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I am currently in the process of building out a messy little constellation of personal projects. Perhaps better described as instruments for thinking. They are things I want to exist because I keep reaching for them, and so likely will be worth sharing when they exist, in case others are reaching for them too :) These projects include: A database-of-databases: and eventually a path into backtesting workflows. Interesting projects like Awesome Public Datasets have previously been carried out, at great scale & with community contributions, but there is a gap I am hoping to address. ...

Science progresses via a collapsing of ontology into the new. A new framework emerges that alters how we define reality (ontology). The old ontology collapses under the weight of what it can no longer explain. The new order of meaning emerges, whereby yesterday’s observations are redeemed from their isolation and reinterpreted as signs of a deeper order. Examples of this include the shift from the geocentric (Earth-centered) to the heliocentric model of the universe. Or the transition from Newtonian mechanics to Einsteinian relativity. ...

Florilegium: literally meaning “a gathering of flowers” in Latin. In the Middle Ages, this was a book that compiled the finest, smartest extracts and quotes from various writings. Cool things I found this week… I. This personal design portfolio site that carefully documents the process of each work II. AND this personal blog website that documents their friends stories. I love everything about this. Not just the design but the approach, the realisation that our most valuable knowledge is not our own but in our friends, this person’s mindset is incredible. ...

Second brains are have moved from personal archives into agent-readable cognitive infrastructure. The central constraint is dual legibility. The system has to make sense to me, in Obsidian, and it has to make sense to Claude in the repo. Throughout history, scholars, scientists, philosophers, and writers have kept some version of an external thinking system. Commonplace books serve as working scrapbooks to store arguments, fragments, and half-formed ideas, to be returned to later. They were not kept as diaries in the introspective sense. John Locke even wrote A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, offering a system for arranging quotations, ideas, and speeches by subject and category. Cognitive scientist Don Norman, in Things That Make Us Smart, explored how humans become smarter by building external aids that extend memory and reasoning. ...

Interest in blogging over time: Blogging is still far below its historical peak, when analysing trends across a longer hoizon, but its recent rebound is statistically unusual relative to the last five-year baseline. Google Trends do not represent not raw search volume. Each point is divided by total searches for that geography/time window and scaled 0-100, so the spike means “blog” became much more prominent relative to all searches, not that we know absolute search count. That said, the spikes are interesting to investigate with context. ...

On the shore of Lake Zürich sits Bollingen Tower. Carl Jung spent decades building it with his own hands. He carried stones, carved symbols into walls, and treated the structure as a physical extension of his inner world. A central tower came first. Later he added a second tower, a private courtyard, and further rooms. Each addition arrived at a different stage of his life until the structure itself began to resemble a psychological map, he described the form that emerged as a symbol of psychic wholeness. One inscription sits on the tower which Jung called his confession in stone: ...

Journal Entry: The Reflexive Loop In the stillness of observation lies the foundation of understanding. Yet, what we observe is not the whole of what is. It is merely the raw clay, waiting to be shaped by the mind. Echoing the words of Heisenberg from his 1958 book Physics and Philosophy" What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Kant suggests we do not see the world as it is in itself (the noumena), but rather as it appears to us through the lens of our own cognition (the phenomena). The clay is shapeless until our minds create a form for it. ...

A system about systems of thinking. I now have a METABRAIN file in my second brain system, a catalog of every major knowledge architecture I could find: Karpathy-style AI repos [I,S,R] Zettelkasten [O,R,M] PARA [I,O] Evergreen Notes [O,M] Digital Gardens [O,S] Molecular Notes [O,S] Knowledge Graphs [R,M] Agent memory systems [R,S,M] Research pipelines [I,S] Vector retrieval architectures [R] These systems are solving different layers: Ingestion [I], Organisation [O], Retrieval [R], Synthesis [S], Memory [M]. ...

Things I found this week… I. Carl Jung on the mountains II. @kejunYing weekend project Symbol becomes structure. Meaning becomes shape A tiny weekend project :) pic.twitter.com/xQ8k7oAiFk — Kejun (Albert) Ying (@KejunYing) April 26, 2026 III. S2Vec learns city structure from map data alone, creates embeddings that predict income, population, emissions, even in unseen regions. Best results come when combined with satellite models like RS-MaMMUT, maps + imagery together. IV. Kawase Hasui woodblock prints ...

A collection of places that draw inspiration from my favourite books… SOMA, Soho Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds. ― Aldous Huxley Book Review Spot: SOMA Oyster & Margarita, Príncipe Real “The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never! You’re asked an unexpected question, you don’t even flinch, it takes just a second to get yourself under control, you know just what you have to say to hide the truth, and you speak very convincingly, and nothing in your face twitches to give you away. But the truth, alas, has been disturbed by the question, and it rises up from the depths of your soul to flicker in your eyes and all is lost.” ...