This is likely a result of me working in a corporate bureaucracy over the last few years, but I've observed executives using PowerPoint for the purpose of articulating and iterating on their thoughts, and it goes without saying that PowerPoint is ubiquitous (for good or for ill) when it comes to communicating those ideas to a wider audience.
It seems to me that the tools for thought community generally rallies around Excel as the best example of a "bicycle for the mind" due to its functional-reactive nature and its programmable core, but I feel like PowerPoint has made an equal contribution to the democratization of "augmenting collective intelligence" due to its affordances around outlining and presentation.
At my corporate job I oscillate between PowerPoint, word and excel depending on how I envision I’ll need to use the information. Often PowerPoint (as a presentation will be needed), but if I need to go to a detailed level excel is the go to, unless I need to write lots of words, then I’ll use word.
For notes, heirarchical notes and to do lists, I flip around between many tools.. ugh. Often just paper too.
That's interesting: I would have assumed academics would be less inclined to use tools like PowerPoint, but I guess I'm mistaken! It really goes to show how ubiquitous it is as a tool for thought. Do you mind if I ask what the context around those interviews was?
At the time we were considering writing some citation manager software and wanted to verify that other people had the same problems with the integration between Zotero and everything else.
I'd caution you to draw conclusions about academics! One reason we did not actually write the software was because we found academics to be high variance in their preferences.
The few people who used powerpoint for thinking would rather write out 20-30 citations by hand before touching Zotero. Someone else had a setup where one click would send articles from Chrome -> Zotero -> bib export -> Emacs org-mode + org-ref + org-roam
Spaced repetition, while reasonably useful, doesn't come without its challenges as well.
For instance, how can you be sure at the outset that you have designed a good prompt [1] that will enable recall versus recognition?
And even once you have designed a good prompt, that brings up the question of epistemology: how can you be sure at the outset that the "information" you wish to ingest is factual and that it will be useful to you later on? It's easy to imagine memorizing a compelling aphorism like:
> The German word for "passion", which literally translates to "enjoyable suffering". Because if you think you’re passionate about something, you must be willing to ask yourself if you’re willing to suffer for it. If you are, that means you are passionate. Otherwise, it’s just a hobby. [2]
But, while beautiful and compelling, it turns out that this definition/translation of the word "Leidenschaft" is misleading: "Leiden" means "suffering" and "schaft" simply means "-ship". This is very similar to the word _passio_ which is the Latin root of the English word (and whose meaning shines through in "The Passion of Christ", for instance).
When using spaced repetition systems you must be extraordinarily careful around vetting the content that you are putting into them, and most of the time, you would be better simply "coming back to the same reading" on a given topic (thereby effectively building your own ad-hoc SRS process).
The brain exists in order to recognize patterns, but it also likes to over-fit!
how can you be sure at the outset that you have designed a good prompt[?]
The link to Matuschak that you supply explicitly argues that you need to go back and revise prompts based on developments in your knowledge and new connections found. This includes eliminating prompts that are too easy, reformulating them for greater personal import and adding new ones to shore up areas of weakness.
Existing mediums for note-taking (Evernote, Notion, Roam Research) are not sufficient for doing knowledge work over long periods of time. The functions these incumbents serve are primarily as “stores of knowledge” that we save because it’s interesting in the moment but never read through or “scratchpads” that we use once and never get rid of, which end up cluttering our information space like a junk drawer full of shopping lists and knick-knacks.
Serious thought involves more than just collections and associations: mastery requires repetition, creativity requires serendipitous discovery, and productive output requires flow states. It’s also a matter of acknowledging the fact that “units of knowledge” do not exist on their own: all knowledge is embedded in context (or “deeply intertwingled”, in the words of Ted Nelson), and without context, metaphor, and nuance, we cannot form meaningful connections. By baking these attributes into the medium itself, it’s possible to build an information space that’s simple to explore, can surface information when you need it, can augment the mind’s naturally ability to form connections, and can get out of the way the rest of the time.
Couldn't you just say "I'm working on this specific thing for this specific purpose that works this specific way" ? Sigh.
Sorry for the negativity, but this post is the perfect example of the wishy-washy rhetoric that people interested in this domain always use.
For examples of what I'm talking about, browse this tedious litany [1] (roam-whitepaper), see if you manage to get pass the first paragraph [2]. BTW, the price for the "Believer" plan of roam [1] is $500 dollars. Roam itself is advertised with the hashtag "#roamcult". Pretty strong BS signals coming from this one.
You know, the trouble is, you're absolutely right. I _could_ have just said "I'm working on a note-taking app", but nothing about that seems particularly weird or hard.
To address the poetic waxing more directly, it's important to remember that we still don't have very good language to talk about the "primitives of knowledge work", which is why I phrased my statement the way I did. We know it almost certainly doesn't involve the concept of "notes" (at least in the way we think about right now) and calling them simply "ideas" is altogether too vague.
As far as the #roamcult is concerned, we are overwhelmingly in agreement :)
Like most note-taking app developers, you don't seem to be concerned with the fundamental questions of what notes are and why we take them. In a certain sense everything we create physically or digitally can be considered a note.
Many write-only "scratchpad" notes are useful because they helped the mind focus and organize information. They can often be safely archived or discarded.
I've seen many people on HN struggle with this issue. I've bookmarked this post from a few months ago and enjoyed reading it and trying some of the ideas out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000791
I very much like the idea of the hierarchy and the content just being the file system.
I’m less excited about the connection to Zettelkasten because that smells of fad.
If there were an app that would make useful sense out of a few tens of gigabytes of stuff kept in a plain folder hierarchy, I’d be a potential customer. In a way Dropbox tries to do this, and it’s better than nothing (for me) but I still wish for some kind of magical portal into my messy attic.
I started working on the app way before Zettelkasten became a thing. My goal is to not force a specific workflow. If you would like to use it as Zettelkasten, it'll work. If you prefer a different system, you can have the app adapt to your needs. It's all just files & folders underneath, only the representation varies.
I'm curious about your folder hierarchy. What kind of files do you keep there to get to tens of gigabytes and what type of knowledge would you like to extract/what type of connections to form?
I'm currently at about 100 MB for roughly 1,400 individual notes (text and images).
Text, images, videos up to and including the occasional rare film, lots of PDFs (usually small), sometimes a PowerPoint or an Excel spreadsheet, used to also do source code and builds and stuff before GitHub... and if I had faith in them being more useful, as opposed to just backed up, I'd probably dump a whole bunch more in my semi-organized DropBox folder.
So for my use-case the Organizer App would have to be able to deal with lots and lots of data of various types, occasionally including multi-gig files like the rough cut of a film, and also know when I "mv this ~/Organizer/that/" -- a tall order, I know. But with storage so cheap these days, I still dream of that.
Re: semi-organized DropBox folder: this came up here recently and might be of help to organize your files: https://johnnydecimal.com
The app I'm working is more focused on capturing knowledge as structured notes. It sounds like a good full text search could already be of help in your case. That maybe combined with slowly categorizing your content with a system like Johhny.Decimal or something similar.
You've described the problem really eloquently. You've obviously put a lot of thought into this. I don't see contact info for you. My email is in my profile. I'd love to chat if you're interested.
I’m not working on this problem actively but about once a year I go into a frenzy of brainstorming about it.
What I wish for is a useful melding of easy stuff like Notes.app, structured stuff like a custom database, and my reams of notes taken on physical paper. Oh and scrapbooks, web clippings, etc.
At the end of every brainstorm I throw up my hands, say this is too complicated to ever be worth doing, and resolve to change the way I gather and generate information.
Are you working on a solution in that field? I've been thinking about the same problem lately, especially how information can resurface contextually while typing or searching for knowledge.
I'm curious how is your solution different from the Zettelkasten-inspired note taking tools?
You've very eloquently put to words my disappointing experiences with that. I hope that someone who understands the problem that well that they can state the problem so unambiguosly, will be able to deliver a novel solution.
Have you already done anything towards this goal? This is something I’ve been thinking about for several years and I’m about to tackle as a side project so would love to chat with you if you want.
I tried so many tools in this category (currently using Trilium Notes). Quite a few times I almost embarked on making my own. Your approach resonates strongly.
Is there a mailing list or some other place to track progress?
All of these work more like scratchpads and, well, note books. That's fine if I want to put information down for later retrieval and even for low key exploration of past thought. But that's just the digitization of pre-21st century information management. What is now sought after is the next, previously impossible step.
What I envision is more of a knowledge space navigator that lives from connections and links (Wikipedia!) but allows a personal state of information and annotation/augmentation on top of it.
I want something that digitally represents my state of thought while augmenting it with a clean version of the world's knowledge and related information, if that makes sense.
Imagine writing a crypto algorithm - a browser with 30 tabs open and a note app plus my IDE feel like a clumsy and ineffective way to truly put my mind and thoughts into the context of work. It simply feels like doing digitally what people did in the 1960s with pen and paper, encyclopedias and books on their desk.
However, the internet and our hardware today feel like they allow to add at least one another dimension. For many, it's a hunch and a revolutionary product waiting to happen.
I worked with someone in 2013 who I'm still convinced solved this problem. But he was an absolute terror to work with. A petty authoritarian who would look over every website I'd go to and have screen monitoring and key logging software.
I kid you not. I left after 6 weeks. I snuck out the work with me (I wasn't "allowed" to bring it home.) If you're interested I'd be more than happy to share the code.
I think it was really revolutionary.
Essentially it used grammatical structures to arrange text in a navigable 2d space which he needed because he was a highly visual and spatial learner.
But what it allowed for is a nonlinear and a nonsequential arrangement of ideas using Wikipedia text, not just some simple mindmap stuff.
I used Wikipedia as an example in a prototype engine I made.
Articles Flowed Into each other through a continuous navigable space. You could interact and engage to go cognitively deeper and expand a new path, as opposed to a series of documents. Wikipedia became one continuous thing that you could endlessly navigate through a 2d space of.
The content wasn't large blocks of text but broken up using a separate visual language so that there'd only be a few words then a relation to another group and so on. This kept the concepts spatially relative and made the distinction of pages disappear.
It did it all automatically. Really amazing stuff. I also worked with Ted Nelson, this guy's methods were better. No question.
He developed the techniques over about 20 years manually and had transferred textbooks to rolls of butcher paper that he kept in cabinets. He totally didn't understand the value of his process as something as transformative as Vannevar Bush's As We May Think.
Instead he wanted to make it a proprietary format with proprietary content under a private publishing company for childhood education. He wanted a kludgy editor to make new content with and then a kludgy viewer for single topic things. He wanted to dictate the interface, keystrokes...
Because once again he's an authoritarian pedant. Bah, he didn't see what he made.
Ideas need to be controlled at the right level of abstraction and liberated at the others. That's what Linus knows that RMS doesn't. That's what TBL knows that Nelson doesn't. That's what Jobs knew but Apple doesn't.
I wanted to run with the idea but yeah, 7 years ago and I've done nothing. I got everything still.
I should stop everything and finish it. It's really something radically different. I think it will change at least the way I personally learn things.
The campaign to convince others, yeah well, no guarantees there.
Sure darklang improves productivity. But the cost of that productivity is absolute vendor lock-in...
Darklang is a proprietary framework where the ENTIRE stack... even the IDE! is controlled by a specific company. Just be weary of this, when depending on it.
That's very true, but for me that's an acceptable tradeoff for not having to write much code or spin up a database, docker container, load balancer, or worry about security. Dark is great for getting a project off the ground and getting to the "proof of concept" stage: for me, there is tremendous value in getting there sooner rather than wasting a bunch of time doing things that are tangential to creating the product.
True, it's great for prototypes, but remember that their incentive is for you to remain on the platform as your project gets bigger.
Therefore you're likely to have extreme difficulty in moving off the platform as your system grows. Which means either a complete rebuild off the platform, or the easier option... Stay on the platform.
So the ultimate options are; either choose open-source flexible solutions, or remain shackled to the proprietary platforms...
That's an interesting point-of-view. I was also worried and had to search in their Slack channel. This is what they have to say:
"so specifically to lock-in: right now, no one concerned about lock-in is going to have a good experience on dark. We don’t have the resources to address that need, but at some point we will be in a company position to deal with the lock-in question. Our plan is to give you tools and resources to move off Dark if you want to"
in b4 all of HN crying posts about dead propriatory software and blogs of how to hack and partially import stuff to "new replacement startup" that is also locked in. When will people finally learn that locked in languages are a very costly mistake.
+1 for Dark — I've been helping a friend with a side project whose backend is built on Dark, and it's very impressive. The request replay feature (being able to replay a previous HTTP request to an endpoint) and seeing step-by-step execution results is amazing.
I've been a Dark beta user since last year and have built several small side projects on it. I think it's fantastic. But I'd describe it as "just code" and not "low code".
To make it work, you have to write all the code! However, you _don't_ have to worry about provisioning databases, deploying, etc, etc, etc.
Makes it really satisfying as a learning to build something and have it be live without getting stuck in heroku / mongodb / etc hell.
I don't know about that... I think the only conclusion you could draw from this might be that the market for iOS and Mac _RSS readers_ are almost the same size. You might even be able to stretch it to say they are the _same_ market.
I wouldn’t even draw that conclusion. NetNewsWire is very old school with an old fan base, and outside its existing fan base I don’t think it’s particularly relevant today (sorry). I doubt a user new to RSS or new to RSS reader on Apple platforms today would land on NNW.
Being a heavy, long-time RSS user and having tested both the macOS and iOS app of NNW, I think you’re wrong. NNW it’s incredibly well-done, fast and polished, and it’s the best RSS app I’ve ever used, and I’ve used plenty. It’s not unrealistic to think it will become successful and relevant, maybe even contribute to a resurgence of RSS and bring in new users, given enough time.
Kinda. The original NetNewsWire was made by the same guy behind the current NetNewsWire. It's just that there was a period in between where NetNewsWire was owned and developed by someone else.
If it does the same thing and has the same name and creator, is it really a different project? Many software releases are actually complete rewrites under the hood.
The only reason what became Net News Wire 5 originally had a different name is because NNW was owned by BlackPixel at that point.
>You probably know that I’ve been working on a free and open source reader named Evergreen. Evergreen 1.0 will be renamed NetNewsWire 5.0 — in other words, I’ve been working on NetNewsWire 5.0 all this time without knowing it!
There's no evidence there is supposed to be continuity between the projects other than the name changing. You can say it's old school but the entire thing is written in Swift to modern UI standards. Not sure what more you could ask for.
> Yes? I don't even understand how this is a question.
Well that's where we philosophically disagree I guess. To me, version 10 of Mac OS is still the continuation of version 9 of Mac OS, even though they're fundamentally different systems under the hood.
>To me, version 10 of Mac OS is still the continuation of version 9 of Mac OS, even though they're fundamentally different systems under the hood.
Sure, and it carries over certain parts and leaves out others. Substantially similar? I'll buy that. Arguably the same thing, ontologically? I think that's a lot harder to prove, which is what the OP I replied to was saying.
Or the Mac market is so much smaller that the iOS market that there is practically no competition for an in-demand RSS reader on Mac and barely any space to enter the market on iOS.
This was my first thought. Especially as I would guess that Mac users who use RSS readers are extremely likely to have both Macs and iPhones and install their RSS reader on of them.
Yup, exactly this. The fact that most iPad "creativity" apps (looking at Procreate, Notability, Photoshop, etc) are using essentially the same set of interactions as we have on the Mac at the moment (limited to a single input method at a time) means that despite having "10x" the available "interaction bandwidth", we are using only 1/10th of it. Gestures are problematic because of their lack of discoverability, but there are definitely other (even simpler) ways to achieve this (can't really say too much since I'm working on a product in this space).
What about coalescing the lists of applications requiring specific permissions, for instance, and presenting that to the user at the end of the setup process in a more structured step? I'm imagining a list of "here are XYZ applications requesting location services access, pick which ones you don't want to give location access to" and then a list of "here are ABC apps that want microphone and camera access". It's not great, but it does eliminate the myriad popups. The more "Apple" solution would be to just have sensible defaults (deny) and only prompt the user when the app in question wants to access that specific item (the way iOS implements it).
> The more "Apple" solution would be to just have sensible defaults (deny) and only prompt the user when the app in question wants to access that specific item (the way iOS implements it).
This is how it works; it’s just that macOS applications are not used to delaying authorization prompts to the appropriate time so they ask for it on startup.
I think the coolest aspect about Unison, is that they're trying to reify the concept of a codebase (http://unisonweb.org/2016-09-17/editing.html) into something more than just a collection of lines of source code. You can think of it more like a well-defined object that can be transformed in coherent, strongly-typed ways. Unison identifies everything by a hash, so if you "change" a function definition, you're not actually mutating any state in the codebase, you're introducing a new function with a new hash.
If you ever find yourself in Mountain View on a Saturday around 11AM, I highly recommend taking in the IBM 1401 demo that happens at the Computer History Museum: singlehandedly one of the coolest things I’ve experienced. Having the opportunity to not only see the machines in action, but to speak with the engineers who originally used them in their work was such a treat.
On a similar note for anyone who might find themselves in the UK the "National Museum of Computing" in the grounds of Bletchley Park is also a great visit https://www.tnmoc.org/ , with the guided tour especially.
They also have the PDP-1 lab next door which they run on the first and third Saturdays of the month.
Last visit I was able to play the original "SpaceWar!" on it and the demo was run by Steve Russell and Peter Samson. Great to see pivotal computer history that directly impacted my life as described by people directly involved in making that history.
It seems to me that the tools for thought community generally rallies around Excel as the best example of a "bicycle for the mind" due to its functional-reactive nature and its programmable core, but I feel like PowerPoint has made an equal contribution to the democratization of "augmenting collective intelligence" due to its affordances around outlining and presentation.