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.

  • A quantitative-researcher system: a little research organism for testing hypotheses, that can ask: does this feature matter, when does it matter.

  • A paper-graph: scientific papers are still weirdly unmachine-readable. I want papers as typed scientific evidence objects: hypothesis → method → experiment → result → caveat → null result → contradiction → replication.

Lower priority:

A Twitter pipeline that turns atoms from my second brain into threads, blog posts into threads, saved examples into style references, and ideally lets me do half of this from my phone while walking around with a coffee and a half-formed idea. And lastly, upgrading the second brain itself. How do I capture knowledge from my phone into the knowledge base? How do I make markdown feel less dead and more like a living interface? Do I use an existing web editor, or build one? How do I show idea lineage on blog posts? How do I make Substack, Medium, Hugo, Twitter, Notion, and Obsidian link better?

Cool things I found this week…

I. Reliq

Link to Reliq via @acmedity using internet archive open API to build a micro site that randomly pulls images/texts from their database!

II. Real life Pokedex

@jurree used claude code to build gotcha “point your phone at any animal. catch it, collect it, share it.”

III. portaltext

@145k4 made a little tool called portaltext that fills in all of your knowledge gaps as you read so you can understand any blog immediately.

IV. This insane paper

If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II…

V. Bartosz Milewski’s Category Theory for Programmers

In connection to my recent post on ontology shifts for second-brains