[HN Gopher] Unbundling Tools for Thought
___________________________________________________________________
Unbundling Tools for Thought
Author : exp1orer
Score : 231 points
Date : 2022-12-26 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (borretti.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (borretti.me)
| __jambo wrote:
| This article has a lot of unfounded metaphors and assertions.
|
| While procrastination is bad, and excessively logging is also
| bad, global systems are incredibly powerful - just look at
| physics.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| Really enjoyed this read, but also couldn't help but feel sorry
| for the author still trapped in the labyrinth. "Just one more CMS
| and I'll be free..."
|
| The jewel in the post is the rejection of Vannevar's acolytes and
| their hand-wrought memexen. Biology already gave me a perfectly
| good memex in my skull. If its shortcomings give you anxiety,
| take 2 YAGNI until productivity resumes.
| neilyio wrote:
| I spent quite a bit of time in this particular rabbit hole.
| Zettelkasten, Roam, Org-Roam, LogSeq, GTD, Anki.... yet I don't
| think I've stuck with any habit for more than a week or two. I
| have the same sinking feeling with these tools as I do with
| programming language development.
|
| I'm sure many others here have followed note-taking/PL ideas for
| years, waiting for the one that will come along and give us
| superpowers. It feels like we're "so close"... all these
| tools/languages are almost the perfect blend of concise,
| expressive, interactive, etc.
|
| It's occurred to me recently that we may already be among the
| last programming languages and note-taking systems to be built.
| We've tried for decades to design notes and code in ways that
| suit storage access patterns of our brains. I used to think that
| meant a breakthrough was inevitable, but now I'm starting to see
| the efforts having diminishing returns.
|
| ChatGPT and its brethren are almost certainly the way forward for
| most knowledge storage (and the knowledge work that goes with
| it). The entire class of organization problems melt away when you
| can communicate in plain language what you'd like to store and
| retrieve. As chat assistants start to become more integrated in
| our work, the storage phase will become completely passive. The
| assistant will automatically accumulate the context it'll need
| when we come back to it for retrieval.
|
| Why would we design new languages and note systems when, quite
| literally, a general-purpose second brain already exists?
|
| I don't mean to discount the creativity and effort of all
| language and note system designers today. All exploration is
| valuable, and there are certainly better designs out there to be
| found. But the best designs don't always win, and we might just
| be at the point where the imperfect designs that have critical
| mass might be the ones that stick around forever.
| bleeding wrote:
| I've tried to use a "personal wiki" in professional life and
| found that I did not really use the functionality. What re-
| occurring concepts need to be linked back to? AWS? APIs? Perhaps
| I'm just not a very good professional note-taker, but my brief
| experimentation didn't really feel useful.
|
| What I _have_found it very useful for is D&D notes. People,
| places, objects come up on a re-occurring basis and it is often
| useful to have a description, encounters, relationships to other
| people/places/things in a page, or even just a place to list all
| of those things! You can easily go from session journal -> a
| bunch of new pages about things, or updates to existing ones in a
| brief review after the session. It took me a while to actually do
| the organization but the upkeep is now easy, and I will have a
| place to recall the name of the inn we we stayed at in our first
| session in Fantasyville.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| If you're deep into something like AWS at work, it seems useful
| to tag all the individual services you encounter in your work
| so you have a record of where you've used it or investigated
| using it. One tag for AWS doesn't sound useful. A tag structure
| like AWS-EC2 should let you search for every service without
| one overarching tag.
|
| This kind of thing is best done in a collaborative tool, of
| course.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I started using one professionally and found it fairly helpful.
| Mostly I just type all my meeting notes and useful things I
| discover into my daily notes, and try to tag the top-level node
| with at least the name of the project and maybe the people I'm
| meeting with. Then I can go to the project page and see a
| history of the discussion, which has been helpful on numerous
| occasions: instead of "I think I remember someone saying that
| foo service is going to be deprecated soon", I can tell my
| teammates "Alice from the baz team told me two months ago that
| foo service will be deprecated in favor of bar, here's a link
| to the doc outlining the reasons". Probably 80% of the benefit
| just comes from having searchable daily notes, but the linking
| is pretty nice too.
|
| Also helpful in 1:1s with people, I can easily see a record of
| all interactions I've had with a person so it reminds me to
| follow up on things when we chat.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| Much of the backlash to these tools seems to assume that they
| require significant devotion and time.
|
| I just use it to store my stuff. I don't spend much time
| organising it.
|
| I had trouble organising my data in folders, so I tried Bear
| Notes, and it helped.
|
| From there, I just came up with a few conventions to deal with
| the problems that emerged over time - similarly to how someone
| would define their personal folder-hierarchy. For example, having
| a page for every contact helped, because I often find myself
| looking for "that thing that Tom showed me".
|
| But the biggest advantage is that whatever I'm looking for is in
| one location, only a short full-text search away.
|
| ---
|
| > Every node in your knowledge graph is a _debt_. Every link
| doubly so.
|
| I have 5000 notes - most of them are useless. But it costs me
| nothing to keep them.
| fieryskiff11 wrote:
| [dead]
| dchuk wrote:
| Capture now, fast. Organize on the fly with searches and filters.
|
| I have this whole app sketched up where the idea is you just
| focus on writing notes and thoughts in one continuous stream,
| jumping around topics as you go like most professionals do, and
| then use searches and filters you can save to render different
| contexts easily from the single stream.
|
| So you can switch between reviewing your work 1 on 1 history and
| your Christmas gift ideas with a change of a filter. You don't
| have to worry about organizing anything, it's all just a single
| stream of content and then searches.
|
| I'll likely never build it, but I'm convinced that would be the
| way I want to write notes. I don't want a knowledge graph, I want
| a stream of consciousness capture tool with a way to use tags
| searches and filters to make sense of it.
|
| Oh also: I want to write some notes in handwriting on my iPad,
| and then ocr and clean up those notes to be liked I typed them,
| but still preserve the original handwriting. I desperately want
| to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes,
| have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of
| consciousness and searchable.
|
| One day.
| cborenstein wrote:
| Stashpad isn't quite this but it's pretty close. Focused on
| stream-of-consciousness style notes. Would be curious what you
| think.
| mythhouse wrote:
| > I don't want a knowledge graph,
|
| I think most obsidian users will agree. I never quite
| understood the hype behind it. 'second brain' stuff never
| really made sense to me.
| RedTwoon wrote:
| > Capture now, Fast
|
| This is exactly right.
|
| My method for rapid journaling/ thought logging:
|
| - use note app of choice, (for me it is Obsidian)
|
| - voice to text, rapid fire, get all my thoughts out in big
| paragraphs
|
| - once every few day re-read + add heading to sections + add a
| couple hashtags + but otherwise leave it in a terrible spelling
| mistake ridden, grammarless mess
|
| --------
|
| > Every note is an extra cost
|
| For notes where remembering / reviewing are important (i.e.
| todo lists), I've found:
|
| "Bullet Method", which is essentially keeping an analog journal
| of bullet notes.
|
| It really makes you slow down and track what is important , so
| you have a nice clean journal
| soulofmischief wrote:
| It wouldn't take much work to make filter lists first-class
| citizens in Logseq, if you want to try hacking it in:
| https://github.com/logseq/logseq
|
| It would be a good feature to have, and it's better than
| starting from scratch.
|
| > I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes,
| type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that
| place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.
|
| Logseq doesn't currently have saveable filter lists, but you
| _can_ create pages with any title which will still collect and
| display direct and indirect references to that title /tag. This
| gets you 80% of the way there already, if you get used to the
| workflow.
|
| Logseq multi-device sync is now in beta, as well.
| c54 wrote:
| You might like Notational Velocity or nvAlt, basically only has
| fast new note creation and fast search.
| dangom wrote:
| Part of the appeal for "Tools for Thought" is that by using them
| we feel we are taking action towards being productive, regardless
| of whether that turns out to be true of not.
|
| The falacy comes, I believe, from the combination of two facts:
| 1. much of the intellectual work we do these days simply takes
| time. No amount of writing can accelerate that beyond our
| biological limit of learning, so we might as well just sit and
| think. 2. Just sitting and thinking is considered unproductive
| and regarded as lazyness, so we believe we should be writing even
| more instead.
|
| In that regard, using tools for thought may be pointless, since
| all we need is time to think. But perhaps that pointlessness
| serves a purpose. Like a guardrail in a highway, tools for
| thought are not something we "really need", but they're there to
| at least keep us on track in case we were to drift away while our
| minds move forward.
| thewarrior wrote:
| Sorry to be cliched but do you think AI could make a difference
| here by thinking for us ?
| dangom wrote:
| The point of the article is that we don't like being idle.
| We'd rather spend our idle time "pretending" we are being
| productive, and tools for thought are what we use for that.
|
| Being actually productive (quality > quantity), I argue, is a
| process that takes physical time. Absorbing information,
| internalizing it, and summarizing it with our own
| understanding requires a lot of energy. This process cannot
| be massively accelerated. Same as with physical fitness, one
| can operate close to optimum and see and maintain great
| results, but one cannot operate better than optimum given
| one's own physical constraints.
|
| For intelectual work, defining what "operating close to
| optimum" means is much harder because the quantity of output
| is usually the metric, and that varies so much from
| discipline to discipline and person to person. I believe many
| of us are already operating close to optimum (reading and
| writing, attending meetings, presenting our work), so there
| is no point in investing even more towards productivity. But
| the falacy is that because we don't have a proper metric for
| productivity, we believe investing even more is worthwhile
| since it increases output, and so we perceive ourselves as
| better.
|
| I don't see AI changing the picture for us because the
| problem is not what we are doing, but how we perceive to be
| doing it. That's what's up with tools for thought and
| personal wikis.
| theCrowing wrote:
| I believe that a fine-tuned autoregressive language model
| such as GPT, enhanced with your personal notes, has the
| potential to serve as a highly effective cognitive aid,
| potentially even fulfilling the role of a "second brain" that
| many of us are looking for.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| It's not scalable, but as an existence proof of what you're
| saying, my partner and I fulfill this role for each other -
| we each are tasked with remembering different facets of our
| lives (e.g. I know the plot and cast of every movie we've
| ever watched, she remembers to pay taxes :).
|
| It seems pretty obvious we're heading for that
| utopia/dystopia where everyone is assigned a personal
| assistant loaded onto a pervasive mesh (your glasses,
| watch, phone, computer, desk, house). On the one hand it
| sounds great to have an AI assistant that knows what I
| know, a model of how I think, and the ability to fill in
| the gaps instantly. On the other, it's so ripe for
| abuse/deepening inequality, the idea almost qualifies as
| "don't create the torment nexus".
| marniewebb wrote:
| For me, what makes these tools useful is the time I spend in
| review. Which often feels like the opposite of productivity.
| Kinrany wrote:
| Thinking with paper is very obviously better than keeping all
| the thoughts in your head.
| dangom wrote:
| Sure, just like working out continously is better than rest.
| There is no better or worse, you need both. Ideas take time
| to materialize.
| adg33 wrote:
| My personal note taking system is based on Markdown, Vim, grep
| and Git.
|
| I have a private repo for personal notes, including a `todo.md`
| file that I use as an GTD style inbox - I have an alias
| `todo='$EDITOR $HOME/personal/todo.md'` which takes me there
| quickly.
|
| For some topics I use other repos - for example for programming
| notes, I use https://github.com/ADGEfficiency/programming-
| resources.
|
| Works great, fast, cheap and I don't have to put up with any of
| the nonsense I used to put up with when I use Evernote.
| larve wrote:
| I'm someone who feels very happy about my sprawling obsidian
| vault, combining journal, project notes, wiki, flashcards,
| zettelkasten, drafts, finished writing. I use pretty much no
| plugin, but I do have different methodologies that have emerged
| in multiple waves.
|
| I started with just notes in bear, crosslinking when i saw fit,
| until that turned into 300 notes where I couldn't find anything.
| Tags and folders never stuck, and I abandoned those pretty
| quickly.
|
| That's when I switched to obsidian, with a few very broad top
| level folders (projects, logs, zettelkasten, writing). Over time,
| this filled up too, and the zettelkasten got split into wiki and
| zettelkasten. The zettelkasten filled up, so I added index notes
| and structure notes and a numbering scheme.
|
| The only plugins I use are some templates and the graph analysis
| plugin to help me find things I haven't linked yet. As said, most
| of the logic is in my workflow / way of tagging things. I don't
| care about being organized as much as I care about regularly
| using the vault.
|
| Now that I'm relying more on research and external reading, I am
| integrating readwise and developing a workflow around that.
|
| I'm sure though that if I were to document my setup, it would
| seem overengineered and impossible to use and over ambitious, but
| the fact is that it's very organic for me.
|
| While there is some truth to the feeling that many people over-
| engineer and get overwhelmed with plugins and methodologies, I
| know many of us who just silently enjoy their vaults and plow
| away and are perfectly productive. If anything, I would indulge
| in the recurring urge to get to know better systems, but the
| foremost thing is having fun. I really enjoy my sunday mornings
| where I just write and throw things in there. I've had a 2 months
| pause, where I mostly kept to daily logs and drafts, but I'm
| about to go back to "proper" content management.
|
| Furthermore, I can easily publish the vault and have a site that
| is not a chronological blog with edited posts. My writing is
| messy, iterative, raw, sprawling, multimedia, and pressing
| publish still gives me a clear signal "you finished something."
|
| My vault is here: https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel
| atomashevic wrote:
| I've spent a good (unproductive) part of 2022 tinkering with
| notes/TfTs and I'm stuck with "optimizing" note-taking for more
| than few years (started with zettelkasten and Roam Research I
| guess).
|
| I'm stopping with all of that - zero results and tons of wasted
| time (and fair ammount of subscription money). If I spent all
| that time tinkering with LaTeX at least I would leveled up my
| skills.
|
| Judging from comments on HN, I'm not alone and quite a few of us
| went down weird notetaking rabbit holes. I'll just stick with few
| scratch plaintext files and handwritten legal pad notes to
| capture stuff as I work and then transfer/delete stuff at the end
| of the day without any special system behind the whole process.
| nicbou wrote:
| In the end, any notes app plus Notability end up working great.
| Pen and paper are another excellent option.
|
| I'd like to have everything neat and tidy, but the effort just
| isn't worth it.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I gotta be honest, with Logseq note-taking comes very
| naturally, at the speed of thought; it's helped me become a
| more effective writer and thus thinker.
| rektide wrote:
| I appreciate the warning & hazard, but I wish it were coached
| in a little humility too. For every comment you cite:
|
| > _Judging from comments on HN, I 'm not alone and quite a few
| of us went down weird notetaking rabbit holes._
|
| I see one person who did find their way. Often they recommend
| something fairly mild & not ultra-aggressive, but thinks like
| getting links or having weekly templates seems like it can be a
| huge help.
|
| I'd like to see some mildness mixed in with this naysaying
| curmudgeonliness.
| atomashevic wrote:
| I agree and I guess I wasn't clear in my comment. It didn't
| work for me, but for other people and/or use cases it might,
| no doubt.
|
| Seeing others quit TfTs and intricate zk systems on HN helped
| me realize that I should probably do that too, again given my
| situation. So, just sharing my experience, not trying to
| preach :)
| gofreddygo wrote:
| You're not alone.
|
| Plaintext just works. Figure out a grouping structure and stick
| to it. mine is just yyyy-subject (2022-travel, 2022-rust). Long
| documents with subheaders and dates.
|
| Currently on google docs. I like the mobile apps and syncing
| across devices. its just text in under a dozen files.
|
| Backup strategy is ctrl--a / ctrl-c / ctrl-v.
|
| I have taken a preference for drawing small diagrams in staples
| composition books last 2 years. A 2 column table of contents
| with numbered pages as the first page of the book. Made lookups
| super quick. My usage took off.
|
| I dont write much on paper. Just draw small cohorts of words
| with some sentences on most pages. This layout helps the
| knowledge to self organize in graph like structure for my mind.
| Very useful when watching videos and in meetings.
|
| Going to get me a nice fountain ink pen soon.
| workbytaylor wrote:
| I wish I had read this 10 years ago.
| habitue wrote:
| The author has some really good points, and I think anyone
| building or using a tool like this should be able to take a hard
| look at what the tool is actually doing for them personally, vs
| what it seems like it could potentially be useful for.
|
| One big limitation is time: it takes a lot of time to write
| things in, say, Roam. You need to be getting commensurate benefit
| for the time invested. If you aren't sure what the benefit is,
| except "one day maybe I'll read through all this again and
| then..." it's probably not worth it. You can make write-only
| documents anywhere, no need to organize and hyperlink them.
|
| On the other hand, sometimes the amount of friction in using a
| tool is the issue. Something can be completely impractical when
| it's doable in principle but has high cost, vs when it is
| pervasive and effortless. Software that actively searches for
| associations with what you're currently writing and presents them
| to you could be much more valuable than software that lets you
| follow hyperlinks if you want, but you don't actually bother
| doing it.
|
| Finally, I'll say there's also the fact that humans need to
| accrete habits slowly over time. If you find/build a notetaking
| tool with 10,000 plugins, well ok, knowing that the plugins exist
| is one thing, but you won't actually use them or get value out of
| them until your brain has indexed them and you've formed a habit
| that is triggered by a recurring context you will find yourself
| in.
| cristianpascu wrote:
| Just realized something while reading the article, about "spaced
| repetition".
|
| For a while now I had the impression of not learning anything new
| and also of loosing the interest of doing so. It sort of came
| back to me as I am in a sabbatical period now, which gave me some
| mental clarity and also more space-time to think about things
| more thoroughly.
|
| But, here's the thing: I have never stopped learning new things.
| I have been checking HN for many years, and been reading daily SW
| news for the past 20 years. Many things come to my attention in
| different shapes and they build up in abstraction and in my
| memory/understanding to a wider and wider scale. Flash cards that
| I'd manage and check regularly would have not had the same effect
| as constantly checking my existing knowledge against random new
| areas of reality.
|
| I am happy about realizing this, as it's somehow difficult for me
| to understand my actual place in the SW industry.
| MBO35711 wrote:
| Thanks for this timely reminder - I was nearly back off down
| the TfT rabbit hole again!
| LunarAurora wrote:
| So he is Ok with unbundling everything but collections. What is a
| collection? What makes todos and contacts special, but not, say,
| movies or books ? I don't think The line is so clear cut.
|
| He has a point though: We need better "generic no-code" Database
| software. Some features of calibre (like the hierarchical tags)
| make me wish I could use it for many other types (and it does not
| work well). The same for Zotero (and I was more successful in
| turning it into a bookmarks manager and even a simple movie
| catalogue)
| eternityforest wrote:
| I'm still not 100% happy with the existing tools for thought.
|
| So far, Google Keep is by far my favorite in terms of experience,
| because it's blazing fast, plus it has Android widget and Google
| Assistant integration..
|
| But I don't fully trust it to always be around, so I don't use it
| for anything long term, just shopping and to do lists, and quick
| notes to be copied somewhere safer later.
|
| For calendar-like stuff, I use Google Calendar, for the same
| reasons.
|
| I tend to think of privacy as a specialist tool not generally
| needed, so I use BitWarden's secure note feature to record
| anything I'd rather have encrypted.
|
| Finally, for long term notes and journalling, I use Obsidian and
| SyncThing. But I dislike that Obsidian takes 8 seconds or so to
| load up, and has no widget to keep always-open, that's just way
| too much friction for something I'm relying on as a second brain.
|
| If Keep had a markdown sync feature that would keep all notes
| synced to a portable folder of markdown guaranteed to be there if
| the service goes down or an app update breaks something, and if
| they had hierarchal organization features, I would probably use
| them for everything.
|
| All in all, with all the talk about tools for thought, it's way
| behind a lot of other areas of software despite having no real
| technical challenges besides the difficulty of maintaining a
| cross platform set of apps with all the integrations and widgets
| and performance optimizations.
|
| I guess that's the problem, there's a lot of tedium and no
| interesting algorithms, so it doesn't get as much interest.
| __jambo wrote:
| Google keep sometimes randomly slows down/notes disappear for
| me.
| idearoots wrote:
| My non-obvious observation after five years in this field:
|
| In essence, journalling is similar to a psychotherapy session.
|
| The clarity of mind you get after a journalling session comes
| from structuring things in your head, not in your TfT tool.
|
| Yet, as one would expect, people project that feeling onto a tool
| -- which leads to more time invested.
|
| Ultimately after the N-th session, when you try to use the tool
| to get more of that feeling -- you get the opposite, burnout, and
| then people switch to a new TfT app for the same cycle.
|
| These benefits are why "Daily Pages" were vital to Roam
| Research's success. Not the bi-directional links or graphs as
| many think.
|
| "Daily Pages" get you closer to a new therapeutic session, which
| is what you want most of the time.
|
| I use : - paper notebooks. - remarkable 2
| - markdown/notion + NeuraCache [I'm a founder] for flashcards and
| spaced repetition
|
| + I've been in group and individual therapy for three years now.
|
| I have never been happier with my setup.
| funksta wrote:
| I've found the same, the catharsis of writing the "Daily Notes
| Pages" [0] is probably the main benefit of these systems.
|
| In my case, the immediacy of handwriting has been a better fit
| than typing for this purpose. I also use the reMarkable 2 with
| a linked pdf planner [1] that I built, and with some custom
| collections I find it hits about 90% of what I'd use a "proper"
| TfT for. Obsidian and Logseq still look pretty seductive, but I
| know I'd spend most of my time in the weeds configuring plugins
| etc.
|
| I'm hoping the rM2's OCR and export capabilities improve over
| time so that we could combine the benefits of quick, effortless
| capture on that device (via handwriting) with automated
| categorization, linking and search (on my laptop, maybe via
| Obsidian/Logseq/etc). There's a lot of potential if someone can
| effectively bridge that gap! It's something I hope to explore
| some more this year.
|
| [0] https://maggieappleton.com/daily-notes [1]
| https://hyperpaper.me/ (as seen recently on HN :)
| DavidPiper wrote:
| Great to see a Maggie Appleton reference!
|
| She also did a talk on Tools for Thought in April 2022:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6uhvFGPUE0 (she's the first
| half of the video)
|
| And she has an unfinished blog post on the topic as well:
|
| https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought
| e-_pusher wrote:
| How do you use the remarkable 2 in your workflow?
|
| I also agree that the one most useful habit is a daily log. It
| hits the sweet spot for me in terms of low friction + benefits
| in organizing information.
| idearoots wrote:
| If the thought is clear, I write it in a paper notebook as
| nicely as possible -- in a "Daily Page" format.
|
| If the thought is unclear, I write random contextual things
| in RM2 and erase or leave them there to mature or die.
|
| I also use RM2 to read articles, pdfs, and draw or think
| about them.
|
| So it mainly serves as a thinking space that feels Offline.
| pflenker wrote:
| My two golden rules of note taking: 1) taking notes is superior
| to not taking notes. It structures your thoughts and helps you
| think. The actual note is of less value than the process of
| writing it. 2) beware the productivity tarpit. It's fun to jump
| on the next blog post about how to get your obsidian setup right,
| but moving your notes from setup a to setup b generates only few
| insights (when you re read a note long forgotten perhaps).
| Movement does not equal progress.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Oof ... default font sizes on that blog are obnoxiously large.
| Paragraph font size is barely smaller than the header size.
|
| Makes the whole thing unreadable since you are constantly
| scrolling to fit the next tiny chunk of text onto the screen. It
| is impossible to read at any sort of reasonable pace.
| gcr wrote:
| i can't read without zooming text, and i generally appreciate
| larger text on some sites.
|
| Cmd+- to opt out, as usual :)
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| Same here, I don't want to squint to read cool 10pt font, I
| prefer to see 16pt easily. I'm not fifteen anymore, my eyes
| need all the help they can get :)
| agileAlligator wrote:
| Nah, it's the perfect size actually (I am using a laptop, I
| don't know how it is on mobile screens)
| muskmusk wrote:
| I use a single folder of files along with a script that can fuzzy
| search said folder. It works perfectly.
|
| Knowledge is messy and doesn't really conform to a database
| schema. Certainly not one you would want to write :) I think a
| better approach would be to find a way to insert all these notes
| into something like ChatGPT.
| wvlia5 wrote:
| Reminded me of famous article "APL as a tool for thought"
| D13Fd wrote:
| I found the perfect system for me and I stick to it. I use a
| folder of Markdown text notes organized by creation date, with a
| text editor (ideally something like nvAlt / Uulysses / Obsidian
| that does indexed searches).
|
| Titles are:
|
| 2022-12-26 Note Name.txt
|
| That way I can find what I'm looking for, usually instantly, even
| though I have a pile of thousands of notes in that folder
| spanning a decade.
| smilekzs wrote:
| I do the same in Obsidian with a slight twist!
|
| I like Zettelkasten / bunch-of-markdown-files tools because
| more often than not they _expand_ on this simple idea, offering
| additional structure on top without aiming to destruct
| anything.
| Tomte wrote:
| I haven't found an iOS app that allows good search in plain
| text files.
|
| About every app out there uses Apples standard search control,
| which finds files where text occurs. Not the line(s) with the
| occurrence itself, no forward/previous, only a list of files
| that contains the text.
|
| Is Ulysses better in that regard?
| [deleted]
| going_ham wrote:
| I am pretty sure you hit the spot. I do not even write notes
| these days. I just work and if it is important enough for me, I
| trust my brain to recall. If it can't recall, I search the web.
| However, this time I have different context so each new search is
| unique. I discover different ways of doing things. Sometimes,
| it's better than what I used to do. As a result, I only focus on
| high level problem solving. This way, I don't care about small
| details and remain faithful to general context. What do I gain
| from this? Long term ability to solve problem. Each problem I
| solve, makes me think more on my thinking process. As a result, I
| optimized surroundings in a way it helps me think and reason
| rather than note and forget.
| boopmaster wrote:
| As limited as OneNote is, I find it the place I keep returning
| to. Obsidian was extremely off-putting to me when I last tried it
| out, as the node parents themselves could not be documents. Or I
| couldn't figure out how to use them that way! Maybe it's just me!
|
| Beyond that, I have a fondness for wikis that permit breadcrumbs
| from excerpts back to a main documents. Giving the right
| information in the right place, with a centralized main resource
| that is carved up. This strategy is super useful to prevent dead
| instruction sprawl.
|
| I once read (in someone else's wiki) that all documentation is a
| memorial to some time in the past. That really stuck with me for
| years now. When you hit "save" it's already in a state of decay.
|
| I am talking about sharing of information and maintenance of
| knowledge stores though, and that perhaps is a different beast
| than cataloging ones own interests.
| c54 wrote:
| Naturally Obsidian has a plugin for this[1].
|
| This is what I like about obsidian. Ultimately nobody has a
| consistent set of capabilities they want because the whole
| space is pretty underdefined (exactly as the article is
| saying). But we still want something. So Obsidian is a kind of
| bring-your-own collection of features, and the mobile app works
| good enough too. It's kinda like vim or emacs where people
| customize it however they want.
|
| I reckon as the space evolves more clarity will appear and more
| opinionated schemes will become popular.
|
| [1] https://github.com/aidenlx/alx-folder-note
| smilekzs wrote:
| Long time OneNote user (since 2003 debut) chiming in. I have
| been extensively test-driving Obsidian for 6 months now and
| couldn't be happpier.
|
| I think both [^1] are opinionated on which layers of
| organization maps to where.
|
| - OneNote: FS dir -> FS file (database) = OneNote Section
| (manual ordering) -> OneNote (sub-)Page (manual ordering +
| level) -> OneNote "note containers" (textboxes; [^2])
|
| - Obsidian: FS dir -> FS file (plain text) = Obsidian Page
| (automatic ordering) -> headers in the page (manual ordering +
| level)
|
| While I agree in principle that some non-leaf node should be
| allowed to have content, really you can see that
| headers/sections in Obsidian map well to the OneNote page-level
| organization. I wish I got a choice though...
|
| [^1]: Out of the box. OneNote also has a major plugin bundle
| known as OneTastic.
|
| [^2]: OneNote has _cosmetic_ headers in textboxes which isn't
| very useful.
| c54 wrote:
| Actually one thing I liked from this is the folder structure in
| his Cartesian app screenshots.
|
| Personal - Autogeny (i'm imagining "talking points", key
| recurring personal concepts), book of days (daily notes,
| journal). Documents and people, self explanatory. "Thoughts" i'm
| unsure of but probably misc grab bag things that arent profound
| or important enough for autogeny.
|
| "Trove" is a nice name for the random collection of interesting
| tidbits and stuff I also tend to collect in my vault
| rgrs wrote:
| Joplin is my personal wiki
| Ruq wrote:
| This fellow's system seems overcomplicated?
|
| For me, the benefit of linked knowledge is just that I tend to
| forget a LOT of things, including many details of things I've
| learned in the past. For me, the principles and concepts remain,
| but all the steps and "how to do X" vanish rather quickly. So
| having essentially a personal documentation database (using
| Obsidian) that I can quickly jump into to recall lost knowledge
| is very important.
|
| My "Second Brain" is not so much about making my brain better, as
| it is filling in the missing gaps of where my brain struggles at.
| rektide wrote:
| The author has good points & the idea that specialized
| (info-)spaces with specialized tools help. The tool imposes a big
| context boundary to rapidly filter through & mask out most of the
| big pile of everything one has. That alone is a huge gain.
|
| Trying to maintain some overall view, some sense of importance...
| having shape to your spaces, having them well defined, some kind
| of memory palace with notable form & place to it resonates a lot
| with me The author nicely highlights the challenge:
|
| > _Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link
| doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are. Every
| node that has utility--an interesting excerpt from a book, a
| pithy quote, a poem, a fiction fragment, a few sentences that are
| the seed of a future essay, a list of links that are the
| launching-off point of a project--is drowned in an ocean of
| banality. Most of our thoughts appear and pass away instantly,
| for good reason._
|
| Strong use of poetic license but stood out & I like it!
|
| Yet... I disagree with the premise. There's definitely some
| expedience to having separate specialized apps for separate
| things. It's a great short term aid, right now, today. The suck
| it up & use Unity option.
|
| But I feel like we have much more exploring to do with general
| purpose systems. Right now we are fairly first order, where
| everything kind of coexists & most interfaces lack distinct
| submodes, lack distinction of subspaces.
|
| Having a common backend & common base-layer, which is extensible,
| growable, can begin to be shaped into the more specific regions
| eith distinct & differentiated capabilities will greatly help.
| But that common platform seems key.
|
| Links alone may be sufficient, but alas few apps really expose
| that. Also fixable, apps really ought have PingBack protocol (or
| some similar protocol) support, to hear when someone links them &
| tell links they have been linked, such that we can have
| bidirectional links, which can greatly add navigation.
|
| Beyond that, I think no tools really do a great job of helping us
| review & raise up data over time. Algorithmic tools like Google
| Photos can do a fairly good job of finding & reminding us of some
| stuff. But overall I havent seen many attempts at tackling the
| underlying problem here, of keeping folks in the loop and
| pruning, refining, revieing, whether we have specialized apps or
| whether we embrace the all-is-one general systems digital garden.
| Attention is a resource we have not honed personally, although it
| has been well tuned at larger mechanistic scales. I hope to see &
| am excited to hopefully become a part of progressing on these
| points!
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yup. The unbundling is _so key._ I find that -- ironically --
| lately, despite the proliferation of tools like this, they 're
| just like the sirens in the myths, and if I tie myself to the
| boat and just use what I use (zim-wiki in my case, YMMV) and just
| force myself to spend time there, I'm actually doing the work/fun
| that's most fulfilling.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Playing with and building note taking tools as a form or
| procrastination is a real issue.
|
| I went from Emacs Org Mode to Workflowy to Roam and the thing I
| like best out of all of these is not necessarily zettelkasten
| personal wikis but just being able to make a simple list for
| today, or outline an article I'm writing.
|
| For me these tools work best when you can use them much like a
| physical notepad. More structure can be extracted and organized
| but in a pinch they can be replaced with a todo.txt.
| jamesgill wrote:
| I tried everything--Emacs, word processing software, custom
| conversion scripts, you name it. A few years ago, I more or less
| adopted Derek Sivers' method: I keep topical plain text files
| (markdown, really).
|
| He described the topical files bit here ('Thoughts On' files):
| https://sive.rs/dj
|
| And the benefits of just writing plain text here:
| https://sive.rs/plaintext
|
| Now, I just organize my text files in folders and forget about
| it. It's all on Dropbox, so I can read/revise from any machine,
| and text files are lightweight and simple to keep synced copies
| locally.
| joe8756438 wrote:
| For a lot of things I agree organization is over-rated, but for
| some things it's essential. And, in any case -- collecting things
| whether organized or not is super important.
|
| I think the act of capturing notes, todos, bookmarks, and other
| things, all involve the same _impulse_ and _function_. Whether a
| great idea strikes, remembering a quote from a good article you
| just read, or capturing an important piece of data.
|
| It turns out, there are all kinds of things that need collecting
| that don't fit neatly into a practice like: note-taking or todo
| lists or bookmarks. Transactions, events, and formulas are three
| other types I use extensively. But the act of collecting is the
| same: at random times you need to record some information.
|
| In an ideal world you need a button available everywhere and when
| pressed an input instantly materializes ready to record the
| desired information. It gets saved somewhere safe, accessible
| from any place, where it is easy to find, where it can be put to
| use without much effort, etc.
|
| I think it's extremely beneficial to consolidate information in
| the same system if that information is processed in the same way.
| This is where I see a ton of redundancy between tools and it
| drove me crazy enough to build a solution myself, Tap [1].
|
| A couple notes specific to Tap and the solution I've come up
| with:
|
| To make this capture-anything from anywhere system work, I
| believe the format needs to be text. But, I don't think a
| structured data format with a schema definition is the answer,
| nor do I think markdown is a good fit.
|
| Tap uses a format designed specifically for Tap called sowhat
| [2]. It's a tiny syntax for parsing tokens that carry special
| meaning. Above all, it is intended to be easy for humans to
| write. This allows collecting information via SMS and email
| trivial.
|
| 1. https://tatatap.com 2. https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat
| rollinDyno wrote:
| I am a strong believer in taking-notes so that I don't have to
| face a blank canvas every time I want to start a new essay.
|
| My issue is that when I am in "the zone", I can't write. When I
| am very intensely focused on a topic, I am informing my internal
| conversation very efficiently by skimming papers. If I interrupt
| that with taking notes, then I am adding unnecessary friction
| that slows me down.
|
| When I write notes, I feel that my ideas race ahead of my typing
| speed, and my working memory is not large enough to keep these
| ideas in a buffer. This is an issue I have had my whole life but
| only recently noticed it is an impediment and only now can I
| describe it.
|
| All that being said, even if this wasn't an issue, there's a
| trade-off between how quickly you move across text and how much
| of it you store on notes. There's an optimal point, of course,
| and this can be raised with technology, focus, and practice.
| gumby wrote:
| Try taking them on paper. That may reduce the friction
| dramatically and keep you in the zone.
|
| I take all my notes on paper. Then at the end of the day I put
| them into the computer. For some notes, that means writing a
| little more than I had put on paper. For other notes, it means
| they don't deserve the transition.
|
| A big change for me was not to curate the notes beyond the
| above. That is, I have a huge emacs file and just use search to
| find things of interest or relevance.
| robertlf wrote:
| Why's the font so big? hahaha
| cf wrote:
| I've used a personal wiki for several years now, and I think it
| works just fine. Surprisingly, I don't really link pages together
| all that much, but I make heavy use of tagging and categorising.
| I find that's been enough for me.
|
| I don't really follow links, and mostly I just use the search bar
| when I need anything. I think one thing that's tripping lots of
| people up is they are trying to use these tools the way they
| think is expected of them. Instead, it's better to just make it
| as frictionless as possible to add notes, and as frictionless as
| possible to read notes you've written before.
|
| Everything else is just procrastination with "productivity tools"
| pattt wrote:
| I tried taking notes for learning and brainstorming over the
| years but found it incredibly difficult, not because of a lack of
| note taking frameworks, apps or technologies but because
| _sustaining_ this process is hard. Reading posts like these makes
| me quite envious of author's dedication. Recently I was
| contemplating about a possible lightweight middle ground solution
| where I think a more polished software would certainly help -
| _highlighting_. Imagine if you could simply highlight/select any
| text/image on the screen of any app (ok, let's start with the
| few), optionally assign different colors, tags and have those
| highlights automatically synchronized in a sort of a searchable
| personal diary format. The main feature of such tool would be
| cropping and indexing what's already read and seen as opposed to
| having to summarize/rephrase or enrich it with your own notes.
| Why I think software in this case reducing friction to a minimum
| would help? As opposed to taking notes, identifying illuminating
| corner-stone paragraphs and sentences mostly feels like an
| implicit process that happens naturally at least in my
| experience.
| marniewebb wrote:
| Readwise or similar?
| TOP-HACKER-NEWS wrote:
| [dead]
| srinathkrishna wrote:
| This was a nice read and resonated with me a lot especially
| around how productivity gurus shill every single app out there.
|
| I've always felt processes > tools and whatever tool(s) work for
| you, you ought to stick with it rather than get into a FOMO wheel
| and try every app out there. Peddlers of these apps are
| innumerable and YouTube definitely doesn't shy away from
| recommending this sort of content.
|
| Even simple text files in a reasonably defined file organization
| scheme is more than sufficient. This post also gave a name for
| this - collection management, which I've been thinking for a
| while. More often than not, there are these collections of
| items/lists that I end up having to track and the ideal bit
| missing is some process and a low friction tool to get there.
|
| Another thing is the fetish for using a _single_ tool which is
| self-hostable which plagues the world today. While a younger me
| would've been onboard for this thinking, at this point in my
| life, the only thing probably matters is local-first and I've
| long given up the hope for a single tool, taking inspiration from
| the world of Unix tools.
| TOP-HACKER-NEWS wrote:
| [dead]
| s3000 wrote:
| >How often, truly, do you find yourself wanting to link a task in
| your todo list app to a file in Dropbox
|
| Links are much more useful once notes and todo lists are shared
| and published. I am surprised that not all tools for thought have
| standardized on ActivityPub to enable their users to connect each
| other's notes. People with an account could correct mistakes or
| link to crucial knowledge that was overlooked.
|
| Like Wikipedia, information would grow "on its own". Important
| ideas could be identified, information could be collected until
| it is enough for further steps.
|
| Zettelkasten is great for one person but that's for prolific
| people who process a massive amount of information. With the
| internet, a group of average people can turn into a genius by
| collectively collecting information and turning it into a useful
| form.
| parentheses wrote:
| _I_ like the idea of a second brain or similar because writing
| helps _me_ to think. If I start writing (instead of free
| thought), I more systematically explore something. This is useful
| for any type of rational thought that spans an even slightly
| complex space.
|
| Some are good enough at operationalizing information and thinking
| more systematically without tools. They don't need these tools,
| but may get stimulated by using/maintaining them.
|
| The problem is that these tools are sold as a way to level up.
| Instead, these tools are a crutch for most, self-fulfilling
| meticulousness for some, and a game changer for still others.
| austenallred wrote:
| For me half of the point is that I can just dump everything into
| one place and not categorize or think about it
| agileAlligator wrote:
| > Pointlessness of Organization: my Calibre and Zotero libraries
| are a mess. But is that bad? Is there any point to organizing
| them? I can always find what I need, either by searching or
| browsing, because I have a spatial sense of where each book is in
| Calibre's big grid view. If I went through everything in Calibre
| and Zotero, and fixed the titles, added missing authors,
| publishers, publication years, fixed the cover images--what then?
| What have I gained? Nothing. It is a waste of time to organize
| things too much.
|
| On reading this, I felt like I already sort of knew this, and
| this internet stranger validated my thoughts.
| jerf wrote:
| About once every year or two, I remember something I read maybe
| 15 years ago and realize it would be absolutely perfect for
| some reason, but I can't find it. And being an engineer and an
| HN poster, my brain immediately leaps to "Oh, if only I ran a
| system that archived everything I browsed so I could build my
| own personal search engine that could search on just what I've
| ever looked at."
|
| Then I smack it down, because that is a _crap_ -load of effort
| to recall a link every year or two. And let's be honest, the
| marginal value of that link isn't all that great either... in
| the moment the need may seem large, but sitting here typing
| about this I couldn't tell you even a single such thing I've
| forgotten about, because that's how important they are... just
| more ephemera in the stream themselves.
|
| My MP3 collection is a bit of a mess. I've cleaned up the worst
| instances of "Band, The" "The Band" "Band" "Band - The" sorts
| of duplication, but that's about it. My book collection is
| similarly messy. Heck, even my family photos are basically
| sorted only by year and not much else. So what? I can fix it. I
| can fix it all. But it's hard to even so much as recover the
| time I'd put into it once over, let alone in multiples.
|
| (Much more important, especially for the family photos, is not
| losing them. So I've got a backup solution. But it's just a
| fire-at-directory solution, not all gloriously organized by
| type either.)
|
| So I've learned to just sort of let the desire to have greater
| organization pass over me, Litany-against-Fear style. It's just
| a siren call.
| Tomte wrote:
| Photos are the worst.
|
| I'm through at least three complete reorganizations where I
| even dusted off old backups and collected all photos (because
| I felt I was deleting photos too liberally last time), de-
| duplicated (and de-quadruplicated) them all, and built the
| new "forever" structure.
|
| It sucks that I just know I'll do it again at most five years
| from now.
| blondin wrote:
| this calls for an AI that recognizes pictures and
| categorizes them for us. what have we been solving all
| these captchas for?
|
| photos and pictures organization should be a solved
| problem.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Does your smartphone not already do that for you? iPhone
| does, I think Android does and I think iPhoto on macOS
| does as well. It wouldn't surprise me if Google online
| photos or Facebook do also.
|
| (That is, let you search using words for things in the
| photo or themes like "winter").
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Photos are a good example of why a filesystem hierarchy is
| insufficiently expressive. You might want to search for
| pictures of me at parties, or pictures with me and my wife,
| or pictures from 1999, or pictures of LA, and the same
| photo might belong in all of those searches. No single
| category will ever be a good place for a photo.
| frutiger wrote:
| I personally agree with your point (and find the loose
| textual search offered by phones these days to be mostly
| adequate).
|
| But reading your comment gave me a thought: filesystem
| hierarchies are indeed insufficient, but what about
| filesystem hierarchies with liberal use of hardlinks?
| karencarits wrote:
| Or tag based, such as https://www.tagspaces.org/
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| That seems equivalent to a graph to me, and yes, I'm
| unaware of any kind of search that a graph does not
| permit. Indeed it could be the basis for a system that,
| in my opinion, would dominate any of the existing
| knowledge graph / tool for thought products. It would
| consist of three more pieces: * A
| database for backlinks. (Links from file X to file Y
| would only be possible when X has an appropriate file
| format -- `.txt`, `.md`, `.org`, etc.) * A
| search grammar with the following primitives:
| * find children of (links from) query results *
| find parents of (links into) query results * take
| the disjunction (OR) of queries * take the
| conjunction (AND) of queries * group queries with
| parentheses * The ability to pipe files found
| via ordinary shell commands into that grammar.
|
| Given the size of most peoples' knowledge graphs, you
| wouldn't even need to keep a text index (ala Lucene) --
| `find` and `grep` would be more than sufficient.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I put all my photographs in directories named year/year-
| month/year-month-day. For instance:
| ~/pictures/2022/202212/20221225
|
| And I tag them with as many tags as I can be bothered with
| using XnView. XnView lets me find pictures by name or by
| tag.
| szastamasta wrote:
| For me photos are solved problem now. I no longer do any
| cleanup on them, just assume that Apple AI will show me
| best photos when I search for them. I think that it is
| simply good enough already.
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. I get the appeal of Having Everything Organized. It's
| conceptually compelling. But I think the right way to look at
| it is in terms of minimizing total cost of retrieval _and_
| filing.
|
| As an example, take physical paper. Receipts, bills, anything
| that ends up in one's mailbox and doesn't immediately get
| recycled. I used to oscillate between two approaches: over-
| elaborate filing systems and just ignoring the problem and
| letting the mail pile up in snowdrifts.
|
| Eventually I realized that my love of elaborate systems was a
| giant fucking problem for my actual life. I thought about it
| like I was designing a production system. I very rarely needed
| to retrieve old documents; most of it was for "just in case"
| conditions. I needed to frequently file things, and if the cost
| of filing was too high, I wouldn't pay it. So I bought 8 filing
| boxes, each 3 or 4 inches high and big enough to comfortably
| hold legal-size paper. Each one is marked with a year, and
| almost everything for that year just gets tossed on top. A few
| exceptional kinds of paper then have their own separate file
| folders (e.g., tax documents, my current landlord, key
| retirement paperwork, key medical stuff). Once a year I throw
| out the contents of the oldest box and relabel it.
|
| This works great. It turns out I almost never need anything
| from an old box. When I do, it's a quick rummage in one spot.
| With infrequent, hard-to-predict retrieval, storage-optimized
| organization is the best organization.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I have been handling physical organization by prioritizing
| filing. My reasoning is that if the house is a mess, filing
| isn't keeping up with retrieval, and I need to reduce
| friction on filing, because dealing with the mess is
| consuming more time than inefficient retrieval.
|
| For paper, I don't have much trouble. Things go on the fridge
| if I will need them soon, or in one small sterilite plastic
| file box. It's nowhere near half full and I would not be
| surprised if it lasts 10+ years before I need any more
| storage for paper.
|
| As an experiment I've been working on sorting things by
| category in a more general way, like the dewey decimal system
| rather than true categories, to remove the overhead of half
| full containers used to sort things. They're based on
| observation of what was already stored vaguely together
| rather than starting with an idea.
|
| One common category is BAM, bulk artificial material. This
| includes paper towels, laundry soap, paint, water repellant
| spray, etc.
|
| Another is TAM, tapes attachments and materials, containing
| tape, steel wire, foam, webbing, carabiners, key split rings,
| screws, and all similar things often having to do with either
| attaching things together or long things sold by the foot.
|
| With wider categories I have fewer places to memorize, and
| organization within a category isn't that critical because
| they can be rummage-searched, without the overhead of a buch
| of individual drawers or boxes in some ever evolving system.
| It's just a formalization of random boxes of junk.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I have a blog post that I've been sketching out in my head about
| this whole area of Tools for Thought, future of computing,
| cybernetics, etc. Basically I find that the thoughtleaders of
| this space seem to always claim that the _true_ manifestation of
| their ideas is just out of reach (Project Xanadu, memex, object
| oriented programming, etc.), but then never deliver this true
| manifestation.
|
| Indeed it's rather remarkable how many of these figures like
| Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, etc., never actually
| shipped much. Now, you could argue that they were ahead of their
| time and couldn't ship, and for some of these people you would be
| right. But c'mon now, Alan Kay is still kicking, and still
| talking about how programming should be reinvented. Douglas
| Engelbart lived into the 2010's. It's more that these fantastical
| futuristic ideas, if they were released, would probably not live
| up to their sales pitches. They're all chasing the high of
| Engelbart's famous demo. And their followers, who are perpetually
| waiting, who attempt interpretations of these thoughtleaders
| ideas and get dismissed as flawed manifestations, well they are
| essentially the parish. They're waiting for the second coming.
|
| This isn't to say that none of these people have accomplished
| stuff. They have accomplished an extraordinary amount. But they
| are fundamentally salesmen, salesmen for the future. And salesmen
| only have a job as long as they have something to sell.
| danking00 wrote:
| I wonder if the trouble is not whether or not they are salesman
| but whether or not they are effective "managers," for want of a
| better word. Many of the products we use today are built by
| companies of tens of thousands of people. Realizing Bush's,
| Englebart's, or Kay's visions demands motivating and
| orchestrating armies of people with diverse skill sets.
|
| Are any of these three known for their skill at orchestrating
| teams or organizations? Compare to some of the more famous
| scientists, engineers, etc., they've led large organizations.
| Like, Jeff Dean, Steve Jobs, J. Robert Oppenheimer, etc.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I think this is true to an extent. Some of these people did
| start out as managers but I think they realized whether
| consciously or not that the selling of ideas was far more
| beneficial than actually creating software.
| simonster wrote:
| A brief look at the first few paragraphs of Vannevar Bush's
| Wikipedia article
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) would clearly
| establish that the answer to your question is yes.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Yeah Vannevar Bush is maybe an unfair example because he
| was truly before his time and he did build some stuff. I
| just felt he was worth pointing out as one of the
| originators of the whole knowledge graph tool for thought
| movement. I don't know if he would have actually executed
| in modern times.
| balsam wrote:
| You might have just stumbled upon the Ozic secret of the
| Silicon Valley. Most of the guys who have made it rich so far
| did so on the ideas of others (while those who had grand ideas
| didn't ship them).
|
| When a core tenet is making things other people want, you tend
| to uplift folks who have no great thoughts of their own to
| sell.
|
| I can imagine an Orwellian doublespeakessay on Steve Jobs
| called, "Saying No As The Only Act of Creation".
|
| Manager, meet thy Master.
|
| PS: Was reading some Thiel approved Girard today, he mentioned
| something about the nihilism in society in which the secret of
| success being all about signaling success.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Kay and his collaborators shipped Smalltalk, which was pretty
| widely used at one time, and which was also highly influential
| on Objective-C, the language of choice for OS X/macOS and iOS
| from 1996 to the introduction of Swift in 2014 (many devs are
| _still_ using Objective-C).
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Indeed. Claiming Kay never shipped anything to show what real
| OOP is like is just ignorant of the history.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Real Artists Ship.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| +1! The danger of not shipping is not that it allows you to
| demand purity of vision, but that it completely removes any
| user feedback mechanism.
|
| And no one, no matter how brilliant, is right about 100% of
| things, 100% of the time. Reality is simply too complex.
|
| Real Artists Ship.
|
| Truly Great Artists Ship, Listen, and Adapt.
| balsam wrote:
| I am glad that Van Gogh didnt have a user feedback
| mechanism? Or maybe God was his only User?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Interactive art is different to non-interactive art.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Van Gogh didn't develop in an artistic or cultural
| vacuum. He received lots of criticism over the years and
| worked with the Parisian avant garde. He had peers to
| receive feedback from.
| carapace wrote:
| Sounds to me like a lazy and, frankly, disrespectful take.
|
| Take Alan Kay. Smalltalk shipped. It's still shipping to this
| day. Right up until 2018 he was working: http://www.vpri.org/
| Is it his fault that Smalltalk didn't conquer the world?
|
| Is it Engelbart's fault his demo hasn't been taken seriously
| for fifty-four years?
| [deleted]
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| I use the following for knowledge:
|
| * Logseq for notes. 95% of these eventually are spaced repetition
| flash cards. The anki plugin for Logseq is incredibly good.
|
| * Lunatask for habits and tasks.
|
| * Readwise reader for reading everything.
|
| I've also never made the PKMS work. I never look at stuff. Using
| Logseq as a convenient place to store knowledge and quiz myself
| on it (the latter requiring me to consolidate understanding) has
| worked out really well.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I disagree with some of the ideas in this piece.
|
| > And yet I don't use them. Why? Building them was fun, sure, but
| there must be utility to a personal database.
|
| There is utility in doing things that are fun. Even if that fun
| thing does not increase your productivity. There are deeper
| issues if enjoying how you spend your time is a problem.
|
| > Pointlessness of Organization: my Calibre and Zotero libraries
| are a mess. But is that bad? Is there any point to organizing
| them? I can always find what I need, either by searching or
| browsing
|
| If you know where to look and how to find your stuff, you're
| sufficiently organized.
|
| > migrating everything from my filesystem, from Calibre, from
| Zotero, from my browser bookmarks, etc. is a huge process
|
| This is a common claim, but the truth is that there's no need to
| move, say, files into a new system. The simplest thing to do is
| keep a note listing where you can find stuff outside the new
| system. Been doing that for years, and it's never failed.
|
| Finally, I don't like the conflation of tools for thought with
| spending large amounts of time on useless things. People use cars
| to get away after robbing banks. The question is whether the
| problem is car ownership or how criminals use their time.
| TOP-HACKER-NEWS wrote:
| [dead]
| exp1orer wrote:
| This was the bit that got me:
|
| > People have this aspirational idea of building a vast,
| oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the
| point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in
| their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they're
| counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your
| knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.
| turtleyacht wrote:
| One idea suggested by _Antinet Zettelkasten_ is to set up an
| analog system that acts as a "second brain." Interacting with
| these boxes of notecards is supposed to be a form of discourse,
| enabling surprising associations and strengthening existing
| memories.
|
| The argument against a digital form is that this kind of
| interaction occurs at a neural level that just is impossible
| without deliberate reflection of handwritten material.
|
| It's important to mention this system is worthless to merely
| contain information. The point is to _publish works_ that
| synthesize these ideas. Otherwise, it 's just a form of
| knowledge Pokemon.
| balsam wrote:
| Feel like the fresh take is really that you can't just
| synthesize new ideas by rearranging the ideas that you suck
| up from the inter-nets, no matter how much offline
| fermentation you put them through. Similar to how "publish or
| perish" merely results in incremental, nearly worthless ideas
| being sold as breakthroughs. Maybe people need to internalize
| twitter as a source of jokes amd entertainment, not insight.
| Maybe alcohol and psychelics need to be seen as brain
| damaging instead of vision inducing.
| crazygringo wrote:
| A side note, but is anyone else experiencing a font size so large
| as to make it almost unreadable?
|
| Viewing it on my laptop, the CSS font size is set to 2 rem, which
| means each letter takes up _four times_ as much space as default
| body text (which is 1 rem, usually 16 px -- so this is 32 px
| size). Even worse, if you zoom out, it detects that and
| compensates by setting it to 2.5 rem (40 px), or over 6 times as
| large in area! It 's trying to _force_ bizarrely big-headline-
| sized body text, even against the user 's wishes.
|
| I've seen this bizarre creeping growth of font sizes across some
| personal blogs over the last decade, but I've never seen a case
| _this_ extreme.
|
| (And remember that, for comparison, traditional OS UI elements
| tend to be around the 12 px size and sometime even smaller, so a
| 32-40 px size is truly gargantuan.)
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I need to allocate time to fixing the font sizes. I suppose
| you're on a high-DPI/retina screen. It's not great.
| damethos wrote:
| I am experiencing the same thing but I read it anyway because
| It was an interesting article :)
| maire wrote:
| By coincidence I am moving off of Evernote right now. I broke
| down everything I used Evernote for right now to plan the roll
| off.
|
| I largely use EN for the GTD system. The first GTD step is just
| capturing info. EN still does this better than any other tool.
|
| EN used to be better at managing large data - but the last major
| release broke all that. For some reason they favored the new user
| over the power user.
|
| Some of the things I used to use EN for are now baked into the
| OS. For instance, the latest release of MacOS now has text search
| on images. The rise of icloud also got rid of many of my use
| cases.
|
| What I am doing now is putting files in files and notes in notes.
| I am converting some notes to files.
|
| I took to heart the scalability issues in EN, and decided to run
| several note taking apps in parallel. After a while I will just
| pick a winner.
|
| Sadly - I have not found a replacement for data capture. EN seems
| to be the only tool that converts email to a note. I might keep
| the free version of EN around for this task, but I am still
| looking for a replacement.
| justindirose wrote:
| One criticism I have of the TfT/PKM space (as a member of it) is
| it often puts too much onus on the tool or system you use. The
| human element is often diminished in favor of replicating our
| brains in our notes.
|
| So instead of making connections in your mind while using the TfT
| app as an external thought workspace, we put this extra process
| on top to make the TfT system a replication of our brains in and
| of itself. For most people, this is an unsustainable effort
| (myself included).
|
| As I see it, the tool is simply the place we work out ideas and
| how we mentally relate them to one another. Whether a plaintext
| file or an interlinked set of notes is sufficient to achieve that
| end goal is up to the individual.
| leonhandreke wrote:
| Maybe the whole networked thought/Zettelkasten thing is just
| something that's only useful for a small subset of endeavours,
| and more of a hindrance for most.
|
| Niklas Luhmann became one of the most productive sociologists of
| the 20th century with the help of his enormous paper-based
| Zettelkasten. If you look at the stuff he wrote, you can see why.
| He ties together publications from the fields of sociology,
| philosophy, legal studies, psychology, biology and surely many
| more, literature, journalism, film... Luhmann was a prolific
| reader (he did few other things as far as I know) and for him,
| stumbling upon a connecting thought he had ten years ago while
| reading a newspaper after having read a specific book, might have
| been crucial to maintain the density of ideas in his
| publications.
|
| In short, these tools are probably only useful to you if you're
| in the business of generating novel ideas by interlinking a lot
| of other ideas that people have had in new, interesting ways.
| (This is the best tentative description I came up with and it's
| probably wrong around the edges).
|
| If you're an engineer, or indeed also a scholar in the humanities
| but playing a different game than Luhmann, these tools may just
| be useless to you. A couple of years ago when I was thinking
| about this a lot, I asked one of my lecturers who was a post-doc
| in comparative political science about his toolset. He didn't
| really seem to understand the question, he told me that he
| sometimes writes notes on books in a Word document but mostly
| knows what's going on in his field and where to look for what. I
| later took a look at his dissertation and while I'm in no
| position to judge the quality of his work (it was probably pretty
| solid, he got it published with a reputable publisher), it seemed
| to have fever moving parts and threads of thought tied together
| than the bits of Luhmann that I've read.
|
| My impression is that what's holding the ecosystem of tools for
| networked thought back right now is that the tools are not built
| for (or possibly even by) the people for whom networked thought
| may be most useful. They're trying to be better task managers,
| tagging systems, collection managers (as mentioned in the linked
| article), flashcard systems, etc. "Zettelkasten" by Daniel
| Ludecke (a sociologist), the software recommended in "How to Take
| Smart Notes" by Sonke Ahrens (himself a professor in the
| humanities), which is hailed as the bible of networked thought by
| many (Roam, Logseq, HN I guess), looks very different from these
| tools. It's an obscure piece of Java software, and while I've
| only briefly tried it out for a few minutes, it works very
| differently. Smaller notes, little structure within them, no
| titles. It has a "desk mode" where you can pull out notes and
| arrange them in a tree structure for when you're writing a paper
| or book (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIztPpFqCBw).
|
| I would love to see what things could happen in the networked
| thought space if people who need these tools the most sat down
| with people who can write software. I have a few ideas, but I'm
| afraid I'm just not enough of a Luhmann to really know what these
| people need. Also, I would just be procrastinating actually
| writing my thesis (nod to the linked article :))
| zetalyrae wrote:
| Yes, one category I left out is research. Turning a big DAG of
| citations into a finished monograph, basically. I feel that
| this is one of the few areas where a TfT with bidirectional
| links makes sense. But I can't really judge this because I'm
| not a researcher, and little of what I do can be called
| research.
| groby_b wrote:
| The value in bundled "Tools for Thoughts" isn't just that you can
| interconnect everything - unless you actively research and want
| to synthesize something new, that's in fact overvalued.
|
| The true value (at least to me) lies in the fact that _all_ my
| information is stored in a human-readable and interchangeable
| format. It makes you independent of vendor whims. It enables the
| creation of custom tools if and when you need them.
|
| The fact that I can click on shiny links just satisfies my desire
| for toys :)
| coldblues wrote:
| I use Logseq currently. I just simply write in my Journals or a
| page, then I add the backlinks on a whim, and leave it be.
| Whenever I need that information again, it will be found by using
| the backlinks, if I don't remember what I'm even searching for.
|
| That's all I do. It's simple, convenient, and doesn't break my
| flow with unnecessary complexity. I just write and link.
|
| That kind of Zettelkasten note-taking workflow is what caught my
| attention and it's currently the only way I can take notes.
|
| People who create complicated note-taking workflows using
| databases and such, they're very bizarre people to me. I can't do
| any of that without recoiling. But I can dump information into my
| graph and link it all together all day if I got into the flow.
| It's just "natural".
| voidhorse wrote:
| I tried something similar a while back after struggling to use
| obsidian myself. I unbundled and subscribed to todoist as well,
| switched to supernotes for notecard style notes etc.
|
| I think ultimately it just comes down to people having different
| needs. It turns out I don't really need a second brain style
| knowledge base. All I need is a solid mobile text editor. It also
| turns out I only need to plan out tasks on a weekly scale. A
| daily scale is too granular for me at this given moment in time.
|
| When you adopt these heavyweight systems before really
| understanding _why_ you need them or if you even need them to
| begin with it very quickly becomes a procrastination trap where,
| as the article mentions, you 're spending far more time managing
| the system for the sake of the system than you are actually using
| it for anything meaningful.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-26 23:00 UTC)