January 8, 2026
Garden or garbage?
Intellectual Junkyards
When your note garden turns into a landfill, and the comments are wild
TLDR: Math researcher Jon Sterling says his long-term note garden became an “intellectual junkyard” after his methods changed. Comments split between mocking obsessive note-keeping and sharing simpler, resilient workflows, making this a wake-up call for anyone drowning in personal wikis and productivity apps.
Jon Sterling lit a match under the note‑taking world with “Intellectual Junkyards,” confessing that his beautiful garden of evergreen notes turned into a rusty junkyard. He built a tool called Forester to grow ideas over time, but after changing how he does math, hundreds of old notes became outdated, tangled, and demotivating. Think: you reorganize your closet, then realize every shirt needs a new label—so you stop dressing. His warning: long‑term personal wikis can rot when your approach evolves, and the burden of fixing everything kills momentum. The internet heard “brain landfill,” and the comment section exploded for many readers.
One camp went full spice: “self‑cataloging is fundamentally masturbatory,” snapped sdwr, accusing note nerds of polishing shelves instead of doing work. Others shared survival hacks: fmeyer swears by a throwback DOS‑style outliner and quick lists to dodge the rot. someone7x admitted they “feel like a caveman” next to the hardcore note gardeners, while TazeTSchnitzel just posted a favorite personal wiki xxiivv like, “this is the vibe.” The memes rolled in—“digital gardens become landfills,” “XKCD straws for Obsidian geeks”—and the room split: build better tools, or stop worshipping the archive. Sterling’s junkyard confession turned a niche topic into a popcorn moment.
Key Points
- •Jon Sterling created Forester after difficulties with Gerby and limitations of Sheafy/Jekyll, evolving it from a Hugo plugin to standalone OCaml software.
- •Forester’s design was guided by Sterling’s “Designing tools for scientific thought” and influenced by evergreen notes, Zettelkasten, and digital gardening.
- •Sterling describes building a large category theory note base (definitions through the Yoneda lemma) within this system.
- •A shift from set/class-based category theory to univalent category theory would require extensive refactoring, reducing motivation to add new insights.
- •Sterling suggests this ‘junkyard’ outcome is common and cites Christian Tietze’s similar experience with outdated notes on Apple’s SwiftUI and Observation frameworks.