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Bookmarked How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt by Margaret-Anne Storey

I enjoyed this short posting by Margaret-Anne Storey, a CS professor. The effect of using generative tools can indeed lead to loss of overview, and uncertainty about the project I recognise. It creeps in very quickly, especially if I’ve started from something exploratory, as opposed to planned. A cognitive debt accrues because of wanting to move fast or move at all, at the cost of understanding one’s actions in enough detail. It hinders being able to make changes later.

It also makes me wonder something completely different. Partially because of examples I saw last week in Madrid of how BMW and Airbus had sped up some specific tasks orders of magnitude with AI:

If we see companies as slow AI, i.e. context blind algorithms working towards a narrowly defined singular goal (this is where the notion of AI turning all the material in the world including ourselves into paperclips comes from), what methods have we come up with to deal with cognitive debt in organisations? My intuitive response is reporting chains, KPIs, and middle management. Consultancy too, hiring an external actor to blame if needed. That suggests to me we actually didn’t, as so much of that is management-theater. Does any board of any company above a certain size actually know what is going on in their organisations? Understand what consequences changes may have? There’s a world of hurt out there caused by ‘reorganisations’ that all too often seem ritualistic more than rational when seen from the outside.

It may also be why companies easily embrace AI, despite e.g. warnings about cognitive debt. It looks the same as current practice, just with the promise of higher speed.

I saw this dynamic play out vividly in an entrepreneurship course I taught recently. .. one team hit a wall. They could no longer make even simple changes without breaking something unexpected. … no one on the team could explain why certain design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. … issue was that the theory of the system, their shared understanding, had fragmented or disappeared entirely. They had accumulated cognitive debt faster than technical debt, and it paralyzed them.

Margaret-Anne Storey

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After being informed about the intention of the Royal Library to archive my website, I wondered how some of the aspects my site has may affect what is being collected.
Specifically:

  • Most of my postings are kept away from the front page but end up in specific categories. These postings do show up in monthly archives and overview pages like for a tag or category.
  • Some of my postings are unlisted in the site, yet are publicly available. Mostly these are postings I originally only shared through RSS, such as my week notes. They are not in overviews, don’t show up as search results, but have public URLs, and you can navigate to them if you click next / previous post on their surrounding posts in the timeline.

The crawler that will be used for the archiving is Heritrix, which is also used by the Internet Archive itself.
A quick test of some posts from both of the two types above shows they are likely not in the internet archive. I mailed the Royal Library to ask how Heritrix may or may not deal with my site’s quirks. Or perhaps I can generate a complete site map and make that available?

I think I’ll put this up on the front page 😉

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I have been interested in personal knowledge management (pkm) for a very long time. I have been an avid notes maker ever since I learned to write. Digital tools from the late 1980s onwards have been extremely useful. And a source of nerdy fascination, I confess. I am certain personal knowledge management (pkm) is of tremendous value for anyone who wants to keep learning and make sense of the world around them.

On March 20 and 21 the European PKM Summit is taking place for the third time in Utrecht, Netherlands. I’ve helped a bit, like for earlier editions with suggesting speakers and workshop hosts for this event.

I am donating a ticket for a student in the Netherlands to attend this two day event. I did the same last year and the year before.

Are you a student at a university in the Netherlands (doing a bachelor’s or master’s) with a strong interest in personal knowledge management (pkm)? (note that it says interest, I don’t expect you to be highly sophisticated or experienced in it!)
Is your interest in pkm to strengthen your personal learning and deepen your interests, rather than increasing (perceived) productivity?
Would you like to go to the PKM Summit on 20 and 21 March in Utrecht, but as a student you cannot afford the 254 Euro ticket price?

Then I have one (1) conference ticket available! Let me know who you are and what fascinates you in pkm or attracts you to the event. If there are several people interested I will choose one. I will donate the ticket a month before the conference, by February 20th, so state your interest before then.

The single condition is that you attend the event on both days and participate actively in the sessions. If you have other ways to attend (by e.g. volunteering for the event staff) then that is preferable. This is specifically for someone who would otherwise not be able to go. I’d be happy to briefly meet you as well at the event, but if not that is perfectly fine too. It would be great however if you would share some of your impressions of the event afterwards online on the open web, especially if that is something you’d normally do anyway.

Interested? Email or DM me (in Dutch, German or English)! My contact details are in the right-hand sidebar.

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Belarus is prosecuting licensed ham radio operators for treason and espionage.
Because they use their equipment to have conversations with people around the world. Siarhei Besarab, callsign EU1AEY, describes what is happening movingly (archive link). Never mind that these are licensed radio operators, meaning there is a government register of everyone who is involved in this technical hobby, and there were technical exams before getting your license, so government cannot be confused as to the reality. The (mandatory) logs, and written confirmations of conversations (called QSL cards), are even used as ‘proof’.

It boggles the mind.

It figures too, because individual agency, and having individual technological capabilities, is subversive seen from an authoritarian perspective. Next to things like ham radio, and e.g. coders, this also applies to (digital) makers. When in Ukraine Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk fell to Russian covert invasion in 2014 something similar happened in the Donetsk FabLab. The guy who founded and ran the FabLab in Donetsk, K (whom I previously met because he contributed to some of the Dutch FabLabs too), saw himself confronted with one of his regular visitors and half a dozen uniformed others, all armed, coming to tell him his work was subversive and his FabLab was hereby shut down. He went home, picked up his family and drove west.

I have a ham radio license (callsign PE1NOR). Since I was 9 years old I was involved in the radio hobby, and I obtained my license when I first went to university. For some years I’ve let it lapse, but have since renewed it. At the time I thought about being registered as having this capability and the potential risk of that exposure. On the other hand, having the license and having the equipment at home, even if I am no longer active in the hobby itself, also means I can assist in cases of higher probability than prosecution in my own country: emergencies. In emergencies the first thing to go down is regular telephone communications. As long as there’s electricity, or charged batteries at least, my radio equipment will work. In the Netherlands a network of ham radio operators have formed the DARES Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Service, and they have agreements with a range of Dutch ‘security regions’ (groupings of municipalities), to supply emergency radio connections for civil protection. That is how you build on the technological capabilities of people.

Abbreviations are widely used in ham radio, because when using Morse code it means you can convey meaning faster.
Besarab signs his posting with three of them:

73, goodbye
QRT, stopping transmission
SK, silent key (meaning a morse key that fell silent, i.e. the operator died)

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Early December I blogged about wanting to build a stronger habit of bookmarking and annotating in Hypothes.is (which sends everything on to my notes in Obsidian). Over the past month that has worked out nicely, with steady additions to my bookmarks and annotations, unlike before.

In that early December posting I mentioned wanting to fix two things:

Today I made a first version of tool to allow me to share to Hypothes.is from mobile. I reused the same code I made for posting within my feedreader, but with added precautions and checks because it needs to live on the open web to function.

The reason I wanted to build my own tool is that one way of doing this, through a proxy server run by Hypothes.is, will be switched off by February. The suggested replacement for mobile somehow doesn’t work in my mobile browser. I don’t know why, and felt it’s better anyway to try and build my own thing.

In this first iteration, it’s a regular webform served from one of my domains, that I bookmarked. While browsing online, I can copy the URL and e.g. the title of a page to the clipboard, and then open and populate the webform by selecting the bookmark, adding a comment and some tags. Hitting submit, sends it all to Hypothes.is. This works best if you have a clipboard on your mobile that can have multiple entries, so you have the material for one or more bookmarks and annotations on it.

So my second fix from last month I’ve now created. Probably I will iterate a bit on this, to see if I can reduce the number of steps involved.

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Yesterday Martijn Aslander demonstrated the personal information tools he recently created. I came away inspired. Perhaps not by the tools as such, and more because of the pathways of thinking it opened. And because everything was so blazingly fast. All vibe-coded, as he has no coding skills himself.
I can see how the way his brain works is aided by the structure and availability of information his personal toolbox provides him. However, I myself would be more interested in shaping a personal tool like this towards being able to facilitate me in my processes and habits, as well as let me work towards actual outputs.

The Digitale Fitheid (Dutch language platform) community (Digital Fitness, the English language platform) has a monthly face-to-face meet-up in Utrecht, and yesterday was this year’s last. In the morning E had attended a session by Frank Meeuwsen on how to use Claude Code to quickly build something from scratch. In the evening I joined Martijn’s session on what he is calling his ‘Theta OS‘.

Some observations.

  • Martijn’s Theta is mostly a dashboard on local information. It shows him lots of different pieces of information at a glance. Each of these things, hotel bookings, books, payments, tasks, quantified self measurements and more, can live and be accessed in their own little apps and silos, but he uses the dashboard to combine them in context. At the outset he said that having his own established ontology (in the information sense, not the philosophical) was a prerequisite. That sounds very true, as the purpose here is having an extremely personal tool. The value is in combining various information sources on purely personal criteria on the fly.
  • His tool stack is sqlite (a lightweight database, installed by default on my Mac), with node.js (to run javascript), and regular html and css for the front-end using the local webserver on his laptop. I didn’t have node.js on my Mac, installed it now to be able to try some things.
  • He is not a coder, so everything is vibe coded with Claude Code. And while maintaining that makes him able to quickly create things, he spent some 500 hours in Claude Code in the past months. Makes me wonder what he could have done in those 500 hours if he hadn’t used it. I do recognise that given his nature, a organised path of exploration and learning would not have been feasible, though might well have resulted in a similar proof of concept after 500 hours.
  • Because of this he wasn’t really able to conceptually discuss the results other than what it does on the front-end and what it means to him. When asked about the architecture of the tool he therefore asked Claude Code to whip up a description.
  • In working with Claude Code he did not feed it his personal information, but abstracted structures. E.g. to incorporate a CSV with personal information he would provide the structure and a bit of dummy data to get a parser or importer and change the database structures. Then use the importer for the actual data outside of Claude.
  • To Martijn Theta is for surfacing and combining little pieces of data and information. He also uses markdown notes a lot (with Obsidian as viewer), but Theta keeps all the small pieces out of his notes. Only when he combines things into something more informational he brings it into his markdown notes. I find this distinction makes sense, as I am usually adverse to ‘make Obsidian do everything for me’ type of efforts. I use several tools that work on my Obsidian notes but do not attempt to be part of Obsidian. Largely absent yesterday was the other way around in the demo / discussion: getting small bits out of Obsidian into his dashboard.
  • The entire thing as it is now is a tool that clearly and visibly had an evolutionary path, as opposed to a planned-for structure and design. This appeals to me a lot. It is the same with my own personal tools and system of notes. Others sometimes remark on how it would impossible for them to create something like it for themselves. Thing is, neither could I. The current state evolved over time, and does not lend itself to reconstruction. That this sense of evolution stands out to me after a few months of Martijn spending that 500 hours in total on his Theta OS too, to me is a strong argument in favor of his approach.
  • This is reinforced by how he clearly builds intensively on his own structures and habits. As I often remark too, I am predictable to myself, and it means any software tool you build for yourself can make choices based on that predictability. If I want to save something I know which attributes I care about, and in which form I want to have them available. If I make a shopping list I know the order of the supermarket shelves of the store I’ll visit. If I’m near a Dutch railway station in the evening, it is most likely I intend to take a train home, that type of thing. The same is true for my information strategies. I know where I store my book notes and how, as I’ve been doing it for ages etc.
  • Building on that predictability he makes functionalities in Theta highly contextual. If he bookmarks a LinkedIn profile, it means he wants a person note with a few distinct fields from the profile (e.g. current role and location), and bookmarking then means the creation of such a person note in the same way as all his existing person notes already are. If it’s a recipe it pulls out the recipe, converts cooking terms and measures to Dutch terms and measures, and makes the ingredients available to dump into a shopping list.
  • Similarly everywhere he has a ‘copy to clipboard’-button in his Theta, it has a contextually determined template, so he can paste it into something else in the way he needs it at the destination. I use those templates in different places already, the way I send a bookmark to my blog, my annotation tool, and how an annotation is imported into my Obsidian notes, how I save a webpage in markdown to my notes, are all determined by a template that takes the same basic information but styles and orders it differently based on purpose and destination.
  • That contextualisation sometimes needs persistent data from outside. He incorporates such data into his local database. E.g. all the place names for the Netherlands, so he can recognise a place name in his own material, or search with any of them across his material. Or the list of translated cooking terms mentioned above.
  • He created his own e-mail client interface (using IMAP to access his mail accounts). This allows him to create processing geared to his own routines. E.g. a button to process an e-mail as a hotel reservation, or as parcel delivery announcement, or to pull location or event data from etc. That information then surfaces in his dashboard where it is made useful. It resulted in a rather long row of specific processing contexts but I can definitely see the power of it. Like I tinker with my ‘ideal feedreader’, doing the same for an ‘ideal e-mail interface’ where the point is to not let things reside in e-mail but make it findable and useful outside of it makes a lot of sense. And again, because you are predictable to yourself it is obvious what ‘outside’ means in each instance.
  • He created ‘companion apps’ (using Mac’s Xcode to make them for iOS, I wonder if something similar for Android exists) for his phone, allowing him to access and work with information on the go.

On the train home, I started exploring both sqlite and node.js in more detail, to figure out if and how I may want to add it to my local personal tool set.
Can I use this to reignite my work on my personal toolsuite? That work is more aimed at facilitating myself in my processes and helping me achieve outputs.
Despite going to bed late, I woke unexpectedly early, given the holidays and weekend, and felt the need to explore more. So the session definitely kicked something in gear. It does need my personal approach of course, and I have plenty of relevant notes on this from the past years to use for it. Years ago, back in 2017, I already gave the effort a name too, Aazai.
I set up sqlite and node.js this morning to have a sandbox to try some building blocks out.