Thinking Surface

What is this?

This site is a kind of personal computing tool built in the lineage of Notion and Jupyter notebooks: a system of blocks for thinking, connecting, writing, and coding all in one. Think of it like the eccentric notebook of a designer, where each page is an expression of my curiosity—rather than expertise.

Interfaces made of knowledge

At a time when knowledge grows beyond what any one person can hold in their mind, we invent a technology that can compress that abundance back down to human scale?

In its use, language model is a tool for reconfiguring knowledge abundance back into human-scale. it doesn’t solve truth, judgment, morality, understanding—at least not yet—but it does have this incredible ability to turn the overwhelming scale of contemporary knowledge into units we can look at, question, and think with.

Philosophy, history, mathematics, economics. these words are made up boundaries. Useful, but artificial. They slice knowledge sprawl into discernable territories. You can point to a subject and say: i want to learn more about that. But now we can move across territories. Human knowledge has become less like a shelf of subjects and more like a material that can be mixed, compressed, expanded, and reshaped.

When I picture the shape of a language model, i imagine a large collection of tiny cubes of meaning—the substrate behind information. Precursors to words, texts, code, encodings, explanations.

Models continuously reconfigure knowledge through these cubes into a shape that’s graspable to us. Not necessarily perfect, and not even automatically true, but closer to the shape our mind needs in order to think with it. In this way, LLMs are a new kind of interface. An interface for knowledge, and thought. An interface that is no longer fixed in advance, and instead can rebuilt with each turn.

We answered the problem of exponential knowledge growth by inventing a new kind of interface for moving through the accumulated knowledge at scale. In the same way pixels on a screen are the material of graphical interfaces, or buttons and gestures are the material of apps, language models make words, probabilities, and next-token prediction into the material of knowledge interfaces.

An interface to move through knowledge, shape it, compress it, expand it, and find new forms for it. While this all feels somewhat obvious given our extensive exposure to the medium, i still can’t help but also find it remarkable. Familiarity aside, this is stuff of science fiction.

Thinking Surface

What is this?

Surfaces:

Thoughts:

About me:

What is this?

Surfaces:

Thoughts:

About me: