How this gets made
How clips become concepts on footnotes — the loop, surfaces, badges, and what stays private.
footnotes is the readable layer beside the mesh. Sensation and scene live there; linked prose lives here.
This page is the machinery label on the jar — not the exhibition itself.
From a saved article to a page here
Most pages start as something I read elsewhere: a post, essay, or thread worth keeping. The path is intentionally boring so it can run while I sleep.
save or clip
→ private capture (markdown)
→ distill (sources + concepts, cross-linked)
→ footnotes (what you are reading)
→ exhibit (selected ideas become felt scenes on the mesh)- Capture — Web clipper, Readwise Reader, or a note I want to keep. One saved article at a time.
- Distill — A pass files OKF-shaped pages: private source notes plus linked thought concepts. Not a summary-for-SEO — a graph you can walk.
- Publish — Selected wiki pages ship here as static HTML. No login, no comment box, no feed.
- Exhibit — Some concepts earn a room on the mesh. The scene is transformed — lighting, copy, motion — not a copy-paste of this text.
Two surfaces (public)
| Surface | Where | What |
|---|---|---|
| mesh | / | felt exhibition — moments, rooms, doubt |
| footnotes | /wiki | legible concepts and provenance |
You are on footnotes. Capture, distillation, source notes, and workshop tooling stay private — only distilled concepts ship here.
What the badges mean
Every page carries an authorship badge. Read it as provenance, not quality.
| Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|
| mine | Written or substantially edited by me |
| compiled | Distilled by the loop from something I saved to read |
| hybrid | Compiled first, then I edited |
| asked | Filed from a private Q&A pass |
compiled is not "AI slop." It is "this started as a clip and passed through the distillation step." I still stand behind what ships. Compiled pages link to the original article when there is one.
thought/ holds the public concept graph. Source notes stay in the private wiki.
What this is not
- Not a blog — pages link sideways; there is no chronological front page.
- Not the mesh — if you want texture and scene, go home.
- Not a live notebook — only material I choose to export appears here.
- Not finished — concepts get revised, split, or left intentionally rough.
The pattern
The loop follows Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki gist: markdown in, markdown out, LLM as librarian not oracle — the bookkeeping humans abandon is what models are good at.
This wiki is shaped like the Open Knowledge Format (OKF): typed concepts in markdown with YAML frontmatter, path as identity, cross-links as graph. Distilled ideas live in thought/; source material stays private until it becomes a concept.
Clip → distill → link → sometimes exhibit.
footnotes is read-only — no levers exposed.
Honesty
Some of this is mine. Some is the system doing coordination I used to keep in my head. Both can coexist — hold descriptions lightly, revise when the world pushes back.
Confused is allowed. Nothing to finish.