▴ LOOMUS · Distill

See any — its whole argument, as a map.

The knowledge graph that makes it stick — plus six cards for the punchlines. And, free, the same paper as a group chat or a song.

Drop a PDF to distill
or paste a link — arXiv, Substack, any direct PDF
Reading first pages…
Read ✓ — what's it for?
for fun opens free, right here · for study lands in your inbox
Nothing at hand? Distill a paper you know free · one-tap Google · to your inbox
Or no paper in mind? Pick a field — we'll suggest one:
Free to start You choose after you drop — no surprises: six cards $3.99 · the full reading (map + cards) $7.99.
The Full Reading · map + cards · $7.99
Attention Is All You Need~3 MIN · LIVE
self-attention Q · K · V no recurrence positional encoding
drag · zoom · explore
+ six cards
cards for the punchlines · map for the wholeopen the live one
and every map you make lights a star in your sky

…or, free: the same paper as a group chat · a song · a dating profile ↓

Built for researchers · engineers · founders — anyone who reads more than they have time for grounded in cognitive research · Nature · PNAS
▾ The whole idea · one paper, many shapes

Drop one paper. Watch it become all of this.

the same source — poured into every vessel that makes it stick

six cards & a knowledge map for work — and, free, the same paper poured into eight playful shapes below.

Featured distillations · from the library

Start with a classic.

Real ones, already brewed — open any to see exactly what you'll get. Every one: six cards + a knowledge map.

Browse all 100
Max Bennett
A Brief History of Intelligence
Book · 6 cards
Vaswani et al. · arXiv
Attention Is All You Need
Paper · 6 cards
Margaret O'Mara
The Code
Silicon Valley · 6 cards
Mustafa Suleyman
The Coming Wave
Book · 6 cards
Dario Amodei · Anthropic
Machines of Loving Grace
Long essay · 6 cards
Douglas Hofstadter
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Book · 6 cards
Brian Christian
The Alignment Problem
Book · 6 cards
NEW THE SHAPE SHOP · SAME KNOWLEDGE, STRANGER SHAPES

Six cards are for work.
These are for joy.

Whatever you brew can also come out shaped like one of these — free with your library card, and every line of the joke is still true.

Two, fresh from the kettle

Same paper — Attention Is All You Need — two completely different shapes.

The Group Chat · a meltdown in real time
Dating Profiles · every concept gets one
Eight shapes · pick one, or pull the lever
FREE
The Group Chat
your paper, as a group-chat meltdown — every message a real fact
“you're retired. we let all the words look at each other at once now”
FREE
The Stand-up Set
five minutes, eight laughs, six things you’ll actually remember
“What academic paper dares to title itself like a Beatles lyric?”
FREE
The Bedtime Story
told for a six-year-old; grown-ups secretly get it too
“Once upon a time, a little word got lost in a very long sentence…”
FREE
The Trial
the People vs. this idea — honest verdict, you’re the jury
“Your Honor, the defendant claims breakfast is the most important meal—”
FREE
Dating Profiles
“Gravity, 13.8bn, single, hobby: pulling things closer”
“Entropy, ageless, chaotic-good, hobby: making a mess of your room”
FREE
The Songbook
the chorus is the thesis — drop it in Suno and sing the paper
♪ and the words all look at each other / at the very same time ♪
FREE
The Horror Story
some knowledge was always a horror story — the last line is real data
“The reviewers approved. None of them had read page 40.”
FREE
The Warring Schools
a field’s century of feuds, told as a martial-arts saga
“The Symbolic School ruled the valley for thirty years — until a child of the Connectionists returned.”
+ the ninth shape
recipe book? tarot deck? evening news? — readers vote, we brew the winner monthly
free · sign in with your library card · two shapes a day · the little 🧪 watermark stays on — that’s the deal
— A 30-second game

How much should a book shrink?

Drag the dot. There's a sweet spot — we live there.

300 pages · the whole thing
30-page summary · still long
6 cards · the sweet spot ✦
"
1 line · too thin
300pg30pg6 cards (us)1 line

Drag the dot →


— Why 6 cards

Three reasons it sticks.

Each one a tiny experiment on yourself — and a paper that proves it.

01 · Memory

Your working memory is tiny.

10 words appear for 3 seconds — how many will you keep?
…how many do you still remember?
Most people hold 3–4 items.
A 300-page book has 50,000+.
6 cards is what fits.

Vogel, E. K. & Machizawa, M. G. (2004). Neural activity predicts individual differences in visual working memory capacity. Nature, 428(6984), 748–751.

nature Vol 428 · 2004
02 · Visual

Pictures stick. Paragraphs don't.

vs
The compound effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from small, seemingly insignificant actions. Success is not magical or mysterious. It is the natural result of consistently applying the fundamentals over time.
time → growth
Humans correctly remembered 90% of 2,500 pictures.
Same brain, text: ~10%.
Cards carry both.

Brady, T. F., Konkle, T., Alvarez, G. A., & Oliva, A. (2008). Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(38), 14325–14329.

MIT Harvard PNAS
03 · Structure

Chunks beat lists.

Soup F B I C I A I B M U S A N A S A U N M I T
Chunks FBI · CIA · IBM · USA · NASA · UN · MIT
Same 21 letters. One is forgotten in seconds.
The other lives in long-term memory.
6 cards is your scaffold.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. — Miller's chunking insight: we expand capacity not by holding more bits, but by packing them into bigger meaning-units.

Harvard Psychological Review

Got something stranger — a transcript, a Substack, a white paper? The Lab will try it · same $3.99, refund if it doesn't land. not yet: video · audio · fiction · OCR

✦ and then —

Every brew lights a star in your sky.

The six cards fade from memory; the star doesn't. Keep distilling, and the bridges between books start to glow — that's your constellation, and it's only yours.

See your constellation
9 stars · 7 books · +1 today
Got a paper? Distill it → Drop a source ↑