Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unbundling Tools for Thought

borretti.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 202 posts

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#171

Post by balsam »

sizzle wrote: post #135
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

His roommate the successful artist Paul Gauguin? Tried to borrow Sunflowers but

“Van Gogh was upset and replied that Gauguin had absolutely no right to make this request: "I am definitely keeping my sunflowers in question. He has two of them already, let that hold him. And if he is not satisfied with the exchange he has made with me, he can take back his little Martinique canvas, and his self-portrait sent me from Brittany, at the same time giving me back both my portrait and the two sunflower canvases which he has taken to Paris. So if he ever broaches this subject again, I've told you just how matters stand".

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#172

Post by balsam »

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.

True artists ship to real artists..“Make things that people who’d like to make things people want want” (Like this Website). The unreasonable effectiveness of higher order recommendations.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#174

Post by keizo »

disqard wrote: post #167
keizo wrote: post #146

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 real…

Did you by any chance, also write the "grug-brained developer" (one of my favorite essays on SW Dev)? The artwork at that link looked familiar :)

Ha! No, I’m just a hack trying to catch meme wave and my goals for it align well with grug brian dev. That’s the htmx guy — Carson Gross. If you’re not familiar with htmx, go check it out! Bad ass little library and almost the only external JavaScript I’m using.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#175

Post by s3000 »

deafpolygon wrote: post #162
s3000 wrote: post #23

>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 Wi…

> I am surprised that not all tools for thought have standardized on ActivityPub to enable their users to connect each other's notes. Because most of my notes, and to-do lists are private. I don't want them to be shared, just available to me.

The printing press made it easy to quickly share finished thoughts, boosting science and bringing the industrial revolution. There should be an equal opportunity for progress when we start sharing unfinished thoughts.

What could change our attitude about privacy? We share code, but only good looking code. We share thoughts, but only finished articles and good looking tweets. This inhibits collaboration on the most difficult part of creating ideas.

AI like ChatGPT can become supportive. But why wait for a technical solution if a social solution is possible? What's better than a to-do list which is resolved or made easy because others just happen to have the necessary resources available?

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#176

Post by _carbyau_ »

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.

This is what I want machine learning and face recognition for.

Problems local to my machine, not Orwellian nightmares.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#177

Post by edwintorok »

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…

Bookmarks are a good middle ground between saving everything and not being able to find something you read later. It is integrated in the browser's address bar as autocompletion/search and if you can vaguely recall some words from the title you can find it. I've been using this system for years, works great with Firefox sync and Firefox on Android too (to remember articles I discover on both mobile and desktop in same place)

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#178

Post by martinlillebo »

Tomte wrote: post #81
D13Fd wrote: post #73

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.

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?

Maybe you'll like 1Writer for iOS. It lists files including the line you search for, and it supports the "YYYY-MM-DD Note title" syntax mentioned in the commment above. So you can point the app to the folder where you store your plaintext files.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#179

Post by pps »

dchuk wrote: post #35

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…

> 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.

You can try Nebo.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#180

Post by gglitch »

dchuk wrote: post #35

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…

This sounds like something you could implement most (or all?) of in minutes with either of two methods: (a) a single text file with grep and, optionally, your own custom tags; or (b) a dedicated email account and client. With (a) you get a stupid-simple system with no setup, myriad sync/backup/versioning options, and unlimited scale; with (b) you get every device and OS conceivable, file attachments, and infrastructure you’re already using anyway.
Post reply on HN