Digital Tools I Wish Existed
jborichevskiy.com
Digital Tools I Wish Existed
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Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed
#2The "Queue Management for Inbound Content" section is exactly what I really want as well, so much that I've just started building it instead of waiting and hoping.
For me, this is the lynchpin:
> "all content I think my future self would appreciate me consuming." (emphasis mine)
Current content feeds are optimized for engagement (ie. advertisement load) and thus won't conceive of a "future self", only what your current self will look at and click on right now.
I think that content feeds need to incorporate goal-orientation and move away from right-here-right-now orientation. For those wanting to do anything difficult they need to optimize their information diet over a very long time-scale, like years, so content-feed tools should be aware of human-scale timelines (eg. high school, college, career, parenting).
Humans thrive on learning and growth but so many platforms choose to see their users as merely inputs to an ad-delivery optimization system.
> I have little visibility into required time investment and foundational context until I’ve opened it and started thinking about it.
This is another thing that really annoys me about our current media ecosystem, and is really also a symptom of not properly conceiving of a person's personal development over time and a person's changing needs over time.
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To look at this blog post from 1000 feet up, I'd say that Jonathan is unfortunately deprived of these tools because our media software ecosystem is madly building things for users who want to look at things and not think, as such platforms are heavily consumeristic and thus fantastic for advertising revenue and monetization generally (eg. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, Canva).
Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed
#3Agreed with all points, but especially the queuing system. I started my journey towards becoming a programmer to build something like that. Its been a long and winding road, but it might be time to follow up on that, unless somebody can point me to a project that already exists like described in the post.
Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed
#4> Content is published in a variety of formats including but not limited to images, sound files, videos, Google Drive docs, diagrams, long-from paywalled articles, PDFs, powerpoint presentations, and base 64 encoded blobs.
One of the great disappointments I’ve had working in tech for 20 years now has been the way we’ve transformed the entire spectrum of human expression, which includes wildly different forms of art and media each of which we used to engage with in its own unique way, into an undifferentiated slurry of “content.”
Every time I hear a child say they want to grow up to be a “content creator,” I die a little inside. Aspire to be a musician, or a painter, or a dancer, I want to tell them. A filmmaker, a poet, a sculptor. Dream of finding your art and mastering it, not just extruding more gruel to fill some corporate pipe.
Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed
#5I haven't read the entire article thoroughly but I think "Queue management for inbound digital content" is something implemented in an SRS app called SuperMemo. The way it's intended to work is that you have content and over time break it down and through the scheduling system you eventually end up with extracts small enough to be made into SRS cards (though it's more complicated than that in actual use). It has a lot of weaknesses, mainly because a lot of it is based on features from IE (thus poor PDF support) but I still find it extremely useful. If I find any article that looks interesting I just throw it there and eventually I'll import it, go through it with incremental reading (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading) and eventually dismiss it.
Edit: I also ought to mention, it has a very good priority/interval system for scheduling when I see things. Essentially things I give lower priority are less likely to show up and when I'm going through my material/doing my reps I'm more likely to see high priority material. There's a general issue that you find the thing you see soonest most shiny and thus a strong likelihood of overprioritizing new material but SuperMemo helps intersperse everything to prevent that.
It sort of can do the central search thing too to an extent, I can search through my collection of imported articles/cards and find stuff that's generally relevant to my interests. Though how useful it is depends largely on how long you've used the app. I am also reminded of the brain (https://www.thebrain.com/) but I'm not super familiar with it.
Have you heard of Ted Nelson's Xanadu? I've only looked into it a little but I was reminded of it when you talked about better reading.
Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed
#6Agreed with all points, but especially the queuing system. I started my journey towards becoming a programmer to build something like that. Its been a long and winding road, but it might be time to follow up on that, unless somebody can point me to a project that already exists like described in the post.
I would check out the IR feature of SuperMemo (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading). There is a very steep learning curve and when you are a beginner you'll think it looks antiquated but if you ever up becoming proficient in it it will all just quick.
Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed
#7I haven't read the entire article thoroughly but I think "Queue management for inbound digital content" is something implemented in an SRS app called SuperMemo. The way it's intended to work is that you have content and over time break it down and through the scheduling system you eventually end up with extracts small enough to be made into SRS cards (though it's more complicated than that in actual use). It has a lo…
Thank you for bringing up SuperMemo - I remember reading through Piotr's article on Genius [0] and thought it was a wonderful piece on the balance of creativity and memorization.
I've looked through SuperMemo's features and while I completely subscribe to the idea of spaced repetition (I have used Anki for some periods) I was put off by the user interface; perhaps I should try it again.
> There's a general issue that you find the thing you see soonest most shiny and thus a strong likelihood of overprioritizing new material but SuperMemo helps intersperse everything to prevent that.
I really the idea of this approach to keep everything at its proper priority level. Thanks for linking the brain as well - I haven't come across it.
I am vaguely familiar with Xandu as well but it warrants another deep dive for sure.
0 - https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/geni...
Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed
#8The "Queue Management for Inbound Content" section is exactly what I really want as well, so much that I've just started building it instead of waiting and hoping. For me, this is the lynchpin: > "all content I think my future self would appreciate me consuming." (emphasis mine) Current content feeds are optimized for engagement (ie. advertisement load) and thus won't conceive of a "future self", only what your curre…
I think even if you have a content feed incorporating goal-orientation you'll still struggle with the learning part. I think this article is very valuable in explaining why: https://andymatuschak.org/books/.
Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed
#9> Content is published in a variety of formats including but not limited to images, sound files, videos, Google Drive docs, diagrams, long-from paywalled articles, PDFs, powerpoint presentations, and base 64 encoded blobs. One of the great disappointments I’ve had working in tech for 20 years now has been the way we’ve transformed the entire spectrum of human expression, which includes wildly different forms of art a…
You might enjoy some chapters of “You Are Not a Gadget”. One of the main discussions is about this.
Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed
#10I haven't read the entire article thoroughly but I think "Queue management for inbound digital content" is something implemented in an SRS app called SuperMemo. The way it's intended to work is that you have content and over time break it down and through the scheduling system you eventually end up with extracts small enough to be made into SRS cards (though it's more complicated than that in actual use). It has a lo…
Thank you for bringing up SuperMemo - I remember reading through Piotr's article on Genius [0] and thought it was a wonderful piece on the balance of creativity and memorization. I've looked through SuperMemo's features and while I completely subscribe to the idea of spaced repetition (I have used Anki for some periods) I was put off by the user interface; perhaps I should try it again. > There's a general issue that…
I love that article, it changed a lot of my thinking regarding people's potential for success. Woz has a lot of other articles you might also find interesting here: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_Guru. I've especially read through a lot of his articles on sleep and memory and found them invaluable.
SuperMemo's interface was not designed with the beginner in mind. When I first started trying it even basic operations frustrated me to no end. But now that I use it as a high(er) level user, it feels very very intuitive and you start to understand why it was designed in a way that looks so unappealing at first. If you do decide to try it again, I would highly recommend joining the SM discord server (https://discordapp.com/invite/pB7jcSK). There are a lot of very helpful people there.