Information scraps: How and why information eludes our personal information management tools

The Micro-Paper: Towards cheaper, citable research ideas and conversations

Academic, peer-reviewed short papers are a common way to present a late-breaking work to the academic community that outlines preliminary findings, research ideas, and novel conversations. By comparison, blogging or writing posts on social media are an unstructured and open way to discuss ideas and start new conversations. Both have limitations in the proliferation of research ideas. The short paper format relies on the conference and journal submission process while blogging does not operate within a structured format or set of expectations at all. However, at times the demand exists for late-breaking ideas and conversations to arise in a raw form or with urgency but should still be archived and recorded in a way that promotes citational honesty and integrity. To address this, I present: The Micro-Paper, as a micro-paper itself. The Micro-Paper is a small, cheap, accessible, digital document that is self-published and archived, akin to a pre-print of a short paper. This meta micro-paper discusses the context, goals, and considerations of micro-paper authoring.

Everything is miscellaneous : the power of the new digital disorder

Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-257) and index; Prologue : information in space -- The new order of order -- Alphabetization and its discontents -- The geography of knowledge -- Lumps and splits -- The laws of the jungle -- Smart leaves -- Social knowing -- What nothing says -- Messiness as a virtue -- The work of knowledge -- Coda : misc; Philosopher Weinberger shows how the digital revolution is radically changing the way we make sense of our lives. Human beings constantly collect, label, and organize data--but today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Everything is suddenly miscellaneous. Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. He examines how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children's teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future.--From publisher description; From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think - and what you know - about the world. Includes information on alphabetical order, Amaxon.com, animals, Aristotle, authority, Bettmann Archive, blogs (weblogs), books, broadcasting, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), business, card catalog, categories and categorization, clusters, companies, Colon Classification, conversation, Melvil Dewey, Dewey Decimal Classification system, Encyclopaedia Britannica, encyclopedia, essentialism, experts, faceted classification system, first order of order, Flickr.com, Google, Great Books of the Western World, ancient Greeks, health and medical information, identifiers, index, inventory tracking, knowledge, labels, leaf and leaves, libraries, Library of Congress, links, Carolus Linnaeus, lumping and splitting, maps and mapping, marketing, meaning, metadata, multiple listing services (MLS), names of people, neutrality or neutral point of view, New York Public Library, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), order and organization, people, physical space, everything having place, Plato, race, S.R. Ranganathan, Eleanor Rosch, Joshua Schacter, science, second order of order, simplicity, social constructivism, social knowledge, social networks, sorting, species, standardization, tags, taxonomies, third order of roder, topical categorization, tree, Uniform Product Code (UPC), users, Jimmy Wales, web, Wikipedia, etc

How People Use ChatGPT

Despite the rapid adoption of LLM chatbots, little is known about how they are used. We document the growth of ChatGPT’s consumer product from its launch in November 2022 through July 2025, when it had been adopted by around 10% of the world’s adult population. Early adopters were disproportionately male but the gender gap has narrowed dramatically, and we find higher growth rates in lower-income countries. Using a privacy-preserving automated pipeline, we classify usage patterns within a representative sample of ChatGPT conversations. We find steady growth in work-related messages but even faster growth in non-work-related messages, which have grown from 53% to more than 70% of all usage. Work usage is more common for educated users in highly-paid professional occupations. We classify messages by conversation topic and find that “Practical Guidance,” “Seeking Information,” and “Writing” are the three most common topics and collectively account for nearly 80% of all conversations. Writing dominates work-related tasks, highlighting chatbots’ unique ability to generate digital outputs compared to traditional search engines. Computer programming and self-expression both represent relatively small shares of use. Overall, we find that ChatGPT provides economic value through decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs.

Karpathy's LLM Knowledge Base Wiki for Enterprise | Vijoy Pandey posted on the topic | LinkedIn

There's a new kind of computer media in the enterprise: Write once, Read never. The docs are perpetually stale, constantly diverging from reality, and scattered across Confluence, SharePoint, GitHub, Webex (or Slack) threads, Notion, Obsidian - and in my personal life, add Apple Notes, Goodnotes, web clippings, and multiple Google Drives worth of docs and slides that nobody is ever going back to. Karpathy tweeted his LLM knowledge base wiki architecture which went viral last weekend and I decided to give it a run yesterday. Verdict: You *have* to try this out. Prediction: You won’t be able to live without it soon. There were a few mods and decisions I made to the base Karpathy provided. First, the vault / folder structure in Obsidian. I already use Obsidian as a human. Instead of creating separate vaults and dealing with the sync nightmare, I just have folders for Human and Agent, and a Raw folder. (1) The Human/ folder is where I write long form articles and notes independent of the knowledge base wiki. No LLM or agent touches this folder. (2) I do have Arnold Layne, my OpenClaw agent, doing background tasks for me. Raw/ is where both Arnold and I, dump raw snippets. Inclusive of diverse kinds of media. (3) The Agent/ folder is where the LLM (Claude in my case) synthesizes the wiki. No human touches this folder. Second, some customizations to CLAUDE.md for enterprise-like usage - (4) Domain extensions - the agent needs to know that quantum computing and agentic AI have different entity types and different provenance thresholds.  (5) Primary source protection, when I drop in my own original work, secondary sources can extend it or raise questions against it, but they cannot overwrite it. It sounds like a small thing but its’s not, especially at enterprise scale where provenance actually matters. Karpathy is upfront that what he’s built is working memory for a single agent, and it’s truly remarkable at that. The jump to Shared Context across teams, reconciling conflicting beliefs at org scale, ontologies that don’t collapse under the weight of a hundred contributors - those are much harder problems and what we are exploring with the Internet of Cognition. PS: The screenshot shows my Obsidian vault after just two runs: one with Karpathy’s original tweet and gist file itself (so meta!) and one with our Internet of Cognition paper. Claude (Sonnet) read it, compiled it into structured summaries, entity pages, concept pages, backlinks, merged all the information cohesively, and keeps it all maintained from there. You just read the Wiki. It’s simply magical.

On fun simple social building blocks… - Scraps!

Replying to Jared's thoughts on decomposing social media experiences into building blocks (identities, data, interfaces) with some building blocks I'd like to explore in Leaflet!

The information flaneur: a fresh look at information seeking

Just in time software

I didn’t plan to write software in the grocery store last night. I was tired and hungry, kids in tow. My long shopping list sat in a text message. I wished I could check items off as I found them. Ideas filtered through my head: I could transfer the list to a piece of paper: too tedious I could copy/paste it into a notes app or an email draft and delete items: too much tapping I could search the web and app store for a thing that would do what I want (of which there were no doubt a great many): slow and painful and annoying Nope nope nope nope nope.

Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends | Hacker News

Decker[2] (which is also open-source) has answers to several of the things outlined on Scrappy’s roadmap, including facilities for representing and manipulating tabular data with its query language and grid widgets and the ability for users to abstract collections of parts into reusable "Contraptions".

Manuscript submission systems and metadata completeness in Crossref: Patterns and associations

The importance of open research information, particularly publication metadata, is widely recognised. Crossref is one of the most important infrastructures for registering open metadata as part of DOI record registration. It is widely known, however, that the metadata of many publications is far from complete, with many publishers making certain metadata openly available, but failing to do so for other metadata elements. Publishers’ ability to register this metadata with Crossref depends on their capacity to capture and retain this data in their production workflows. Manuscript submission systems are an important, yet largely overlooked, factor in the extent to which publishers make metadata available through Crossref. In this paper, we present the results of an analysis investigating the relation between the level of metadata that publishers deposit with Crossref and the submission systems that they deploy for their journals. We have looked at the 153 publishers with the largest amounts of publications in Crossref and concentrate on the four most commonly used systems: Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, Open Journal Systems (OJS) and eJournalPress. We show that some submission systems appear better suited to capturing certain metadata elements. However, there are always cases where publishers using the same system differ widely in the level of metadata they register, suggesting that technology is not the only prohibiting factor and other considerations are at play.

Erasure and Slop - Human-Generated Content · augment

Human Generated Content, Issue 4

The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information

A Political Economy of Personal Information

OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC — Subcommittee | OASIS

Advancing a document creation and management specification that builds content reuse into the authoring process

Living in Data: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future (Paperback)

Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.”To live in data in the twenty-first century