How to use this site

First of all, thanks for using this site. I really appreciated your visit here.

For more of a “why” check out philosophy of this site

Basically, I'm trying to make the site easier to parse and find connections with by using visual cues, shortcuts, and dense linking. Hopefully this will spur more thought or save some time.

Linking

The right bar (bottom on mobile) has pages that link back to the current page. This often called a backlink and can be a very useful companion. This is arguably the single most crucial point which makes the rest of the system usable.

To get in the habit of using the backlinks, use the backlink instead of your browser "back" button 🔙, since wherever you came from will by definition have a backlink to the page that you're on (unless you used the right-side nav, in which case use the back button).

This is what makes is possible to think in graphs instead of having to think linearly. Check the backlinks section often for related topics.

You can always use the Home button on the left bar (top on mobile) to go back to the index. If the index gets big enough, I'll make meta-pages for categories.

The current page (obviously) will link out to other links in the content itself.

I want to encourage clicking links as much as possible, so after hundreds of hours researching test subjects in a small lab in south america, after doing countless unspeakable tasks, an optimal link-clicking encouragement was found.

There's a satisfying jiggle on my head every time an internal link is clicked.

Hopefully that'll really push you to click that next internal link.

Visual Cues

Internal links, like this, which are links that stay on this domain (sinakhalili.com), are not annotated in any way.

External links, for example this link to a very scientific analysis website, are tagged with an emoji (namely, this notebook emoji 📝), and have darker shade.

Some external links are annotated with a symbol, because their website or their website creator is relevant, cool, or beautiful.

For example the website where I stole this from, Gwern.

Or for example the 🐐 website, wikipedia.

For more examples, see symbol link dump.

What a great and wonderful time you will have, skipping the line of the hover-click and deciding in a single moment whether to click that link.