Second Brain

I've planted some seeds in my digital garden. https://brain.dustinfirebaugh.com/

What's a Digital Garden?

I kind of view it as a personal wiki.

It's a place to store notes in a way that's easily accessible to you (and potentially other people).

Why?

Learning/Memorization

There's some opinions floating around that suggest that we no longer have to remember things since it's now extremely easy to look things up.

I see some merit in this opinion. However, there are still some scenarios that require rote memorization (at least at some level). This is apparent with some academics environments. It's definitely the case if you're trying to participate in language learning. There's probably a balance between rote memorization and note taking in most learning scenarios.

I can the digital garden being a tool to use while learning.

Transhumanism

In the distant future, we may rely even more on our devices (computers/smart phones or whatever comes after the smart phone) to interface with information.

You could argue that the interface we have between our brain and the internet is very slow. This is why there are some ambitious endeavors for some kind of neural implant.

Do we need a faster interface to our information? Considering several warnings from the likes of Jaron Lanier and science fiction, I could definitely argue that it could do more harm than good.

Hopefully my digital garden will stay modest enough to avoid being a source of false information.

Lex Fridman interviews Jaron Lanier: https://youtu.be/Fx0G6DHMfXM

I hope the digital garden will be a way to off load stuff that's in my brain without having to lose it forever.

Open Format

If I started this 10 years ago, I could imagine having a lot of value to sift through. I can also imagine the technology that it was originally deployed with being extremely outdated. I've decided to run my digital garden on a very minimal static site generator elleventy. The actual content is built with several markdown files. Given that markdown is fairly flexible, I should be able to migrate this content fairly easily because I won't be locked in to some vendors database. Another perk is that I can host it freely on gh-pages

Context vs Timeline

In a traditional blog the posts are listed by dates. When taking notes or referencing something, contextual linking seems to make more sense.

Also, I added a very cool graph diagram that shows a visual representation of how these pages are linked together. I look forward to watching this second brain constellation grow over time.

Some cool digital gardens

my new fresh digital garden: 🧠🌱

check out more here: digital gardeners