# My Summer, & What Have I Been Working on in General Hi Ajay, Promised to have another chat about what have I been actually working last semeter, but didn't have the chance. And obviously you will be exponentially busier this year, so figured why not briefly present you in the form of words by the end of the break. ## Learning & Note-taking I love learning, and I take notes of everything I learn & think about. I opensource all of my notes (currently nearly 1 million words) here: https://jimmyzhang.space. You can find here books I read, and things I've been thinking about. I make monthly updates here. Some ideas / projects over the summer [[Thought Experiment -- Re-Constructing the World from First Principles]] [[Thought Experiement -- Re-Inventing Electricity]] ## Essays, Photography, & Projects On my personal homepage https://jimmyzhang.org, you can find my essays, photography showcase, and a brief overview of the big projects of my life. ## Life's Big Projects ### OpenLearn OpenLearn is a meta-education Copmany So much wasted potential in my 12 years of education -- wonder what's the total wasted potential for humanity as a whole, and what height our civilization could have achieved. As a result, the mission of OpenLearn is to redefine learning by decentralizing education and empowering self-directed learning. Very vague and ambitious mission indeed (the following projects even more so). What have I actually made? The initial idea wa to build a community of self-directed learners -- https://learninginpublic.space. Recruited 20 beta testers, and turned out ot be not working. There are too many similar "communities" "platforms" out there online that tries to get you in, pormising great resources, yet fail to actually empower individuals other than as a marketing platform for certain products or courses. Haven't figured out a way to break this model -- seems like learning is such a personal and individualized journey, and empowerment is not possible if not on a one-to-one individual level. As a result, I thought about moving on to individualized mentorship to help students who struggle intraditional educational institutions. I lable myself as the "Learning Archiect" -- an architect that instead of teaching students *what* to learn, guides them through *how* to learn, by showing & not telling. I hope to guide a student through the whole process of learning a topic -- from generating inquiries, searching for sources, to taking notes, organizing knowledge, and turning into sharable assets, and serve as a "co-learner". This idea was inspired by so many wonderful teachers I have met during my previous years who are all embodying this practice. Yet, I still deeply believe that the impact myself can reach through one-on-one mentorship is limited and not sustainable -- it requires my constant effort, and cannot become an asset for passive income. As a result, I am turning to software, aiming to build an App or platform that can basically embody my philosophy and practices to help countless individuals. I call it Larc (short for Learning Architect) Mini -- mini because due to the current technology in 21st century (laptop and mobile phones, GUI software, lack of spatial intelligence etc.) it will never be able to fully capture the full power of a transformative education. Neverthelss, it is never to early to start building -- I have built an MVP in the summer, which is basically a very simple markdown note editor with built in AI chatbox and custom commands, inspired by products like Obsidian, Dia, and Copilot. I hope that I will be able to share it with you and other students as the first group of alpha testers during the next few months. Long way to go to reach our loftly mission -- But we are about to start. ### Nex For Nex and The Human Consultancy Company, I will be brief because compared to OpenLearn and Larc, they are both more of conceptual ideas that haven't made their way beyond my thoughts and notes into the real world. The idea of building Nex stems from my interested in PKM (Personal Knowledge Management), and my belief that "Knowledge Management" is not and should not be "Personal". In fact, human as a species urgently need a better infrustructure for the sharing & colelctive building of the knowledge of our civilization -- a move from PKM (Personal Knoweldge Mangement) to CKM (Collective Knowledge Management). Currently, some attempts we have are Google, Wikipedia, and Github -- but each have their own strength and fatal weaknesses. The idea also stems form my observaiton and specualation of the inefficiency of our academic institutions -- of students writing "trash" papers that contribute nothing just ot graduate, or tudents finding sources just to fulfill the requirements, of important pieces of knowlege failing to spread and harness their full impact, and of important piece of information failing to connect with each other to paint the full picture. Thus the mission of Nex -- To build a collective knowledge interface for humanity and revolutionize the way humans create, manage, and communicate knowledge. Nex is short for the Latin word Nexus, which roughtly translates into "connection" and "hub". ### The Human Consultancy Company AI is challenging human value. It's still too early in 2025 to say this, but fast forward to the 2050s and the latter half of the 21st century, it will have become a planetary crisis. The Human Consultancy Company is human's response to AI. We hope to build humans that are unLLMable by resisting doing what AI can do and re-searching for human value We hope to create a world in which every one can follow their passion and achieve their meanings, creating a healthy system of agentic humans. In a world where intelligence becomes abundant and cheap, we believe that the value of humans is beyond intelligence. As a result, we are in seek of what's left of humans in the age of AI and finding the mext height for our civilization. ## This Summer For this summer break specifically, I have made a few projects. ### I Wrote a Book I compiled a short poetry-style book of mine called "The Education I Want". It talks about the education I don't want and the education I want. https://theeducationiwant.my You can read here: https://read.theeducationiwant.my ### I Made an app As explained above, for OpenLearn, I have started building Larc Mini -- an AI-native note-taking & learning app. It looks something like this -- a file browser, a note editing panel, and an AI sidebar. Future roadmap will include cross-note context, agentic AI. ### I Made a Film I made a film for the portfolio thing. It's made in a single day and it's quite fun. Don't quite know how to justify the use of non-original music, because it's the soundtrack music of the show "Devs", which I just watched the day before. It fits oddly well.