Glossary
The second brain of the AI for Everyone blog
This glossary serves as the blog's second brain. It collects the concepts, people, devices, works and organizations I write about. Each entry draws on the blog's articles and on facts from external websites. Those websites are listed in the entry, along with the date they were last checked. I add an entry when a particular article needs one and expand existing entries as new articles appear.
To learn how a second brain like this works, read: Notes That AI Keeps in Order: From Tiago Forte's Method to a Wiki Run by a Model
Concepts
LLM (large language model)
An LLM, or large language model, is a program that has been trained on vast amounts of text and can generate answers and other writing.
People
Alan Kay
Alan Kay (born 1940) is an American computer scientist who conceived the Dynabook, the forerunner of the laptop and the tablet, and led the development of the Smalltalk language.
Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy is a computer scientist, a co-founder of OpenAI and a former director of AI at Tesla. He has also described a way to have a language model maintain a wiki.
Doug Engelbart
Doug Engelbart (1925–2013) was an American researcher who publicly demonstrated the computer mouse and hypertext in 1968. His work on these ideas was inspired by an essay by Vannevar Bush.
Paul Otlet
Paul Otlet (1868–1944) was a Belgian bibliographer and lawyer who began working with Henri La Fontaine in 1895 on a vast index of facts.
Sönke Ahrens
Sönke Ahrens is a social scientist and the author of “How to Take Smart Notes”, the book that brought the Zettelkasten method to a wide readership.
Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson (born 1937) coined the words “hypertext” and “hypermedia” and created Project Xanadu.
Tiago Forte
Tiago Forte is the founder of Forte Labs and the author of “Building a Second Brain” and “The PARA Method”. He popularised the term “second brain”.
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) was an American engineer and inventor who wrote the 1945 essay “As We May Think”, which describes a device called the memex.
Devices, works and organizations
Katolicka Szkoła Podstawowa im. św. Jacka
Katolicka Szkoła Podstawowa im. św. Jacka is a Catholic primary school in Katowice, Poland, run by the Association of Catholic Families of the Archdiocese of Katowice.
Memex
The memex is a memory aid that Vannevar Bush described in 1945. It was never built, but the “associative trails” it would have used to connect documents resemble the hyperlinks we use today.
Soneta
Soneta is a Polish company based in Kraków. It makes ERP systems, the software that runs an entire business, for mid-sized and large firms. Its main product is enova365.
Zespół Szkół Stowarzyszenia Rodzin Katolickich
Zespół Szkół Stowarzyszenia Rodzin Katolickich is a Catholic group of schools in Wodzisław Śląski, Poland, made up of a primary school and a secondary school. The secondary school dates from 1997.
Books and other sources
As We May Think
“As We May Think” is an essay by Vannevar Bush from July 1945. It describes a device called the memex and associative trails between documents.
Building a Second Brain
“Building a Second Brain” is Tiago Forte's book about creating a personal knowledge management system. It was published in 2022.
How to Take Smart Notes
“How to Take Smart Notes” is Sönke Ahrens's book about the Zettelkasten method and the research behind it, written for students, researchers and non-fiction authors.
LLM Wiki
“LLM Wiki” is a short note by Andrej Karpathy from April 2026. It describes a pattern in which a language model builds and maintains a wiki of Markdown files.
Niklas Luhmann-Archiv
The Niklas Luhmann-Archiv is an online portal to Niklas Luhmann's slip-box, with scans of his manuscripts, transcriptions and recordings. It is being built at Bielefeld University.
zettelkasten.de
zettelkasten.de is a website about the Zettelkasten method, run by Christian Tietze and Sascha Fast. It published an English translation of Niklas Luhmann's 18 cards about the slip-box itself.