Summary

The author highlights how novelist Ma Boyong and Andrej Karpathy both keep diaries by recording only facts (no opinions, no polishing) in a single append-only file, searched via Command+F. This low-friction, high-density, plain-text style — capturable by voice — turns out to be excellent AI-native corpus: small enough to fit a model’s context window, semantically dense (names, books, events, commands, code), and not locked to any product. The author plans to adopt it in 2026 to build a personal ChatGPT-like memory.

作者點出小說家馬伯庸與 Andrej Karpathy 都用「只記事實、不寫感悟、不潤色」的方式寫日記,全部丟進單一 append-only 檔案,用 Command+F 檢索。這種低摩擦、高密度、純文字(可語音輸入)的風格,意外地非常適合 AI:體積小到能塞進模型上下文、語義密集(人名、書名、事件、指令、程式碼),且不被任何產品綁定。作者計畫在 2026 年實踐,用它建立個人化的類 ChatGPT 記憶。

Key Points

  • Record only facts (“流水账”) — no opinions, no perfomance, no polishing — to slash input friction.
  • Append-only single file; no tags, no categories, no hierarchy; search with Command+F.
  • A year of such notes is only tens of thousands of words — small, retrievable, context-friendly.
  • Ma Boyong uses it against middle-age memory decline; Karpathy treats it as releasing brain RAM.
  • Plain text avoids product lock-in and is an ideal AI-native corpus.

Insights

Removing opinion and polish does double duty: it kills the friction of self-presentation and produces cleaner structured data for an LLM to extract. The single-file, append-only constraint is the same “brain as CPU, not RAM” idea seen in task-management circles — offload state so the mind can focus. The deeper bet is that low-friction plain text plus a long-context model gives you a private, portable memory layer without committing to a proprietary memory feature.

Connections

Raw Excerpt

这种低摩擦、高信息密度,且纯文本的记录方式,无意中非常适合现在的 AI。