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Unbundling Tools for Thought

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Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#141

Post by wpietri »

eternityforest wrote: post #106
wpietri wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

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 n…

Yes, same spirit for sure! Rummage-searching is very effective as long as the total rummage space is low, like a single box.

The main place where I'll depart from that is with higher access frequency. E.g., I have a box that is sort of "LRU tech stuff". In there my various cables are sorted by type into gallon ziplocs. Finding the right kind of USB cable is something I do too often to want to pull it out of a 50-wire snarl.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#143

Post by [deleted] »

carapace wrote: post #120
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…

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]

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#144

Post by blep_ »

MonkeyClub wrote: post #94
gcr wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i can't read without zooming text, and i generally appreciate larger text on some sites. Cmd+- to opt out, as usual :)

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 :)

It's almost like font size should have been solely a per-user setting in the browser, and not a per-page setting.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#145

Post by eternityforest »

wpietri wrote: post #141
eternityforest wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Yes, same spirit for sure! Rummage-searching is very effective as long as the total rummage space is low, like a single box. The main place where I'll depart from that is with higher access frequency. E.g., I have a box that is sort of "LRU tech stuff". In there my various cables are sorted by type into gallon ziplocs. Finding the right kind of USB cable is something I do too often to want to pull it out of a 50-wire…

Oh I didn't think of that. LRU makes a lot of sense, especially since it's just the default big mess with an expiry.

My first line of defense with tech is volume reduction on the stuff itself. Bluetooth over cables, software over hardware, USB-C over everything else, resisting any kind of random tinkering gadgets in favor of phone apps and zero-friction stuff I'll set up and never bother to upgrade, etc.

If you never buy random stuff just because it looks cool, then when you really do want something you can afford to future proof it and sometimes get one thing that replaces multiple separate things.

I have one box dedicated just to power(Which I may split up into separate cables and batteries boxes) that has all my USBs not in active use.

USB-C has been fantastic. If you don't do a lot of fancy stuff with high data rates, it's an amazing way to collapse down the number of unique objects.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#146

Post by keizo »

I've found most apps too slow or too complex. So much that I've spent the last 3 months building another one, kinda like the author. Maybe my use case is different than most as I only spend 20% of my workday on the computer, but I'm convinced there are others like me. Roam Research was compelling and I paid the $500 two years ago. But found the friction and 12 second load time too slow. I downloaded my graph and realized it's only 250k of text -- maybe I'm a light note taker. Either way, sticking text on a server side rendered webpage seems reasonable. I have my entire graph on one page. Most of the time, ctrl-f will find what I need. Trying to do autotagging and some fun things with open ai. It's unpolished but online if anyone wants to give it a go. Just a hair above plain text files. grugnotes.com -- tech stack is django, htmx on google cloud run. Haven't done much coding in past 10 years, so skipped all the js frameworks and loving it.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#147

Post by mikewarot »

Tomte wrote: post #45
jerf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Digital photos are easy to organize... I store everything in d:\masterarchive\yyyy\yyyymmdd\ folders, and have since 1997

Tagging them with embedded IPTC tags is the way to go. DigiKam works (mostly) as a substitute for the late Picassa. (I'd use that, but the last version has a nasty bug in that it sometimes swaps faces in the recognition database, which then tends to corrupt it all).

The major problem I've had is that in the beginning I didn't really have enough free disk space to keep up. That is no longer an issue, nor is it likely to be again.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#148

Post by mikewarot »

joshspankit wrote: post #139

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…

I think you just described mappers vs packers, a theme in the programmer's stone.[1]

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#149

Post by mikewarot »

Imagine a proxy that sat between your web browser and the internet, transparently recording to your local storage everything you've ever seen, in context.

Imagine Google, back when it still worked, able to search ONLY the stuff you've already seen. That would be incredibly useful.

A decade or so ago, there was an intriguing story on Slashdot about a covert operation prior to Desert Storm that simply recorded the waveforms of the power feed going into the Iraqi enrichment facility, and how that simple dataset allowed all sorts of things to be inferred.

I've tried more than once to find that story again, and simply can't, and I have pretty strong Google-fu.

If I had a log of everything I've seen, it would be trivial to find.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#150

Post by deafpolygon »

balsam wrote: post #112
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…

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 Ac…

> the Ozic secret

Can you expand on the origin of this? I tried googling, but it failed me.

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