Most people will read it and say "fun" (including me, since I don't work with gears) and maybe 5-10% will go on to do something else with it, but that's working as intended.
I agree you can't really say you know something without testing the knowledge. You need to do more work to test whether you know it or not, but having the concepts and words at hand is a prerequisite for that. I'm certain if I were to actually work with gears I would come back to this article. (I would probably also learn where it falls short in practice, but I would learn that about any resource AFAICT.)
-----
Testing your knowledge is one reason my brain flipped from math to programming over 20 years. Math is hard to test but programming is easy to test.
However, one thing I found surprising is that publishing tests your knowledge, but writing does not. I would categorize Dercuano as writing but not publishing at the moment.
It tests it in exactly this way:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22033792
Blogging is a public act. Anyone can read this. When I write a blog post, I imagine my supervisor, a respected colleague, or a future employer reading my explanation. These imagined readers force me to ask myself honestly if I understand what I am writing.
I found the same thing while writing my posts on https://www.oilshell.org. If someone digs this up in 5 years, is it going to look dumb? And of course simply not knowing something is not dumb, but pretending you know something you don't is dumb (likewise with promising something you can't deliver, which I've been careful not to do).
I can see there are a lot of great ideas in your notes, but I have 100% certainty that polishing those ideas will lead to a better understanding, more ideas, and forcing a focus. The writing alone alone doesn't cut it. (I know because I also have 3382 personal wiki pages with notes and URLs accumulated over 15+ years with overlapping research!)
I would definitely comment on drafts. I was paid to review the second edition of Effective Python last year, and am also reviewing a book for a friend currently, so I have some experience with that. I'm most interested in the posts on parsing, automata, languages, compilers, and (parallel) algorithms -- I have less experience with graphics. I didn't know you were working on HAMMER -- that line of research is also in my wiki pages and I have several thoughts about it. I'll send you a mail with the ones that jumped out at me.
