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Unbundling Tools for Thought

borretti.me

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Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#91

Post by smilekzs »

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…

Long time OneNote user (since 2003 debut) chiming in. I have been extensively test-driving Obsidian for 6 months now and couldn't be happpier.

I think both [^1] are opinionated on which layers of organization maps to where.

- OneNote: FS dir -> FS file (database) = OneNote Section (manual ordering) -> OneNote (sub-)Page (manual ordering + level) -> OneNote "note containers" (textboxes; [^2])

- Obsidian: FS dir -> FS file (plain text) = Obsidian Page (automatic ordering) -> headers in the page (manual ordering + level)

While I agree in principle that some non-leaf node should be allowed to have content, really you can see that headers/sections in Obsidian map well to the OneNote page-level organization. I wish I got a choice though...

[^1]: Out of the box. OneNote also has a major plugin bundle known as OneTastic.

[^2]: OneNote has _cosmetic_ headers in textboxes which isn't very useful.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#92

Post by smilekzs »

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 do the same in Obsidian with a slight twist!

I like Zettelkasten / bunch-of-markdown-files tools because more often than not they _expand_ on this simple idea, offering additional structure on top without aiming to destruct anything.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#93

Post by hardwaregeek »

danking00 wrote: post #85
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 wonder if the trouble is not whether or not they are salesman but whether or not they are effective “managers,” for want of a better word. Many of the products we use today are built by companies of tens of thousands of people. Realizing Bush’s, Englebart’s, or Kay’s visions demands motivating and orchestrating armies of people with diverse skill sets. Are any of these three known for their skill at orchestrating t…

I think this is true to an extent. Some of these people did start out as managers but I think they realized whether consciously or not that the selling of ideas was far more beneficial than actually creating software.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#94

Post by MonkeyClub »

gcr wrote: post #3
traceroute66 wrote: post #2

Oof ... default font sizes on that blog are obnoxiously large. Paragraph font size is barely smaller than the header size. Makes the whole thing unreadable since you are constantly scrolling to fit the next tiny chunk of text onto the screen. It is impossible to read at any sort of reasonable pace.

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 :)

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#95

Post by srinathkrishna »

This was a nice read and resonated with me a lot especially around how productivity gurus shill every single app out there.

I’ve always felt processes > tools and whatever tool(s) work for you, you ought to stick with it rather than get into a FOMO wheel and try every app out there. Peddlers of these apps are innumerable and YouTube definitely doesn’t shy away from recommending this sort of content.

Even simple text files in a reasonably defined file organization scheme is more than sufficient. This post also gave a name for this - collection management, which I’ve been thinking for a while. More often than not, there are these collections of items/lists that I end up having to track and the ideal bit missing is some process and a low friction tool to get there.

Another thing is the fetish for using a _single_ tool which is self-hostable which plagues the world today. While a younger me would’ve been onboard for this thinking, at this point in my life, the only thing probably matters is local-first and I’ve long given up the hope for a single tool, taking inspiration from the world of Unix tools.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#96

Post by MBO35711 »

cristianpascu wrote: post #83

Just realized something while reading the article, about “spaced repetition”. For a while now I had the impression of not learning anything new and also of loosing the interest of doing so. It sort of came back to me as I am in a sabbatical period now, which gave me some mental clarity and also more space-time to think about things more thoroughly. But, here’s the thing: I have never stopped learning new things. I ha…

Thanks for this timely reminder - I was nearly back off down the TfT rabbit hole again!

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#97

Post by pflenker »

My two golden rules of note taking: 1) taking notes is superior to not taking notes. It structures your thoughts and helps you think. The actual note is of less value than the process of writing it. 2) beware the productivity tarpit. It’s fun to jump on the next blog post about how to get your obsidian setup right, but moving your notes from setup a to setup b generates only few insights (when you re read a note long forgotten perhaps). Movement does not equal progress.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#98

Post by Turing_Machine »

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).

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#99

Post by jimbokun »

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…

Real Artists Ship.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#100

Post by 1123581321 »

bleeding wrote: post #67

I've tried to use a "personal wiki" in professional life and found that I did not really use the functionality. What re-occurring concepts need to be linked back to? AWS? APIs? Perhaps I'm just not a very good professional note-taker, but my brief experimentation didn't really feel useful. What I _have_found it very useful for is D&D notes. People, places, objects come up on a re-occurring basis and it is often usefu…

If you're deep into something like AWS at work, it seems useful to tag all the individual services you encounter in your work so you have a record of where you've used it or investigated using it. One tag for AWS doesn't sound useful. A tag structure like AWS-EC2 should let you search for every service without one overarching tag.

This kind of thing is best done in a collaborative tool, of course.

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