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Unbundling Tools for Thought

borretti.me

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Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#41

Post by c54 »

Actually one thing I liked from this is the folder structure in his Cartesian app screenshots.

Personal → Autogeny (i’m imagining “talking points”, key recurring personal concepts), book of days (daily notes, journal). Documents and people, self explanatory. ”Thoughts” i’m unsure of but probably misc grab bag things that arent profound or important enough for autogeny.

“Trove” is a nice name for the random collection of interesting tidbits and stuff I also tend to collect in my vault

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#42

Post by adamgordonbell »

Playing with and building note taking tools as a form or procrastination is a real issue.

I went from Emacs Org Mode to Workflowy to Roam and the thing I like best out of all of these is not necessarily zettelkasten personal wikis but just being able to make a simple list for today, or outline an article I'm writing.

For me these tools work best when you can use them much like a physical notepad. More structure can be extracted and organized but in a pinch they can be replaced with a todo.txt.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#43

Post by ianmcgowan »

theCrowing wrote: post #30
thewarrior wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to be cliched but do you think AI could make a difference here by thinking for us ?

I believe that a fine-tuned autoregressive language model such as GPT, enhanced with your personal notes, has the potential to serve as a highly effective cognitive aid, potentially even fulfilling the role of a "second brain" that many of us are looking for.

It's not scalable, but as an existence proof of what you're saying, my partner and I fulfill this role for each other - we each are tasked with remembering different facets of our lives (e.g. I know the plot and cast of every movie we've ever watched, she remembers to pay taxes :).

It seems pretty obvious we're heading for that utopia/dystopia where everyone is assigned a personal assistant loaded onto a pervasive mesh (your glasses, watch, phone, computer, desk, house). On the one hand it sounds great to have an AI assistant that knows what I know, a model of how I think, and the ability to fill in the gaps instantly. On the other, it's so ripe for abuse/deepening inequality, the idea almost qualifies as "don't create the torment nexus".

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#44

Post by mythhouse »

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…

> I don’t want a knowledge graph,

I think most obsidian users will agree. I never quite understood the hype behind it. 'second brain' stuff never really made sense to me.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#45

Post by Tomte »

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…

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.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#46

Post by soulofmischief »

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…

It wouldn't take much work to make filter lists first-class citizens in Logseq, if you want to try hacking it in: https://github.com/logseq/logseq

It would be a good feature to have, and it's better than starting from scratch.

> 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.

Logseq doesn't currently have saveable filter lists, but you can create pages with any title which will still collect and display direct and indirect references to that title/tag. This gets you 80% of the way there already, if you get used to the workflow.

Logseq multi-device sync is now in beta, as well.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#47

Post by c54 »

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…

You might like Notational Velocity or nvAlt, basically only has fast new note creation and fast search.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#48

Post by cborenstein »

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…

Stashpad isn't quite this but it's pretty close. Focused on stream-of-consciousness style notes. Would be curious what you think.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#49

Post by c54 »

boopmaster wrote: post #40

As limited as OneNote is, I find it the place I keep returning to. Obsidian was extremely off-putting to me when I last tried it out, as the node parents themselves could not be documents. Or I couldn't figure out how to use them that way! Maybe it's just me! Beyond that, I have a fondness for wikis that permit breadcrumbs from excerpts back to a main documents. Giving the right information in the right place, with a…

Naturally Obsidian has a plugin for this[1].

This is what I like about obsidian. Ultimately nobody has a consistent set of capabilities they want because the whole space is pretty underdefined (exactly as the article is saying). But we still want something. So Obsidian is a kind of bring-your-own collection of features, and the mobile app works good enough too. It’s kinda like vim or emacs where people customize it however they want.

I reckon as the space evolves more clarity will appear and more opinionated schemes will become popular.

[1] https://github.com/aidenlx/alx-folder-note

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#50

Post by Jeff_Brown »

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.

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.
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