A forest of evergreen notes
Griffiths uses Jon Sterling’s Forester-built mathematical note forest as a prompt for design questions rather than as a system review. The post is a short, enthusiastic practitioner reflection: it notices how Forester names and composes notes, then uses that example to unsettle Griffiths’s earlier distinction between a private working method and a public publication. Its contribution is a small but useful taxonomy, not evidence that Forester improves research or writing.
Atomic notes leave several choices open
Forester gives each note a permanent identifier made from an author’s three-letter initials and four base-36 digits. The four-digit suffix supplies 1,679,616 possible identifiers per prefix. Griffiths likes the scheme because it is compact and ample, but the more important point is what the identifier does not decide: note hierarchy, authorship, visibility, and output format remain separate questions. He flags hierarchy and atomicity as attractive parts of the design without claiming that one requires the other.
The post also separates two meanings of evergreen. A note’s content may remain applicable across contexts, while its format may make the same unit easy to remix into papers, lectures, presentations, and other artifacts. The first is a claim about durability; the second is a claim about composability. Conflating them makes a timeless essay and a reusable research fragment look like the same design achievement.
A working system can also be a publication
Griffiths proposes two axes for classifying note systems: single- versus multi-author, and private versus public. Luhmann’s historical slip box occupies the private, single-author quadrant; Andy Matuschak’s notes are public and single-author; Sterling’s forest is public and multi-author. Griffiths leaves the private, multi-author quadrant as an open question rather than forcing an example.
Those axes overturn his prior functional binary. He had treated a Zettelkasten as a backstage process for producing artifacts and a wiki as a public-facing artifact in its own right. Sterling’s site appears to do both: the working material remains generative infrastructure while the open studio is itself something readers can use. The distinction therefore lies neither in software nor visibility alone; method and publication are roles that one system can combine.
Assessment
- Durable: separating durable content from composable format, and separating working method from publishing posture. The two-axis public/private × single/multi-author frame is a useful first diagnostic because it makes design choices explicit instead of treating “wiki” and “Zettelkasten” as mutually exclusive technologies.
- Era-bound: the particular Forester sites and links are a June 2024 snapshot of evolving public note systems. The specific tools may change while the distinctions survive.
- Caveats: the post is observation and conjecture. It does not test Forester’s workflow, substantiate the suggested journalistic ancestry of “evergreen,” or support its broad claim about twentieth-century Zettelkästen with a survey. Griffiths openly marks several points as questions or personal definitions.
- Stake: Griffiths writes as an advocate of atomic notes and describes his response as enthusiastic. That declared affinity makes the piece perceptive about attractive design details but deliberately non-adversarial.
- In this library: luhmann1981 explains how fixed addresses and links make a private note network capable of surprise; karpathy2026 makes compilation and maintenance the core of an agent-managed wiki; and matuschak2019 asks whether a representation enables new thought. Griffiths adds the orthogonal question those accounts leave mostly implicit: whether the working substrate is also a public artifact, and whether many authors can inhabit it.