I'm a tab hoarder, and I'm not ashamed. I'm used to have 495 tabs open on my iPhone and 300+ on my Mac.
I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists. So I keep tabs open, group them by project, save things to read later. Before I know it, I have another browser window with multiple tabs sprawling across my screen.
Obviously, this consumes a lot of memory. I frequently see the warning that my system has run out of memory.
I don't like the browser bookmarking system because it's too hard to organize the folders and it's not visual—bookmarks only show titles and favicons. I think native bookmarks are good for things you use every few weeks as part of your workflow, but they're horrible for saving interesting links you want to remember.
Early last year, I decided to build my way out of this problem. This sent me on a journey building different solutions. I created four different iterations in the process, each trying to use AI to enhance my memory and remember everything I browsed.
1. A Chrome extension
The first iteration was a Chrome extension sidebar. The AI would store and summarize every website visited, building your personal knowledge base. However, I put too many features into it and soon discovered that an extension is quite limited—if it consumes too much memory, it gets killed. You can see a demo of it here: https://x.com/borisandcrispin/status/1953862562652860763?s=20
2. An Electron app + Chrome extension
For the second iteration, I built an Electron app to handle all the processing instead of the Chrome extension (its only job was to send the data). I liked this approach, but Electron felt too slow and bloated. I wanted to experiment with local models and worried that Electron would already be consuming too much memory.
3. A Tauri app + Chrome extension
The third iteration was a Tauri app with the Chrome extension only sending website data locally. I'll talk more about this version in the future, but let's just say it became a powerful second brain and was doing more than just saving my web history.
4. A Chrome extension + iPhone app + Web dashboard
That's why I wanted to try a different, fourth approach: just a simple bookmarker to save interesting links on desktop and mobile. It's a simple mobile app and Chrome extension that I built in a couple of days, but it helped me review, save, and close all my tabs.
Here's a few interesting links I discovered buried in those 664 tabs
3D gen AI
I've been researching and reading a lot about 3D gen AI. Although I never did anything with it, it's a topic that fascinates me.
The weird internet never fails
- https://rafichaudhury.com/site/blog/Freehand-Web
- https://danwilkerson.com/posts/2024-12-04-square-zero
- https://webspace.merz-akademie.de/~helene.dams/icanhashistory/
Running LLMs locally
Tech history
- Satoshi emails: https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/
- Slack: https://buildingslack.com/the-death-of-glitch-the-birth-of-slack/
Game development history
- GTA: https://web.archive.org/web/20231121200115/https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/
- Starcraft: https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft
Image embedding
Typography
- https://maxhalford.github.io/blog/llm-font-identification/
- https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/
Text-to-Speech
- https://huggingface.co/KittenML/kitten-tts-nano-0.2
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42973769
- https://github.com/nari-labs/dia
Those are just a few of them. In total, I closed more than 800 tabs and saved 664 links, categorized into 121 tags and 18 projects. One interesting realization is that most technical blog posts from 2024 about AI are already useless and outdated. A lot of products launched on Hacker News don't exist anymore either. The internet moves fast.
This journey also led me to build 2 Mac apps, 4 Chrome extensions, and 1 mobile app, while learning about several interesting topics along the way. It's a good example of the build-to-think methodology, but that's a topic for another day.