Unbundling Tools for Thought
borretti.me
Unbundling Tools for Thought
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Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought
#2Oof ... 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.
Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought
#3Oof ... 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 :)
Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought
#4Oof ... 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.
Nah, it's the perfect size actually (I am using a laptop, I don't know how it is on mobile screens)
Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought
#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 cover images—what then? What have I gained? Nothing. It is a waste of time to organize things too much.
On reading this, I felt like I already sort of knew this, and this internet stranger validated my thoughts.
Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought
#6[deleted]
Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought
#7This was the bit that got me:
> People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.
Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought
#8I tried something similar a while back after struggling to use obsidian myself. I unbundled and subscribed to todoist as well, switched to supernotes for notecard style notes etc.
I think ultimately it just comes down to people having different needs. It turns out I don't really need a second brain style knowledge base. All I need is a solid mobile text editor. It also turns out I only need to plan out tasks on a weekly scale. A daily scale is too granular for me at this given moment in time.
When you adopt these heavyweight systems before really understanding why you need them or if you even need them to begin with it very quickly becomes a procrastination trap where, as the article mentions, you're spending far more time managing the system for the sake of the system than you are actually using it for anything meaningful.
Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought
#9The author has some really good points, and I think anyone building or using a tool like this should be able to take a hard look at what the tool is actually doing for them personally, vs what it seems like it could potentially be useful for.
One big limitation is time: it takes a lot of time to write things in, say, Roam. You need to be getting commensurate benefit for the time invested. If you aren't sure what the benefit is, except "one day maybe I'll read through all this again and then..." it's probably not worth it. You can make write-only documents anywhere, no need to organize and hyperlink them.
On the other hand, sometimes the amount of friction in using a tool is the issue. Something can be completely impractical when it's doable in principle but has high cost, vs when it is pervasive and effortless. Software that actively searches for associations with what you're currently writing and presents them to you could be much more valuable than software that lets you follow hyperlinks if you want, but you don't actually bother doing it.
Finally, I'll say there's also the fact that humans need to accrete habits slowly over time. If you find/build a notetaking tool with 10,000 plugins, well ok, knowing that the plugins exist is one thing, but you won't actually use them or get value out of them until your brain has indexed them and you've formed a habit that is triggered by a recurring context you will find yourself in.
Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought
#10I'm still not 100% happy with the existing tools for thought.
So far, Google Keep is by far my favorite in terms of experience, because it's blazing fast, plus it has Android widget and Google Assistant integration..
But I don't fully trust it to always be around, so I don't use it for anything long term, just shopping and to do lists, and quick notes to be copied somewhere safer later.
For calendar-like stuff, I use Google Calendar, for the same reasons.
I tend to think of privacy as a specialist tool not generally needed, so I use BitWarden's secure note feature to record anything I'd rather have encrypted.
Finally, for long term notes and journalling, I use Obsidian and SyncThing. But I dislike that Obsidian takes 8 seconds or so to load up, and has no widget to keep always-open, that's just way too much friction for something I'm relying on as a second brain.
If Keep had a markdown sync feature that would keep all notes synced to a portable folder of markdown guaranteed to be there if the service goes down or an app update breaks something, and if they had hierarchal organization features, I would probably use them for everything.
All in all, with all the talk about tools for thought, it's way behind a lot of other areas of software despite having no real technical challenges besides the difficulty of maintaining a cross platform set of apps with all the integrations and widgets and performance optimizations.
I guess that's the problem, there's a lot of tedium and no interesting algorithms, so it doesn't get as much interest.