by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 34)
TODO those more:
Major downsides that most of those personal knowledge databases have:
  • very little/no focus on public publishing, which is the primary focus of OurBigBook.com
  • either limited or no multiuser features, e.g. edit protection and cross user topics
  • graph based instead of tree based. For books we need a single clear ordering of a tree. Graph should come as a secondary thing through tags.
Markdown based, Visual Studio Code based.
Publishing possible but not mandatory focus, main focus is self notes. Publishing guide at: foambubble.github.io/foam/user/recipes/recipes.html#publish Related: jackiexiao.github.io/foam/reference/publishing-pages/.
They seem to use graphs more than trees which will complicate publication.
TODO are IDs might be correctly implemented and independent from source file location? Are there any examples? github.com/foambubble/foam/issues/512
This is the project with the closest philosophy to OurBigBook that Ciro Santilli has ever found. It just tends to be even more idealistic than, OurBigBook in general, which is insane!
Source code: sr.ht/~jonsterling/forester. Not on GitHub, too much idealism.
Author's main social media account seems to be: mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling e.g. mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling/111359099228291730
They have \Include like OurBigBook, nice: www.jonmsterling.com/jms-007L.xml, but OMG that name \transclude{xxx-NNNN}!!
Headers have open/close: 
\subtree[jms-00YG]{}
OurBigBook considered this, but went with parent= instead finally to avoid huge lists of close parenthesis at the end of deep nodes.
One really cool thing is that the headers render internal links as clickable, which brings it all closer to the "knowledge base as a formal ontology" approach.
Does not encourage human readable IDs, uses stuff like jms-00YG.
The markup doesn't seem to have any insane constructs, you have to type out open paragraphs everywhere?! OMG, too idealistic, not enough pragmatism.
Jon has some very good theory of personal knowledge base, rationalizing several points that Ciro Santilli had in his mind but hadn't fully put into words, which is quite cool.
OCaml dependency is not so bad, but it relies on actualy LaTeX for maths, which is bad. Maybe using JavaScript for OurBigBook wasn't such a bad choice after all, KaTeX just works.
Docs at: www.jonmsterling.com/jms-005P.xml Sample repo at: github.com/jonsterling/forest but all parts of interest are in submodules on the authors private Git server.
Viewing the generated output HTML directly requires security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy which is sad, but using a local server solves it. So it appears to actually pull pieces together with JavaScript? Also output files have .xml extension, the idealism!
Good:
Crazy overlaps with Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook Project, Wikipedia states:
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
Video 1.
New Game in Town by TheTedNelson (2016)
Source.
Closed source, no local editing? PDF annotation focus.
Seems like a "organize ideas for my private academic research" use case.
Co-founded by this dude: x.com/iamdrbenmiles
Sponsored by Obsidian itself!
Written in TypeScript!
Markdown support!
Everything is forcibly is scoped to files quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/wikilinks: 
[[Path to file#anchor|Anchor]]
Global table of contents based of in-disk file structure: quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/explorer with customizable sorting/filtering.
Interesting "gradual" WYSIWYG. You get inline previews for for things like images, maths and links. And if you click to edit the thing, the preview mostly goes away and becomes the corresponding source code instead.
In the 2020's, this refers to writing down everything you know, usually in some graph structured way.
This is somewhat the centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers: dumping your brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
This is also the closest one can get to immortality pre full blown transhumanism.
Ciro's still looking for the restore this plaintext backup on a new body though.
It is a good question, how much of your knowledge you would be able to give to others with text and images. It is likely almost all of it, except for coordination/signal processing tasks.
His passion for braindumping like this is a big motivation behind Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook.com work.
Cute synonym for second brain, sample usage: beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/#cntnt
zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ mentions one page to rule them all:
How many Zettelkästen should I have? The answer is, most likely, only one for the duration of your life. But there are exceptions to this rule.

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