| title | description |
|---|---|
An Alternative View on Computing & Cognition |
A public Obsidian vault with all my notes on Cognitive Engineering, OS Development and Design, and Complexity. |
👥 Intended Audience — People interested in an ineloquent view on AI, cognitive science, and/or software development.
This website is my personal digital garden/wiki. Here I mainly explore [[📝 Cognitive Research]], [[📝 OS Research]] and anything in between.
Update note:
Last year 2023, I decided to start traveling and prioritized different things in my life. During this time a lot happened. ChatGPT was released and I spent most of my time working on [[🧰 oceloti-svelte]] — an infinite canvas engine for future projects, research and work. You can follow all the development details here, in my YouTube Channel. I also have a devlog feed at fergarram.online/devlog.html
The point is, I'll be spending some time updating most of my [[📝 OS Research]] stuff since most of my notes are outdated and proven by the ChatGPT disruption. Stay tuned.
Computers are more ubiquitous than ever. One would think that this would result in a better user experience and a general improvement in this space, but it's actually quite the contrary: Rushed feature development, agile strategies, a leaking backlog full of bugs and an uncaring relationship with users well being are making our computers harder to use for professional work and hurting our fragile human minds with dopamine spikes and user interfaces designed to be addictive.
My "research" is really just a bunch of prototypes and radical ideas that try to change how we use computers and the internet. You can follow it by going to [[📝 OS Research]].
My work in this space is mainly experimentation with conceptual cognitive primitives with the goal of creating a toolkit for developing personalized AGI agents or artificial beings. Contrary to the common view that AGI needs to be this know-it-all intelligence, I argue that AGI doesn't need to be human-like in every way, but rather, just with the parts we need it to.
For example, an AGI that's used as the mind of a video game's NPC doesn't need to understand what a tik-tok is or how it feels to drink coffee unless the game design requires that. The same would apply for any type of use case — a digital assistant that manages your computer OS doesn't need to understand why we have pets or the difference between a dog and a cat.
These examples might look simple, but I believe that by analyzing the experience required for specific tasks we can aim to design a digital world and cognitive architecture that produces a digital being capable of surviving in its world by doing what we need it to do for us.
My ultimate goal with this research is to create a digital assistant that's capable of understanding the software I use in my day-to-day, and I want it to help me build more software tools and help me with my digital tasks in general.
You can find a more detailed guide in the introductory page at [[📝 Cognitive Research]]. There I explain more about my approach and how to navigate my work.
[[📝 Resources]] is a list and guide to manage external resources like papers, books, articles, etc. If I find it's useful, I usually create notes about them.
As Maggie Appleton explains in her post about digital gardens, documents can be at different growth stages. For example, you might find that there are empty pages or half-baked ideas. This allows me to plant ideas which I slowly hydrate and fill with information and connections. It also allows me to validate and formalize concepts.
You can think of this website as a text editor or IDE that allows you to browse and read the files in a repository. I use emojis as icons to identify the type of document. For example, the 📝 icon is used to identify topics or concepts within a research space. The 🔬 icon is used to identify experiment documents, and for my experiment notes I use the 📎 icon to store important ideas related to a specific experiment.
Instead of providing a definition for each type or icon, I invite you, the reader, to explore the sidebar and try to figure out how they are used.
My name is Fernando Garcia and I am a software developer, designer and amateur researcher. I don't intend to be a source of truth on any of the topics I write about, but rather, a naïve view on existing ideas.
If you disagree, have any comments or questions, feel free to reach out. I love talking about anything cognitive science and computers. You can DM me or tweat me on twitter at @_fergarram_.
I'm mostly in are.na.
You can also find more about me in fernando.works or contact me directly at [email protected].