(2022-05-21) Lee Hyperlink Maximalism

Linus Lee: Hyperlink maximalism. ...begin with today’s lightly hyperlinked documents, and let the reader’s computer generate links on-demand

The computer can look at every word on the page, every phrase, name, quote, and section of text, and show me a “map” of the words and ideas behind which lay the most interesting ideas I might want to know about

when I select it, my computer should search across everything I’ve read and some small high-quality subset of the Web to bring me 5-10 links

This vision of a knowledge tool with “everything as a link” really appealed to me when I was building myself a new app for my personal notes earlier this year, so I sought out to prototype a basic tool that would try to achieve some of what I speculated on above: begin with basic, conventional text documents, generate links “on the fly” between my ideas, and visualize a map of such links and connections across my knowledge base. The result is an app that I named Notation. (notation.app)

This is not to say that automatically generated links will replace hyperlinks authors and note-takers like to use today, or even that we should try to replace and deprecate manually-placed hyperlinks. (double-brackets)

I’m a hyperlink maximalist: everything should be a hyperlink, including everything that is hyperlinked by the author, everything that isn’t hyperlinked by the author, and perhaps even the hyperlinks themselves. Words should be hyperlinked, but so should be every interesting phrase, quote, name, proper noun, paragraph, document, and collection of documents I read.

Everything in Notation lives in a single, giant bulleted list, and each bullet can contain sub-bullets that open up when you toggle the bullet by clicking on it or hitting Ctrl + Enter.

in Notation, every word and phrase is a link. To access any word or phrase as a link, you simply highlight it, and a popup will show all the places where I’ve mentioned that idea

That’s really all there is to Notation. It lets me treat my notes as if every idea is linked to every other mention of that idea, without ever manually linking anything

To produce these highlights and heatmaps, Notation currently uses a very simple algorithm for finding ideas that share similar context: two bullet points are similar if they share many n-grams. This is so computationally efficient that Notation can currently run everything in-browser, highlighting and generating heatmaps as you type

If you want to try the interface for yourself, you can find a public deployment of Notation at notation.app

There’s one caveat: Notation was initially created just for myself, so keyboard shortcuts are essential to getting around.

This has already been so useful to me that I found myself writing down thoughts I don’t even care to remember in Notation, because writing it into Notation will surface connections and links that I wouldn’t have remembered myself.

The first natural extension of Notation is to expand the search scope of its connection-finding beyond my notes, to things like my web-browsing history or my journals. With a smarter system, a similar interface could even automatically discover and show links from your notes to high-quality articles or online sources that you may not have seen yet

Another direction of exploration may be to use generative language models (LLM) to automatically recombine and synthesize new ideas from my existing notes.