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Digital Tools I Wish Existed

jborichevskiy.com

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Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#11

Post by thundergolfer »

rajlego wrote: post #8
thundergolfer wrote: post #2

The "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/ .

Yep, I'm familiar with that post and largely agree. I personally love books as a learning tool but I've personally not learnt nearly as much about programming from reading compared with 'doing'.

The content-feed I'm aiming towards certainly includes books because they're essential to really understanding certain things, but won't be just concerned with reading material.

The key to supporting goal-orientation is some notion of scheduling, requisites, and knowledge-evaluation. This system should not at all be limited to books. My early prototype will include flash-cards, articles, programming koans, and Leetcode problems.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#12

Post by hos234 »

thundergolfer wrote: post #2

The "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…

Also all the individual effects get exponentially amplified when dealing with orgs/groups/teams being hit by/creating their own info tsunamis.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#13

Post by pgcj_poster »

smacktoward wrote: post #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 a…

> Every time I hear a child say they want to grow up to be a “content creator,”

Do kids really say this? If so I'm going to kill myself.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#14

Post by kresten »

This is taking your digital life very seriously.

I feel like saying he should have less screen time and live in the real world cause such details don’t matter at all.

But what a hypocrite that would make me.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#15

Post by rajlego »

thundergolfer wrote: post #11
rajlego wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ .

Yep, I'm familiar with that post and largely agree. I personally love books as a learning tool but I've personally not learnt nearly as much about programming from reading compared with 'doing'. The content-feed I'm aiming towards certainly includes books because they're essential to really understanding certain things, but won't be just concerned with reading material. The key to supporting goal-orientation is some…

For programming, you might find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgrdg1uwDeA Larry Sanger (co-founder of wikipedia) found SuperMemo/SRS sort of clunky for use with program so he made a program which lets you review more by doing rather than just recalling.

I think rest of what you're after are in large part SuperMemo which I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread. It basically allows the same goal orientation feature through its priority/scheduling system though it lacks managing requisites (aside from just scheduling something to show up later than something else).

I'm not a huge fan of books for 2 reasons: -they're not information dense (you can get way more information-per-paragraph from a wikipedia article rather than a book) -they're not very context independent, as in, if I want to understand some specific part of a book I'll likely have to read the entire thing while with internet articles I can read one part and ignore the rest. The main reason this is important is that I can read the parts I find valuable and ignore less valued things. Reading an entire book for one concept that takes 15 chapters to get to isn't great.

With SuperMemo, if there's a book I find interesting I'll generally try to find any alternative wikipedia article first or otherwise some other web article on the same idea. It's just takes so much more time to read and retain a book than to retain a smaller, denser article.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#17

Post by jborichevskiy »

thundergolfer wrote: post #2

The "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…

> 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.

Spot on analysis. When I open Reddit it's indeed as if I don't have to think, I can just... turn off. Sure, there are times when that's the right experience be it after a long day or something - but once you're on an infinitely scrolling app it's hard to leave. Our brains just haven't caught up yet. As soon as I've left the app I struggle to list the 5 most interesting things I learned or saw.

> 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).

One of the things I like about school is in some way it takes care of that for you, for a while anyway: this book follows that one, don't waste your time understanding this until you've poked at that, etc. But I don't think we actually learn how to develop (or maintain) those long-term learning plans; especially as they are rarely linear but much more akin to an RPG skill tree.

I'm excited to see what you build!

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#18

Post by kamphey »

It’s interesting that your “tool” revolves around you... in other words, Revolves around a single user. What I see happening in the content ecosystem are two things: 1. Easier to make content than ever before and 2. Variety of content is collected by topic, not by user.

1. Social Media and all web content tools are always making it easier to make stuff. This might not be very good, but it’s good. Yes we get more noise than signal, but in time there should be tools to cull that noise. The numbers are astounding, 500 new podcasts are started, a day. Millions of YT videos uploaded a minute. Medium made it fast to write.

2. Platforms, even medium and social media, allow you to collect around topics. Yes hashtags, but also publishers/pages. I can search IG through #technology or follow @technology. Same name different stream of content.

If you’d like a mix of audio, video and writing, there needs to be a publisher that creates on a single topic. Digital publishers a plenty. PopSugar, Bustle, Jalopnik, The Athletic, etc. These will continuously get better and worse as their revenue models mature. There will be a hybrid of ads and fees. But the “best” ones, the higher signal to noise will be ones you pay for. $50 a year for The Athletic is a steal right now if you want it. Trade pubs, The Information, Business of Fashion, and the like are multi-medium publishers.

Spending $200 a year between 4 trade pubs that help me be a better person, saves a couple days total of ads for me and supports 20 journalists do the best work they can. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#19

Post by thundergolfer »

rajlego wrote: post #15
thundergolfer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I'm familiar with that post and largely agree. I personally love books as a learning tool but I've personally not learnt nearly as much about programming from reading compared with 'doing'. The content-feed I'm aiming towards certainly includes books because they're essential to really understanding certain things, but won't be just concerned with reading material. The key to supporting goal-orientation is some…

For programming, you might find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgrdg1uwDeA Larry Sanger (co-founder of wikipedia) found SuperMemo/SRS sort of clunky for use with program so he made a program which lets you review more by doing rather than just recalling. I think rest of what you're after are in large part SuperMemo which I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread. It basically allows the same go…

Thanks for the video link, I’ll check it out.

SuperMemo is a large part of it yeah. I’ve thought about how I will integrate that functionality in as the evidence is there that it works.

In certain domains I really disagree that books aren’t information dense. If you want to properly understand say philosophy, politics, literature it is essential to read primary sources which are often books. Reasons and Persons does not waste a page, for example.

Agree that a lot of books are padded as hell, but to say this is a problem generally with books is myopic. You might just be reading Self-Help and Management books which are notoriously padded out.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#20

Post by thundergolfer »

hos234 wrote: post #12
thundergolfer wrote: post #2

The "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…

Also all the individual effects get exponentially amplified when dealing with orgs/groups/teams being hit by/creating their own info tsunamis.

Can you elaborate? What’s an info tsunami as it relates to my comment?
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