Things don't make any sense until you acknowledge:
- things that seem hard are actually easy, and
- things that seem easy are actually hard.
I learned this a long time ago, because for much of my life, I watched my brothers and sisters do things that seemed impossibly hard to me.
It seemed like each and every one of them were class favorites. Homecoming queens and king! They always had friends. When they talked, everyone seemed to know what they were talking about.
But when I talked, people seemed confused. Their attention drifted to other things. Friendship didn't come so easily to me. I felt as though the only thing I did well at in school was grades.
Nevertheless, I saw my siblings struggle. They stayed up late working on assignments. They doubted their own abilities. They exercised faith to move past their obstacles. All of them struggled just like I did.
Moravec's Paradox
In the realm of computer science, this concept is known as Moravec's paradox1. A computer can calculate unimaginably large numbers faster than you can blink. And yet, decades of robotics research have only just barely allowed a robot walk on two legs reliably: something most humans learn after only one year after birth.
To humans, walking feels simple. You don't think about it. But if you were asked how to walk, what would you say? "Put one leg in front of the other" doesn't fully cover it.
Although I have never struggled with walking, I can relate to the plight of the computers. There is no written guide to making friends or sharing ideas or feeling connected to a person or a community. Everyone takes these things for granted. Their brains simply take in all of the stimuli in stride and concoct it into a meaningful response faster than they can blink.
In this life, I may not know the reason why my siblings' brains can do what mine can't. And the truth is, I have no right to envy them. I'm sure they envied me the same way when they were up at three in the morning working on a school assignment, while I was happily sleeping without any kind of homework weighing on my mind, because I had completed it at school.
Since then, I have gained a more nuanced view of my teenage years. Through my life experiences, I have learned several good heuristics to get by in the social world without expending a lot of mental energy. And my siblings have similarly learned to overcome their own weaknesses. My brother is now working on his masters' degree and wears glasses!
Seeing things that are obvious
Paul Graham once wrote, "[C]oming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen."2
I would generalize this much further. Life itself is a question of seeing things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen. Success. Love. Happiness. Whatever word you prefer. (Side-note: startup wisdom generally applies to lots of things!)
A little Book of Mormon wisdom on this point:
O my son, do not let us be slothful because of the easiness of the way; for so was it with our fathers; for so was it prepared for them, that if they would look they might live; even so it is with us. The way is prepared, and if we will look we may live forever.3
"The way is prepared." This principle—to look for obvious things, that easy things are hard, and vice versa—is inherently a principle of faith.
Faith is a sensitive subject for lots of people. Religion, even more so. And yet, faith is something that everyone needs to survive, like water. My thoughts always drift back to faith and religion, because it is so central to my life.
I believe all people are part of the same large family, and because of that, we are all fundamentally the same, even if on the surface we differ. Because we are all one family, everyone has dignity, rights, and needs that must be respected.
All of us are born from a woman, and as children, learn these principles by example. We learn that we shouldn't watch someone use the bathroom. We learn that others need time alone to clean their bodies, and learn that we should clean our own bodies too. We learn that we should eat food and drink water every single day. We learn that it is reasonable to expect other people to listen when we speak to them.
Those are things that seem easy, but are actually hard.
Over time, we observe larger principles rising out of the examples we saw in our youth. We learn in history classes that generations of people fought and risked their lives for abstract concepts like liberty and freedom. We learn of those who are evil and deprive people of those things. We learn to apply these abstract concepts to real life. We navigate decisions about finances, relationships, and lifelong commitments. We work to support families. We labor to keep our families from breaking apart, and labor to comfort those whose families have broken.
Those are things that seem hard, but are actually easy.
Hard work over time, personal growth, chronic issues—those seem hard, but are actually easy.
Computers make hard things easy...
I have designated a physical notebook as "my journal" at least six separate times before. I loved them, and understood well the need to physically write, at least once in a while. (It's good for the brain.)
But once I discovered digital journaling, I knew it could give what pen and paper never could: unprecedented power over my information. I could rearrange my journal in any order. I could attach any kind of metadata. I could modify that metadata to my liking. I could turn my writing into a PDF and print it. I could turn it into an email and send it to someone across the country.
With pen and paper, that would require ripping pages out and taping them back in, tedious hours of rewriting and repair, not to mention re-deciphering my famously lazy handwriting. With pen and paper, the movement of information is constrained by physics. But computers keep physics out of information's way...
...unless they break.
Diaryx has been in my brain, basically as the concept is now, since September of 2024. It seemed to rush into my mind like a wind, and something lodged there and wouldn't come out. I had been an avid journal-keeper for many years, and I was also more invested in family history than the rest of my family, but it was only then that the idea entered my mind:
What if I could share my journal safely? What if I could configure which parts would be shared with which people, and it all just worked?
I was also very interested in computer science and software engineering, and had previously wondered about why digital journaling wasn't more widespread, and why so many people still felt very strongly about pen and paper for personal writing.
Eventually, I realized it was because computers weren't yet reliable enough. Write something down, throw it in a closet, and you can be reasonably certain it will still be there in 10 years. But put something online, and it is just as easy to delete information as it is to move it or copy it.
The more I researched, the more impressed I became with the Diaryx idea. The infrastructure for reliability was already there: opaque identifiers, universal resolvers, plaintext, local-first, indie web. But all of it required either 1. technical knowledge, or 2. some kind of institutional weight.
Nevertheless, I knew this problem was solvable, and that the need for this solution was very great. And I also felt in my heart that no one else in the world would try as hard to solve it as I would.
The unintuitive uniqueness of PROV
PROV is my working solution to these problems for now. I hesitate to share much about it now, because it is still under very rapid development, but I still want to share a little.
How do I describe PROV? I think it is the project of mine that I understand the least. Fig and Twig are relatively straightforward: parsers, printers, and editors. But PROV is the most important component of Diaryx, and yet there is a much more exploratory feeling when I work on PROV, like I'm not exactly sure what I need or what I'm making.
I think that is part of what makes it so compelling for me, like it could have a real impact on the world. In many ways, Diaryx is just the "prettied up" version of PROV.
PROV is designed to contain all the logic specific to preservation, provenance, fixity, hierarchy, and all other things necessary to make sure a digital archive lasts forever.
Obviously no code library can literally guarantee "forever." No one can. But I draw inspiration from the story of Mormon and Moroni, who engraved the history of their civilization in plates of gold. Gold does not rust, or fade, or tarnish. The gold on the sarcophagus of King Tut is just as bright as it was when he was buried. Similarly, the honey stored in their tombs was still edible.
I want my writing to be engraved in gold. I want the taste of my writing to be preserved like honey.
As impossible (and as prideful) as that is, I can't help wanting that.
If you are reading this and know of any resources out there that could help me with this goal, or if you know of any code libraries that do something similar to PROV, then please tell me, okay?
Progress report
Diaryx's iOS app is still waiting for review. I'm adjusting a lot of things with CI and versioning to make it much easier to get Diaryx updates out faster. I'm going to make versioning daily and quick so you can get the latest builds on TestFlight.
Here is the current TestFlight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/R8T5s819. It doesn't have the latest build yet, but soon it will.
Leaf, PROV, fig, and twig are all receiving lots of updates and bug fixes. Go on https://github.com/diaryx-org to see the progress. Hopefully I'll have more to show you all next week.
Your friend,
Adam Harris