. The two will continue to share content where it makes sense, while otherwise going their own separate ways.