the short version
- I keep what I learn in a notes system that an AI keeps tidy. Every talk, article or video gets summarised, tagged and linked to what’s already there.
- One evening I watched the Borg hail from Star Trek and laughed, because that is my notes system. It takes in everything, and everything comes out in the same shape.
- The Borg get one thing wrong, and it matters to anyone learning something: they say resistance is futile. When you learn, the struggle is the part doing the work.
where the joke fits
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one shape
Everything gets the same format
A talk, a news story, a long PDF and a 16-second video clip all come out with the same headings, tags and links. The source adapts to the system.
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the collective
The system knows more than I do
I no longer remember what’s in it. I remember where things are. Researchers saw people make this switch with search engines back in 2011.
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night shift
It works while I sleep
New things get filed overnight. The Borg regenerate in alcoves. My laptop does much the same.
where it breaks
The Borg erase the person they take in. With an AI notes system, the one who gets absorbed is me. Filing something feels like learning it, because I watched it happen and the pages look neat. But the system did the remembering.
Learning researchers have names for what gets skipped. Robert and Elizabeth Bjork call the helpful kind of struggle desirable difficulties. The generation effect says you remember what you produce better than what you read. A system that summarises for you skips both.
Takes in everything it meets.
You pick what goes in, and skip most of it.
Every new thing comes out in the same shape.
You keep one line in the source’s own words, so its voice survives.
Allows no disagreement.
It flags where two sources clash, and waits for you to decide.
Makes nothing new. Everything it has was taken from someone.
You make things from it: a post, a talk, a better way of working.
The drone forgets who it was.
You can explain it without opening the app.
the lunch test
Pick something you filed two weeks ago. Explain it to someone over lunch without opening the app.
If you can, you’re a Starfleet officer with a very good library computer. If you can’t, that one got assimilated.
two habits i’m keeping
- Write first, file second. Before anything goes in, I type two or three lines in my own words: what I took from it, and where I disagree. Writing it myself is what makes it stick, and it gives the note a voice the template can’t.
- Keep one exact line. From each source I keep the one sentence that surprised me, word for word. The summary keeps the facts. That line keeps the voice.
the same thing at work
A whole company can get assimilated too. Pour every SOP and manual into an AI tool, and if nobody reads them any more, you’ve built a collective, not a team that knows its work.
One check: could your newest staff member explain the process without the tool? If not, the know-how lives in the tool, and it leaves when the tool changes.
made with
- Voices: Fish Audio, AI-generated. The Wiki’s voice is one clip, pitched down, played three times, slightly out of step, mixed live in your browser.
- Cube: three.js.
- The notes system idea: Andrej Karpathy’s LLM Wiki.
- The research: Sparrow, Liu and Wegner (2011), “Google effects on memory”, Science; Robert and Elizabeth Bjork on desirable difficulties; Slamecka and Graf (1978) on the generation effect.
- Star Trek and the Borg belong to Paramount. This page is a fan homage. The hail is written from scratch, and the page is not affiliated with or endorsed by Paramount.