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.
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!
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.
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...
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.
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?
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
I am making some changes to the way I do my newsletter, so I can write more regularly.
From September to May next year, I will be a part of the Sandbox startup incubator program at BYU. I am going "all in" on Diaryx, and plan to do everything I can to make it a real company with sustainable revenue. A big part of this is being more open about the work I do on Diaryx, since it all starts with me. So the focus of this mailing list will be shifting. If this content does not interest you, please feel free to unsubscribe (unless you are my family, in which case you are required to read every email I write).
This is legitimately a hard decision for me. Let me be clear: I still plan on sharing spiritual thoughts (and scripture quotes) in my emails. I just won't name every single email after a verse. This is a tradition I started as a missionary.I love the Book of Mormon, and naming my emails after Book of Mormon verses gave me joy and motivation to share. But I realize that the title of an email just isn't the right place for it. And I'll be honest, sometimes it delayed emails because I couldn't quickly think of a super related verse, or made my email titles "stretches," or even made me change the content of an email by a lot just to make it fit the title better. So I have decided to focus on making the content more honest and powerful, and allowing the title to be a boring, short description of the email, as it should be.
Yes, really! I haven't decided on a day yet—maybe Mondays. But this is something that will be good for me and everyone that likes to read my writing.
Hopefully this won't be a big deal from your end. But Substack has been bothering me because of its insistence on the marketing side of newsletters, which I am not interested in. Buttondown is a much better option, and it is more mission-aligned with Diaryx as well. Maybe I will write a technical post about this another day.
Diaryx is going to play a much bigger role in my life, and hopefully your life going forward. It is, simply put, the mission to allow personal digital archives to last forever.
I want to give you a brief introduction to the ecosystem I have built this summer. This email may be a little long.
Fig is a project I made to address the structured metadata part of preservation.
Say you want to represent a person. They have a name, a favorite color, things they like, a place they live, and so forth. You could represent the person like this:
{
"person": {
"name": "John Doe",
"favoriteColor": "blue",
"thingsLiked": ["Raindrops on roses", "whiskers on kittens"],
"hasABigNose": false,
"age": 35
}
}
This is the JSON format. It is very commonly used in the programming world. You will probably never find a software developer who hasn't used JSON.
Fig, internally, represents this like:
name, favoriteColor, thingsLiked, hasABigNose, and age.name and favoriteColor have values that are strings of text.There are lots of different formats for this kind of information. I wrote my own format, called "Fig."
person
> name = John Doe
> favoriteColor = blue
> thingsLiked = [Raindrops on roses, Whiskers on kittens]
> hasABigNose = false
> age = 35
You could also use YAML format:
person:
name: John Doe
favoriteColor: blue
thingsLiked:
- Raindrops on roses
- Whiskers on kittens
hasABigNose: false
age: 35
Lots of people like writing in YAML format, but I think Fig format is better because I don't have to count spaces. What do you think?
Anyway, Fig, the library, can convert between any of these formats, and crucially, it can edit these files precisely, modifying the absolute minimum number of bytes necessary. So, if you keep your information in a specific order, or have special comments or spacing at certain spots in the file, Fig won't affect it. This is a surprisingly uncommon quality in a file parsing library, and a super important one in the realm of archiving/preservation. So I had to write Fig before I could have a proper Diaryx.
Twig is Fig's sister project. Remember when I said that Fig could represent "pretty much any kind of information you could possibly think of"? That's a big claim. Could I, for example, convert an email into Fig format?
email_content[0] = {type = paragraph, txt = This is my first paragraph!}
email_content[1] = {type = paragraph, txt = This is my second paragraph!}
email_content[2] = {type = paragraph, txt = Look at this cool picture!}
email_content[3] = {type = image, src = https://example.com/image.png}
email_content[4] = {type = paragraph, txt = Did you like my image?}
Yes, you can. But it isn't pretty.
Once we have information that is shaped more like a document than a list of values, Fig's tiny abstract syntax tree model starts feeling claustrophobic. We start repeating things, because we want some kind of consistent leg to stand on. We do things like type = paragraph because we wish Fig's AST had something more than strings and numbers.
Basically, Twig is lot more complex than Fig, but fundamentally works the same way. It has ~40 types instead of just 7.
But it is worth it, because I can represent my document like this:
This is my first paragraph!
This is my second paragraph!
Look at this cool picture!
Did you like my image?
Notice how it looks… normal. I don't have to say that it is a paragraph. It just is a paragraph, because it is text on a line. That is the beauty of plain text.
Plain text is important to Diaryx because it is the de facto way to share writing between computers without needing any specific dedicated program. Plain text doesn't rely on any specific program—it relies on ASCII and UTF-8, standards that are supported by nearly every computer on the planet. Because of plaintext, you could read your Diaryx file on a computer from 1960, and it would look pretty much identical. That is because every character you see on screen equals one byte of information. It is dead simple for a computer to render.
That's one truth I'm betting on for Diaryx. Plain text lasts forever. At least, it is more likely to last forever than anything else on a computer.
You can probably detect a naming theme by now.
Fig and Twig are great, but they don't reach the end user. A person who knows nothing about programming will never ever see them. But a person could see Leaf and Flower.
Leaf is a rich text editor. In fact, I am writing these very words in the Leaf editor in the Diaryx app. I can click on it and type into it. As I type, I can style my text and Twig will automatically convert it to plain text. So I get the benefits of plain text without having to know anything about it.
There is something magical about this process: I am typing these words, and on the computer they are represented in a way that isn't very far removed from how they appear on the screen. If I moved them to an old Windows XP desktop from 2001, and opened them, they would appear pretty much identical to how they look now. It's like a visual window into a block of computer memory.
Flower is a little different, because it is configuration rather than a document. Visually, it looks more like a settings menu than prose. And that is a good thing: to have prose in one place and a settings menu in another. A settings menu is strict, structured information that is easy for a computer to interpret, while prose is natural for humans. They deserve to be side-by-side.
This might be the most important one. It stands for Plaintext Records, Organized and Verifiable. It does a lot of things:
That's just a short list.
Prov "depends on" Twig and Fig. The whole idea is that structured data belongs right alongside a document, so they coexist in the same file. And that structured data names other files, so all the files link together in a kind of big workspace graph.
This linking is really important when you are working on any sufficiently complex project. A text message isn't much. But if you are writing a novel, you probably want Chapter One in one file and Chapter Two in another. Then, they can link to a "parent" file, called the "index file." This parent file can be named, "My Novel." It looks something like this:
---
title: My Novel
author: Me
contents:
- "[Chapter 1](chapter-1.md)"
- "[Chapter 2](chapter-2.md)"
---
This is my novel! It has two chapters:
# Chapter 1
In this chapter, the dragon kidnaps the princess.
# Chapter 2
In this chapter, the knight saves the princess from the dragon!
Notice how the file declares a structured data section at the beginning. Notice it has a contents value that lists each of the chapters. This is the primary insight of PROV—that information can be organized in a way that is easy to understand intuitively. On your computer, you see three files:
How simple is that?
Though, I have to admit that PROV is not as verifiably accurate and useful as Fig or Twig. There isn't really a precedent for a project like PROV. I'm treading new ground! Though, recently the Markdown format, popular for plaintext documents, has become really popular because of AI. So the popularity of apps like Obsidian has exploded!
The thing I wanted to be different with PROV is the linking between files. This nearly eliminates the dependency on even the filesystem. That means, even if you couldn't see a list of what was in the folder, and all you could see is one file at a time, you could still find your way around!
Diaryx brings all of these together. Imagine all the power rangers coming together to form a super robot! Or something like that.
My main goal with with Diaryx is making the app as easy-to-use as possible. Even if you have no technical knowledge at all, I want Diaryx to be super easy to use! Seriously, I want my grandma to be able to use it with no problems! That means you don't need to understand anything I just told you in order to use Diaryx.
But what hopefully lots of people will appreciate is the longevity of the files they keep in Diaryx. Because of how it is designed,
These things feel very important to me. They feel like basic human rights—which is part of why I've been so passionate about this.
I’ve updated the Diaryx website to be a better landing page. I am probably going to change it again in the near future. But it is pretty cool as it is now, so go take a look anyway.
Also, Diaryx will be available on the App Store very soon! It is actually already available on the Mac App Store. But the iOS app is currently waiting for review—it has been waiting since Tuesday.
If you want to support me in this mission, honestly the best thing you can do right now is offer ideas or feedback. I'm setting up a sponsor page but it is low priority until I can actually release something people can use.
Thanks for everything,
Adam Harris
]]>Several weeks ago, my wife and I were in the car with my dad to visit his old mission president. This former mission president was notorious for knowing everything there was to know about the scriptures and the words of the prophets. Apparently he had even ghostwritten encyclopedic church manuals that are available today on the Gospel Library app!
Anyway, we had a good visit, and on the way back home, my dad said something along the lines of, “Adam, I know you’ve got the brain. You could know as much as he does if you wanted to.” Not that he was wishing I was someone else—he was just expressing curiosity.
I replied with some thoughts about how I probably couldn’t match the sheer depth of knowledge that this mission president had. But then I said something like, “I know enough for now.”
My dad was confused. “You can always study and learn more.”
“No, I know that,” I said. I struggled to try and word what I meant, and eventually said, “Yes, daily study and ever-expanding knowledge is important. But I wish I could have told my younger self that the true answers to my spritual questions weren’t literally found written down somewhere in the Gospel Library app. Rather, the scriptures point to Jesus Christ and teach us how to listen to the Holy Ghost. And that is where all the answers are really found.”
In hindsight, I might add: being a scripture/gospel encyclopedia isn’t my life mission. It is a good desire. But if I had tried to do that, even if I do have the brain for it, I wouldn’t have had the right motives. I would have wanted the Lord to literally tell me, in writing, everything I should do.
“But Adam!” you might say. “What about the scripture that says ‘the words of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do’?” Yes, that is 2 Nephi 32:3. The whole point of that chapter is that Nephi cannot literally tell me in writing exactly what I should be doing. It isn’t the scriptures that tell me everything I should do, but the words of Christ. There is an important difference. “man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live” (Deuteronomy 8:3).
We are a church that believes in ongoing revelation. The scriptures that have been revealed are intended to support and nourish ongoing revelation. If we treat them as the only source of God’s word and deny the Holy Spirit, we are no better off than any other Christans.
That said, revelation and the scriptures can build on each other in surprising ways. I know many stories where a line from scripture seemed to leap off the page and bear immediate relevance for someone’s life. (For instance, someone who literally needs to go to the state of Ohio reading, “ye shall go to the Ohio” in Doctrine and Covenants 37:1). My main point is that it is revelation that makes all the difference.
The great difficulty is to teach someone what revelation might mean for them. I was a missionary for two years, and I admit there is no single, concrete, foolproof method. The best answer I can give is this: behave like Jesus would, love the person fully, teach abundantly from the scriptures, pray with them, share spritual experiences and personal testimony, and teach of God’s individual love for that person, pointing out specific experiences that are evidence of God’s love. Needless to say, only someone who already possesses the Holy Spirit can do these things. Someone without the Spirit will never be able to teach someone what revelation really means. (And one additional important point: even someone with the Holy Spirit will not always succeed.)
The title of this post is, “For in that day shall they understand them.” This is something Nephi, speaking by the power of the Holy Ghost, said to his brothers and descendants, speaking of the people in the latter days who will understand the words of Isaiah. That is intended to mean us, the members of the Church.
In my life, I have tried to be someone that others can turn to to understand not only the writings of Isaiah, but all kinds of spiritual things. I have endeavored to communicate by writing. I am trying (through my ongoing Diaryx project) to remove some of the barriers that are currently unavoidable with writing. I am not an encyclopedia. I am not perfect. I’m not the best person for every problem. There are many ways I fall short. But all I can do is be immensely grateful for the ways He has blessed me, and try to be the specific tool He needs wherever I am at.
Your friend,
Adam Harris
]]>