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Unbundling Tools for Thought

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Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#131

Post by hardwaregeek »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #98
hardwaregeek wrote: post #62

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…

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).

That is fair, but why has he not shipped anything else? He's been content to sit back on his laurels for the past 40 years and make broad statements about OOP and the future of programming. Clearly Smalltalk was not the pinnacle of software development.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#132

Post by LunarAurora »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #62

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…

I don't agree.

Academics (and "Hackers"/Visionaries) in every field are doing the same thing every day. It is called (open) experimentation/Imagination/Theorisation.

Tools for thought are no different. Computers/HCI are still in their infancy and these ideas (xanadu…) are just not mature yet. What's the rush?

Even already mature paradigms are not easy to popularize in this domain. Take Obsidian. It is really just hyperlinked text files (at the core). Yet, most people, 30 pages after hyperlinks got popular, will fail to comprehend its utility.

We are still in the phase of tools of thought where even outliners are a novelty. Try adding a "semantic" DB on top of that outliner, and some will call it "a new fundamental model" [1].

My point is : For most (truly) new ideas/methods, it is normal that the manifestation is (ever) out of reach. It is like Charles Babbage reaching for the computer. It was completly out of his reach. Yet, his vision had value for the future.

[1] https://tana.inc/#:~:text=This%20is%20proposing%20a%20new%20... .

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#133

Post by taneq »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #50
Tomte wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I’ve been looking for a good tagging system for image and video files, something I can use to quickly and easily go through a stack of files and tag them, then search by tag later. Bonus points for being able to recompress on the way through, since phones seem to have terrible compression ratios compared to offline compressors.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#134

Post by agileAlligator »

jerf wrote: post #36
agileAlligator wrote: post #5

> 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 cove…

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…

> My MP3 collection is a bit of a mess. I've cleaned up the worst instances of "Band, The" "The Band" "Band" "Band - The"

MusicBrainz Picard cleans and labels your music automatically using sound signatures, even when the file has no metadata. You can just give it your files and let it run, rarely have I felt the need to monitor it. It gets stuff right 99% of the time, the rest 1% is easily fixable whenever you come across it.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#135

Post by sizzle »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #118
balsam wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am glad that Van Gogh didnt have a user feedback mechanism? Or maybe God was his only User?

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.

Didn’t he cut his ear off after fighting with his roommate

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#136

Post by type-r »

> Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.

I do agree with the first part of this sentence, but I think that the second is a little more nuanced. The first few 'links' among nodes in a knowledge graph I do think generally represent more debt (probably less than the node itself, though). As the links increase and the knowledge graph gets denser, I feel that things start to flip and each individual node/link actually gets increasingly easy to recall.

For a specific example: learning how to conjugate a verb in a foreign language and learning a bunch of words out of context is going to be hard to retain over the long-term. However, combining those into a fill-in-the-blank kind of sentence once you know enough actually becomes easier and supports knowledge of all that you've learned. This is just a simple example but once you know about it, you start seeing it everywhere, regardless of the topic under study.

Anyway, I enjoyed the article. I have gone all-in on Anki and sometimes I get concerned that I'm missing out on the newest software. Articles that remind us that the best system is the one that you use are important to have around.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#137

Post by type-r »

crazygringo wrote: post #31

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 a…

I actually had the opposite reaction -- on most websites I have to zoom in to 150 - 200% to get it to be readable (HN is at 175% for me). Here I had to do no zooming.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#138

Post by syntaxfree »

larve wrote: post #68

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 stuc…

I wish there was some lightweight (optional) web-ring like structure for Publish so we could learn from each other. Find me at

https://publish.obsidian.md/zero-chroma-infinity/Signpost

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#139

Post by joshspankit »

I was sparked on this “one graph” idea real hard when I learned about graph databases (which I still say has one of the biggest marketing hurdles to overcome since graph and database mean very specific and well-rooted things) and I will say something that was a blind spot until recently:

Neurotypical people don’t normally think in terms of connections.

Many of my peers (ended up interviewing probably 100 of them) for example felt that the standard testing questions of “X is to Y as A is to _____” were thrown in to give everyone a break.

Neuroypical people can even struggle to understand analogy while to the ND folk they can be as fluid and understandable as breathing or walking.

This is why I think there are significant gaps in the market as OP pointed out.

To get there it takes someone who:

- Thinks with connections as a “first class citizen” (this might even just be the subcategory of kinaesthetic learners)

- Has the programming skills to create a useful tool for scratching their own itch

- Has the awareness that other people might have the same problem, and further has the interest in doing (10?x) the work to make it generally useful for others

- Has the marketing skills and/or the connections required to get visibility and traction

Then to take it to the next level they have to prove that there is a market for it. If none of us understand that the market is small to start with, it would be understandable for someone to see 10% of that market as a complete waste of time since it’s 0.0/\d*/1% of the market they assumed they were targeting.

I may be entirely off the mark. I’ve been thinking about this for a few years during my transition to software development and having conversations as I go but a lot of these thoughts are still internally-compassed.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#140

Post by rasengan0 »

Great article and highlights the cyclical hype of PKMS. I use FountainPens and Paper. RandyPausch was/is a TimeManagement guru and inspires. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/ KeepItSimple. PaidFor SubscribedTo literally every MajorPkms DigitalGarden Wiki MindMap GewGaw aka ToolsForThought out there. But thoughts are cheap along with storage (SdCard) and backup (RsyncBackupScript) There is simply no reason not to enjoy ExternalizeThinking with DigitalTools (and have it centralized) Now for the last 9 years feel like I am making my own language and talking to itself.

Literally my Year2022Review took a few keystrokes and under a few minutes to process.[1]

WuWei is the way.

Live in the terminal both in DayJob and Personal; UseVim; no FileExtensions; CamelCase = thought = node; ISO8601 DateTimeStamp every node; Mimimal DataStructure or VimOutliner prn; Fck Markup MarkDown, PlainText is LazyGenius; FrictionlessSystem, ZeroMaintenance

Capture in GuiBrowser

CaptureBookmark DataUrl

javascript:(function(){let text=""; if(window.getSelection()!=''){text=window.getSelection().toString()+"\n";}prompt("Press Ctrl+C, Escape", text+"\n"+document.title+" "+location.href);})()

[1] Year2022Review Method in local ./.exrc in 128G sd card

Have cursor on 2022 then ,b in NormalMode

where nmap ,b :r !. ./backlinks.sh

and ./backlinks.sh is

#!/usr/bin/sh term=$1 for file in $term do echo $file rg -l -i $file -g '!.*' | sed 's/^/\t/g' done

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