This website is my personal digital garden/wiki. Here I explore two major research and experimentation areas: 📝 Cognitive Research and 📝 OS Research.
About me
My name is Fernando Garcia and I am a software developer, designer and indie 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 with a fresh "Gen Z" twist.
👥 Intended Audience — People interested in AI, cognitive science, and/or software development.
About this website
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 fomalize 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.
Quick links
🗂 Cognitive 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 tiktok 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.
🗂 OS Research
Computers are more ubiquous 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 stategies, 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.
Having said this, my research focuses on distilling our current knowledge about how we use computers and how we develop software into primitives and core ideas. A better example of this work is what Alex Obenauer is doing with his lab notes and WonderOS. Since he's quite ahead in this field with his idea of an itemized OS, I want to focus more on the "lower-level" primitives like processes, files, memory, etc. My main goal is to be able to teach an artificial mind how to understand these primitives and interact with them, and to build a base for thinking about computer resources with an itemized approach as well. You can find more about this research space at 📝 OS Research.
🗄 Resources
📝 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.
Get in touch
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_.
You can also find more about me in fernando.works or contact me directly at hello@fernando.works.