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Unbundling Tools for Thought

borretti.me

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Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#71

Post by karencarits »

frutiger wrote: post #60
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 personally agree with your point (and find the loose textual search offered by phones these days to be mostly adequate). But reading your comment gave me a thought: filesystem hierarchies are indeed insufficient, but what about filesystem hierarchies with liberal use of hardlinks?

Or tag based, such as https://www.tagspaces.org/

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#73

Post by D13Fd »

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.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#74

Post by Jeff_Brown »

frutiger wrote: post #60
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 personally agree with your point (and find the loose textual search offered by phones these days to be mostly adequate). But reading your comment gave me a thought: filesystem hierarchies are indeed insufficient, but what about filesystem hierarchies with liberal use of hardlinks?

That seems equivalent to a graph to me, and yes, I'm unaware of any kind of search that a graph does not permit. Indeed it could be the basis for a system that, in my opinion, would dominate any of the existing knowledge graph / tool for thought products. It would consist of three more pieces:

  * A database for backlinks. (Links from file X to file Y would only be possible when X has an appropriate file format -- `.txt`, `.md`, `.org`, etc.)

  * A search grammar with the following primitives:

    * find children of (links from) query results
    * find parents of (links into) query results
    * take the disjunction (OR) of queries
    * take the conjunction (AND) of queries
    * group queries with parentheses

  * The ability to pipe files found via ordinary shell commands into that grammar.
Given the size of most peoples' knowledge graphs, you wouldn't even need to keep a text index (ala Lucene) -- `find` and `grep` would be more than sufficient.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#75

Post by jamesgill »

I tried everything--Emacs, word processing software, custom conversion scripts, you name it. A few years ago, I more or less adopted Derek Sivers' method: I keep topical plain text files (markdown, really).

He described the topical files bit here ('Thoughts On' files): https://sive.rs/dj

And the benefits of just writing plain text here: https://sive.rs/plaintext

Now, I just organize my text files in folders and forget about it. It's all on Dropbox, so I can read/revise from any machine, and text files are lightweight and simple to keep synced copies locally.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#76

Post by szastamasta »

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.

For me photos are solved problem now. I no longer do any cleanup on them, just assume that Apple AI will show me best photos when I search for them. I think that it is simply good enough already.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#77

Post by justindirose »

One criticism I have of the TfT/PKM space (as a member of it) is it often puts too much onus on the tool or system you use. The human element is often diminished in favor of replicating our brains in our notes.

So instead of making connections in your mind while using the TfT app as an external thought workspace, we put this extra process on top to make the TfT system a replication of our brains in and of itself. For most people, this is an unsustainable effort (myself included).

As I see it, the tool is simply the place we work out ideas and how we mentally relate them to one another. Whether a plaintext file or an interlinked set of notes is sufficient to achieve that end goal is up to the individual.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#80

Post by SirensOfTitan »

I use the following for knowledge:

* Logseq for notes. 95% of these eventually are spaced repetition flash cards. The anki plugin for Logseq is incredibly good.

* Lunatask for habits and tasks.

* Readwise reader for reading everything.

I've also never made the PKMS work. I never look at stuff. Using Logseq as a convenient place to store knowledge and quiz myself on it (the latter requiring me to consolidate understanding) has worked out really well.

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