[HN Gopher] Gains I'm seeing from my second brain tool
___________________________________________________________________
Gains I'm seeing from my second brain tool
Author : codazoda
Score : 119 points
Date : 2022-01-31 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joeldare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (joeldare.com)
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| This is cool. Have you considered making it a chrome extension?
| _virtu wrote:
| Love that you're putting this out there, but what's the
| difference between this and VisualStudio code or another editor
| du jour?
| codazoda wrote:
| Thanks. For me, it's important that it runs in the browser and
| is still minimal (just text). I spend much of my time in the
| browser. I spend a lot of time in VS Code too, but I found it
| awkward for notes for some reason. It may be that I've got a
| few VS Code projects opened and so I was confusing code with
| notes, I'm not really sure.
|
| There are lots of note tools out there and I'm sure our
| preferences will each be different. I hacked this one together
| to work for my particular needs, which I'm not sure I even
| completely understand. But, the minimalist web based nature of
| it is making the work-flow work really well for me.
| newbie789 wrote:
| This is a wildly masturbatory post. The author made a text editor
| for ~ _hyper productive_ ~ people and decided to call it a
| "second brain."
|
| How on earth does this end up on the front page of HN? Is it a
| commonly held belief that making a text editor imbues one with
| some sort of ascendant mode of cogitation?
| junipertea wrote:
| Second brain is a pretty common term for curating your
| knowledge in a structured way. While a text editor is a main
| component of it, it tends to allow us to:
|
| 1) connect notes/ideas using tags or links
|
| 2) automatically generate graphs/views (some even do sql)
|
| 3) make it easy to look up past information.
|
| Some people can do it using a single txt file in notepad.exe
| and ctrl+f, some people add tags/headers/titles to make it
| easier, and some people go full graph DB with roam research.
| You might not enjoy that (and based on the comments, we enjoy
| dumping stuff to it more than using it), but no need to dismiss
| this.
| vernie wrote:
| I'm just a moderately productive programmer so I guess this isn't
| for me.
| [deleted]
| l0c0b0x wrote:
| Am I in a minority that has been looking for a tool like this
| ("2nd brain"), but just never knew the concept is called that
| way? This is what my current, best second brain, looks like :\
|
| https://i.imgur.com/B1dT9M8.png
|
| I'm excited to try these new tools and see improvements.
| keb_ wrote:
| Haha I kinda do what you do (text editor + files). It works
| fine for me, and I keep it synced with Syncthing. I just
| repurposed my old installation of Sublime Text 3 and keep stuff
| separated by [topic].md.
|
| screenshot: https://i.vgy.me/1Ol8BZ.png
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| "Notes", "personal knowledge base" and "(personal) knowledge
| graph" are terms I'd call both more informative and more
| popular than "second brain", but they all have history.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Ha, this is what mine looks like too, but all in one tab and
| split up via line breaks. Sometimes I come back to it and
| realize I've completely lost the plot and clear it and start
| over. It's like having too many tabs open in a web browser.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Show HN: I built my own second brain software tool_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640765 - Dec 2021 (20
| comments)
| onaworkcomputer wrote:
| drooby wrote:
| I'd like to see these kind of second brain tools mergable with a
| global anonymized database. Where my notes merge with the
| collective, and I can traverse ideas that spawn from my database
| into the collective whole.
| cxr wrote:
| This is, in theory, what graph.global is supposed to be (by Mek
| from OpenLibrary / Internet Archive).
|
| <https://github.com/w2g/w2g>
| bityard wrote:
| This was exactly what the World Wide Web was intended to be.
| akvadrako wrote:
| I agree this is something we should have and it's what I will
| be working on for the next year or so.
|
| One aspect I would like to get out of it is something like
| Wikipedia but with no notability criteria or censorship, since
| each author can choose which edits to include.
| 58x14 wrote:
| How can I follow along?
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| ouid wrote:
| What I would like, as a productivity tool, is a coarse to do list
| + contexts. Contexts here means, essentially, snapshots of
| virtual machines with all of the tools open that I was using,
| along with some structure for shared ddata, probably managed by
| git.
|
| You might recognize this as more or less the definition of an
| operating system, so I suppose I could just say that I want an OS
| which treats me as the CPU.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Tmux and Emacs scripts can (either on it's own) get you pretty
| far in that direction.
| ouid wrote:
| I would love to know more about it, I know about as little as
| it's possible to know about emacs while having also used it.
| If you have anything more guided than me just doing a google
| search, please share!
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Here is the page about Tmux from the public portion of my
| knowledge graph:
|
| https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/notes-in-org-
| format-...
|
| See in particular the passage "send text to a tmux
| session|window|pane".
|
| In Emacs, `M-x desktop-save` and `M-x desktop-change-dir`
| will let you save your session state and restore from a
| saved state. Also handy is the command `process-send-
| string`. I use it in the below (from my .emacs config[1])
| to mark one buffer as the "receiving GHCI buffer" and then
| send text from another buffer to be evaluated in that one.
| ;; https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/37889 (defun
| mark-receiving-ghci-buffer () (interactive)
| (setq receiving-ghci-buffer (buffer-name))) (defun
| send-highlighted-region-to-receiving-ghci-buffer (beg end)
| (interactive "r") (process-send-string receiving-
| ghci-buffer ":{\n") (process-send-region
| receiving-ghci-buffer beg end) (process-send-
| string receiving-ghci-buffer "\n:}\n")) (global-
| set-key ( kbd "C-c s") ( lambda () (interactive)
| (send-highlighted-region-to-receiving-ghci-buffer) ) )
|
| [1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/play/blob/maste
| r/dot...
| youngNed wrote:
| > so I suppose I could just say that I want an OS which treats
| me as the CPU
|
| <obligatory emacs response here>
| jedberg wrote:
| I read the page and the docs but I still have one main question:
| What problem is getting solved with this? I feel like I'm missing
| something.
| capableweb wrote:
| First off, not everything is about "This is the problem and
| here is the solution", sometimes it's just about wanting to
| make incremental improvements in something.
|
| That said, here are the incremental improvements listed from
| the post in the submission:
|
| - I'm writing more
|
| - I understand my productivity better
|
| - I'm thinking more
|
| - I'm managing my health better
|
| - I'm managing my subscriptions better
|
| - My spelling is better
|
| - I'm tracking decisions
|
| If it helps you, you could frame each section as "The problem
| is that I'm writing too little, so my second brain helps me to
| write more", "The problem is that I'm thinking too little, so
| my second brain helps me to think more" etc etc.
| jedberg wrote:
| Fair enough, but how? How does this tool enable those things
| that Notepad doesn't?
| codazoda wrote:
| Author here... I had originally written something like, "I
| wrote my own tool but you might see these gains using any
| note tool". For whatever reason, I edited that out.
| Probably a mistake, given your confusion.
| jedberg wrote:
| Ah yeah that clears it up. I thought this was a post
| about why your tool was better than others. Thanks!
| capableweb wrote:
| Ah, I didn't even realize this was a post/ad about a
| specific tool that the author was launching, I thought it
| was a general post about any "second brain tool". Sorry for
| that.
| geoelectric wrote:
| They're invested enough in it to use it, is my guess.
|
| People tend to downplay the "neat" factor in productivity
| tools--and they can be total attractive nuisances where you
| play with them instead of doing stuff. But the truth is you
| do sometimes need something to keep you engaged in the
| short term while the long-term benefits add up. Wrestling
| with Notepad works against that.
|
| FWIW, when _I_ try to use Notepad for this, I end up with
| 150 open Notepad notes that just end up pickling /restoring
| with the app. I've never thought hard about it, but I
| suspect that happens because you naturally keep the note
| open all day, and often the next to refer back, but there's
| no obvious time to close it.
|
| But for whatever reason it just tends to turn into a huge
| mess, whereas note-taking apps tend to either optimize to
| the idea of "everything all at once" or they manage a daily
| journal scroll for you somehow.
| d23 wrote:
| Yes and: what is this? Literally: what is it? A tool for taking
| markdown notes that doesn't render it and runs as a web server?
| oxff wrote:
| I just use wikilinks and markdown, edit it in VSC; it is helpful
| if you schedule yourself like a hour of study time for some topic
| which forces you to revisit the stuff you wrote previously,
| _regularly_. I 'm going over some math / stat / probability at
| evenings for 1-3 hours and the wikilinking is definitely helping
| to learn the stuff.
|
| But on topics where I am not doing revisits regularly even if to
| just to light a bulb in my head ("Oh that topic, yeah I remember
| it"), I don't see much benefit accumulating.
| brentjanderson wrote:
| I tried a few different options for note taking, including
| Foam[1], Roam[2], and now Dendron[3]. Dendron has been the best
| fit for me because it's built on VS Code (I already know my way
| around and can be more productive in it), and has a great team &
| community supporting it.
|
| Markdown in a git repo is so much better than anything else I've
| tried.
|
| [1] https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ [2]
| https://roamresearch.com/ [3] https://dendron.so/
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| LogSeq is another interesting tool in this space. Its primary
| differentiator seems to be letting you attach arbitrary key-
| value attributes to pages and blocks and then query things in
| your workspace to create ad-hoc tables.
| https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/advanced%20queries
| bathtub365 wrote:
| What I really like about LogSeq is the Journal feature that
| you can specify a template for, and the ability to query
| TODOs across all of your notes. I take meeting notes and add
| in action items and they all get collected up and organized
| using my queries that filter and order by due date. The way
| they're presented also lets you easily jump back to the
| context where the TODO was created.
|
| It's a prolog based query language so it took a bit of time
| to learn but now it helps me stay organized and on top of all
| the stuff I need to do.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| Why do you prefer Dendron over Foam? Foam is also markdown in a
| git repo.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| obsidian.md is another great tool (supports local md folder,
| backlinks, graph view)
| smoldesu wrote:
| While we're shilling for Obsidian, I'd like to plug
| "Obsidian-Admonition"[0], which has been a gamechanger in the
| way I take notes. It's a simple extension of Markdown
| protocols with an enormous amount of flexibility for adding
| block-styled content. If you've ever wanted to glitz up your
| notes with some documentation-styled content blocks, this is
| for you!
|
| [0] https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-admonition
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I use Obsidian to take notes. I like it. I keep a daily journal
| there and connect it out to notes I open on different projects I
| work on or books I read.
|
| When I started using it I thought about it like a "Second brain"
| in the sense of it would somehow make me effectively smarter. I
| imagined referring back to stuff I'd written, building
| connections, and the notes letting me discover or recall insights
| I may have missed. Instead, like the author of this piece, I find
| that most of the benefits seem to come from inspiration and
| overcoming inertia and I almost never refer back to things I've
| written in the past.
|
| The inspiration is usually simple stuff, like if someone told you
| a problem you might immediately react with a solution or
| question. Same kind of thing happens when you write out problems.
| For example, recently my wife was annoyed at me because I haven't
| done a chore I said I would. As I'm just jotting this down into
| my daily journal I have the obvious "Why don't you take out the
| boxes now?" question. I answer that now I don't want to do it
| because she scolded me and I don't want to reinforce her scolding
| me. As soon as I see those words, I realize that's childish and I
| go take out the boxes.
|
| It's a realization I might not have confronted had I just existed
| in a non-reflective state. By typing out what's going I gave
| myself the chance to make conscious questions and observations
| which I can then react to. Sometimes they are useful.
|
| Journaling also helps overcome inertia. Left to my own devices I
| might spend all day on hackernews, Twitter, YouTube, and taking
| care of kids. When I journal though I document my frustrations
| with living that way and that helps push me to work on my side
| projects more.
|
| Further, just the act of writing things out helps me get started.
| If I have this nebulous idea that I want to work on "an idea"
| it's hard to actually start doing it. Decomposing a big idea into
| discrete chunks is inherently productive - it's drafting a plan
| and thinking through the system end to end. When I've written out
| a plan I have something specific and actionable to work on and my
| mind is already in the "Work on X" state.
|
| Note taking has also helped with ideation. Last night I wrote
| that I wondered whether Spotify would ban Joe Rogan and
| challenged myself to predict whether or not they would. While I
| was writing a brief argumentative essay to myself making my case
| (low confidence they do ban this year) I came to hold an opinion
| on Spotify the company (long straddle). I was then able to queue
| up a buy order - which I wouldn't have done had I not been note
| taking. (Although, whether or not this idea was good for me
| remains to be seen)
| reidjs wrote:
| Maybe second brain is a misnomer. I rarely check old notes.
| Main value to me is lower friction to start writing and I spend
| more time reflecting. Keeping a daily log (ironically) improves
| my memory of what's happening lately.
|
| For me it's also a place to dump all those things that you want
| to say but you don't know who to say it to. So you write it out
| and realize 90% isn't not worth saying to anyone. But
| occasionally a tidbit here and there helps in a conversation or
| meeting and it all seems worth it.
| shime wrote:
| > So you write it out and realize 90% isn't not worth saying
| to anyone.
|
| Probably one of the biggest advantages of keeping a journal.
| I don't have to bore anyone else with my shit.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Agreed. Another big reason I do it is just because it's fun
| and I like to.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| +1 Insightful
|
| Similar experiences here. I started my analog bullet-journal
| system 5 years ago, and though it's evolved a lot, continue to
| use it today. In parallel, I'd spent a few years writing what I
| call "devnotes" in markdown files on local fs. But they were
| sporadic and poorly organized. Then in 2020 I tried Roam
| Research, loved it (backlinks ftw), spent just over a year
| using it daily, but eventually abandoned it, faced w/ a
| "choice" between abysmal performance [the offline UX depended
| on Chrome local storage, and as my graph grew it kept getting
| worse] and putting my private thoughts in the cloud. Enter
| Obsidian. Finally! Offline, local fs, markdown, backlinks,
| plugins galore (eg Excalidraw integration)... it's _exactly_
| what I wanted. I 've been delighted with it for the last 6
| months, and recommend it to anyone interested in "tools for
| thought", PKM, note-taking, GTD, etc.
| yangikan wrote:
| Logseq is pretty good too. https://logseq.com/
| shime wrote:
| For what it's worth, Roam team has just recently added end-
| to-end encryption option for graphs.
|
| I'm a Roam user, although I've tried Obsidian, Bear, Zettlr
| and vimwiki. I keep coming back to Roam because I find
| thinking in blocks suits me better than thinking in
| documents.
| woile wrote:
| I have quite a very same feeling. But as a way to review
| things, I also write flashcards when I think there's something
| useful I'd like to remember, or when I'm studying. Once you
| start remembering a flashcard, it will appear less and less
| often.
|
| It's quite simple in Obsidian with the extension "Spaced
| Repetition":
|
| What is foo? ? foo is bar
| maxs wrote:
| That's a cool extension, I didn't know about it.
|
| I built an entire app around the idea that every note
| participate sin the spaced repetition queue. For me it has
| made a lot of difference, as I have managed to internalize
| (as in put into a practice) a lot of the stuff that I put
| into my "second brain", for example insights from books I
| have read, videos I watched or blog posts, etc:
|
| https://github.com/msipos/mind-palace
| throw10920 wrote:
| I'm building my own PIM.
|
| The only points that the author brings up that I can relate to
| are "I'm writing more" and "I'm thinking more".
|
| The interesting part is that my PIM is incomplete - I can put
| things into it very easily, I just can't get things out.
|
| That didn't stop my random note-taking from rising significantly
| (from 1 note once every few days to 1-3/day on slow days and
| 30-50 on fast days) after I implemented the note capture bit.
| Although, even though I can't (easily) get things out of it
| again, my brain seems to think that I'll eventually find the
| stuff I write down again - perhaps that's what unlocked the flood
| of ideas?
| nivethan wrote:
| This is exactly what I found as well! Writing things down forces
| me to consume content and makes me want to produce more as a
| result.
|
| I made my own application as well at https://leftwrite.io though
| the focus is more on making notes on websites I visit than plain
| notes.
|
| I'm still working on it but you can see how to use at
| https://nivethan.dev/devlog/how-to-use-leftwrite.html.
|
| It's still very much still in progress for documentation but the
| core features I consider complete and so there won't be any
| functional changes.
| itg wrote:
| Anyone try Nolific? What advantages does it have over
| Notepad/Textedit?
| codazoda wrote:
| Hey, post author and Nolific creator here. Nolific is very,
| very new, so I don't think there will be a lot of other users,
| yet. For me there are a couple advantages. The main one is that
| it's in the browser, where I spend a lot of my day, which makes
| it friction free. I mention a couple more in the post. I'm also
| super excited to add "actions" to Nolific. When I do, it will
| pass any text you're working on to any API end-point. I'll use
| it for things like, "Post to my blog".
| 58x14 wrote:
| This is a killer feature that I've been wanting to create
| myself. When my thinking is divergent, I benefit from a
| single dialogue that allows me to write without distraction,
| but my outputs belong to many different contexts. When my
| thinking is convergent, I have difficulty recovering my
| collection of useful material.
|
| My experience with a 'second brain' has mirrored yours. Nice
| post! Good luck!
| bachmeier wrote:
| Is there a way to query your notes, or is it intended as a way to
| capture and maybe review the most recent few notes?
| codazoda wrote:
| I have added a simple search feature recently. Calling it a
| tool for "most recent" notes is an accurate indication of how
| I'm using it. In fact, it defaults to your most recent note and
| then you can flip back and forth through recent stuff. The
| search feature does come in handy when I'm looking for
| something specific that I know I wrote in the past.
| tunnuz wrote:
| Can recommend Standard Notes.
| [deleted]
| wware wrote:
| I'm running on a Macbook that is not at all set up for PHP, so no
| "users.ini" file. I did this ugly hack. <?php
| class BasicAuth { public function
| __construct($passwordFile) { }
| public function auth() { return true;
| } public function hash($password) {
| return "hello"; } }
|
| I can create notes and search them, only possible name is
| "Untitled", found no controls for formatting (h1/h2/h3, italic,
| bold, code block, lists, etc). Nice start, could benefit from a
| better UE and more features.
| codazoda wrote:
| EDIT: I've fixed this.
|
| Yeah, sorry about all that, this thing is very early in it's
| life...
|
| The users.ini file is a simple ini with my list of users. I put
| that file in place. I put it outside of the root so that you
| can't read it. I thought I had explained this somewhere, but
| clearly I haven't. I need to fix this.
|
| My plan with the name is to pull the first line of the text
| file, remove pounds and things, and use that as the "dynamic"
| name. I haven't needed to implement that for myself just yet,
| so it's on the todo list.
| 9dev wrote:
| > Naming software experiments is a barrier to entry for me.
| Typically, I need to come up with a name before I can even create
| a project. Using numbers removes that burden and lets me start
| with a readme or a bit of code. This is the first of those
| numbered experiments.
|
| (From the project readme on GitHub)
|
| I have the exact same issue, not only for projects, but also
| servers, structures or variables. If the name doesn't clearly
| communicate the purpose, I can't go ahead. What helps me is
| settling for an unrelated naming scheme like greek gods or NASA
| missions (servers), going with concepts, like batch-importer or
| note-app (projects), or choosing the first generic name that
| occurs to me, eg. EncodingManager (code structures). The only
| important thing is a simple path to renaming stuff later on as
| its purpose becomes clear :)
| donclark wrote:
| This makes me wonder if someone could create a service to gather
| our conversations, writings, emails - in the hopes of:
|
| -help us manage our relationships
|
| -guide us to bring us closer together as human beings
|
| -bringing more understanding and options for resolutions
|
| (edit) formatting
| kenta_nagamine wrote:
| matrixcubed wrote:
| Joplin user here. I've installed it on every device I own, and
| sync my notes with my NextCloud code instance. A few
| synchronizing snags aside, I'm extremely happy with it.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I wish there were a tool that could just record _everything_ -
| text, web history, clicked links, video chat, messages, etc. and
| just index it.
|
| fundamentally I believe "taking notes" is the wrong way to think
| about it. if you "know" everything, then notes serve no purpose.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I wish there were a tool that could just record everything
| [...] if you "know" everything, then notes serve no purpose._
|
| I guess the completeness of your proposed "auto-memorize-
| everything" solution depends on what style of notes a person
| writes.
|
| A lot of my notes are _annotations_ or personal commentary that
| _don 't exist_ in the sources of the url text or video.
|
| Here's an example of that type of notes I often take... E.g. I
| found some links that explain how one can grok "Docker" by
| going through the learning exercise of re-inventing it from
| basic os features with homemade scripts. But I wrote my own
| _personal notes_ (in "##")about the limitations of the
| explanations in the urls: ## these tutorials
| explain the verb (runtime) but not noun (artifacts of image
| file) https://github.com/p8952/bocker/blob/master/bocker
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fi7uSYlOdc
|
| Because content cannot meta-analyze itself and enumerate all
| the ideas and concepts that are not embedded in its own text,
| it means a hypothetical indexing engine that converted the 2
| links above to searchable data still would not retrieve the
| extra meta information I wrote. A lot of good notes are
| generated from your own brain.
|
| EDIT add to categorize different types of "notes" to aid
| discussion:
|
| (1) notes as _memorization aid_ such as copying _facts_ : a
| user writes a note that says _" 1 inch equals 25.4
| millimeters"_ after seeing it on a webpage or something. So the
| "universal-record-and-index-everything" would help make these
| type of notes obsolete because one could just skip writing that
| note down and just recall it later by searching for "inch to mm
| conversion" in the digital archive
|
| (2) notes as _synthesizing /interpreting/connecting/commenting_
| the content. These type of idiosyncratic notes generated by the
| user's brain _often don 't exist on the internet_ so they
| cannot be replaced by a universal recording tool.
| sdepablos wrote:
| Of course the best option is doing BOTH things: indexing the
| context automatically via a modern personal search engine
| that accepts all kind of media and does vector / full text
| and relation indexing, plus the information wroten by the
| user
| 9dev wrote:
| Wouldn't that essentially be a system that tracked the entirety
| of your digital life in a sort of timeline, with metadata
| attached, making it easily accessible and searchable? I have
| thought a lot about this and curiously, it's also what many
| science fiction depictions of computer systems seem to aim for
| - a single, integrated, computing experience, across all
| devices and tools.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| This is something I think about often when it comes to tools.
| The idea that Google had all of my location history for the
| past 8 years means I can see everywhere I've ever gone. I can
| lookup any email I've ever sent/received. I can look through
| my browser history for any particular day. With Spotify +
| Last.fm I can see stats about my listening history, and with
| Tract.tv I can see my TV/movie watching habits. Strava tracks
| exercise, and YNAB tracks budgeting/spending. There's an
| incredible amount of health data from my iPhone + Apple
| Watch.
|
| It's really cool to think that all of this data exists, but
| I'm not really sure that it's useful. Occasionally I've gone
| back through my old search history for that one old post that
| I wanted to re-read, or go through my Spotify listening
| history to find a song I really enjoyed but forgot the name
| of, but 99% of that data goes to waste.
|
| Quantified Self [0] is an interesting project to me since it
| seems to make use of data from all of these disparate
| sources, but I'm still not sure what the outcome of tracking
| all of this data is. It seems cool but not useful.
|
| [0]: https://quantifiedself.com/
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| It's exciting that the data exists, but Google's (and every
| similar organization's) business model is not compatible
| with full data transparency. They want you locked into
| their platform, using their tools.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Yes exactly! It would be nice if this data were more
| opened up so that tools around the data could be created.
| hateful wrote:
| I think it's the same with a lot of other things, such as
| backups or proper testing - you wouldn't say backups were a
| waste because you never used them and you wouldn't say
| tests were a waste because they always passed!
|
| It's also like all the wires I have in boxes and draws at
| my house. As soon as I throw them out I need them!
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I've dumped my SMS logs into my IMAP mailbox since 2010. I've
| used the "History Trends" browser extension and religiously
| archive my browser history. I store client IP addresses and
| timestamps from my IMAP server as another data-point on my
| physical location in the world (i.e. what network my phone is
| connected to when it checks-in for email). My credit card
| transactions dump to email as well. EXIF from photos is
| helpful but I haven't automated dumping those into my email.
|
| Most of my personal "note taking" is either time tracking
| entries for Customer billing or emails sent to myself with
| keywords in the subject line and the notes in the body.
|
| I wish I could get at my phone's (iPhone) browser history,
| call database, and location services database easily to
| amalgamate into my "digital life panopticon" too.
|
| I love being able to search over even this limited corpus of
| data. I can "remember" where I was and what I was doing on a
| given day pretty easily. I discovered that I can often get
| "organic" recollection when I prime my brain with a few
| context details gleaned from the digital corpus. ("I was at
| xxx site that day, I had lunch at yyy restaurant, and when I
| got back I looked at these websites... Ah, and now I remember
| what Bob and I talked about that afternoon!")
|
| I'd love to have audio and low frame-rate video recording on
| my person during all my waking hours. If I had that, though,
| I'd keep it completely secret (and use parallel
| reconstruction if I need to divulge "memories" gleaned from
| it to others).
| primarydonkey wrote:
| This project comes to mind:
| https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline
| rzzzt wrote:
| "There is no worrying about whether a document belongs in
| the Letters folder or the New Project folder. It simply
| takes its rightful place in the time-ordered stream."
| https://www.wired.com/1997/02/lifestreams/
| gumby wrote:
| > fundamentally I believe "taking notes" is the wrong way to
| think about it. if you "know" everything, then notes serve no
| purpose.
|
| I used to think that but the act of taking the note is itself
| important, as it integrates some of the info into your decision
| making process.
|
| The indexed database would also be useful, but you have to
| understand enough to search in the first place.
| karlicoss wrote:
| This is my approach!
|
| I'm using HPI [0] as a sort of universal API for almost all of
| my data (manual notes, bookmarks, instant messages, internet
| comments, etc)
|
| Then I use it in tools like Orger [1] and Promnesia [2,3] which
| function as my second brain
|
| [0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI
|
| [1] https://github.com/karlicoss/orger
|
| [2] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668507
| avian wrote:
| Maybe APSE is what you're looking for [1]. A while back the
| founder sent me a link after one of my blog posts hit HN. It's
| a tool that continuously records your desktop and offers text
| search of _everything_ through OCR.
|
| I personally found the idea interesting, but I was too afraid
| to ever try it out. The mere idea of a video record existing of
| everything that's going on on my computer, even if it's never
| supposed to leave the computer, was too scary for me.
|
| [1] https://apse.io
| csours wrote:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex
| randito wrote:
| Ink and Switch have done a _lot_ of thinking and a lot of
| experiments around this idea.
|
| https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone/
| gopalv wrote:
| > I believe "taking notes" is the wrong way to think about it
|
| Recording only the inputs doesn't help me much, my notes are
| mostly always about the part of my brain it ticked off.
|
| A lot of it is "I wonder if this will help me with X"
| connection points left off for me to follow up later rather
| than to go back to refer to the conversation in exact terms.
|
| Good notes for me are a way of letting off my internal
| narrative pick up from there later and carry on paying
| attention to the conversation I'm actually having right now.
| XorNot wrote:
| tracker in theory should be really useful on the Linux desktop
| because it did pretty much all of this.
|
| In practice I don't know how or why it currently feels so
| unusable.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I am building something like this. It's my most ambitious
| project to date and I know it will require a large team of
| people to support it's various connections.
|
| Think automatically downloading all youtube videos you liked,
| all tiktok videos you heart, all tweets you favorite, make a
| crisp HTML backup of every bookmark you have. It will grab all
| the videos you "save" and automatically ffmpeg to the
| resolution of your choosing (in my case x265 720p).
|
| It's a large effort, but one that I think it 100% worth it.
| People are losing their connection to the past on the whims of
| a few corporations. It's time to decentralize that.
|
| A swarm of my apps all online, all uploading/downloads the
| content as people search for it and consume it. No taking it
| down since there is nothing to take down.
|
| Coming soon!
| flurie wrote:
| The closest thing I've seen to that is
| https://github.com/novoid/Memacs
| thinkling wrote:
| There have been a number of research prototypes in that
| direction including Susan Dumais' Stuff I've Seen [1], which
| was Windows desktop-oriented but I think had the right idea.
|
| > much knowledge work involves finding and re-using previously
| seen information. We describe the design and evaluation of a
| system, called Stuff I've Seen (SIS), that facilitates
| information re-use. This is accomplished in two ways. First,
| the system provides a unified index of information that a
| person has seen, whether it was seen as email, web page,
| document, appointment, etc. Second, because the information has
| been seen before, rich contextual cues can be used in the
| search interface.
|
| Might be worth revisiting their papers to see what they
| learned.
|
| [1] (PDF of SIGIR paper) https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
| [deleted]
| echelon wrote:
| > fundamentally I believe "taking notes" is the wrong way to
| think about it.
|
| Hard disagree for a few reasons.
|
| Even with history, sometimes I forget how to look up a paper I
| saw six months ago. A lot of stuff sits at the tip of my
| tongue, and I'm unable to adequately describe it well enough to
| find it again. Or if I can find it, it takes a great deal of
| effort. I'm pretty sure this problem isn't unique to me.
|
| But even more importantly, writing helps your brain build
| connections. When you have to analyze, synthesize, and
| summarize, your brain is actively grappling with,
| contextualizing, and relating new concepts to the world you're
| already familiar with. It becomes an active part of your
| worldview.
|
| Coupled with spaced repetition, note-taking is one of the best
| tools for learning.
| endisneigh wrote:
| we'll have to agree to disagree - everything you're saying is
| also true even if you take notes, except your notes are just
| a lossy form of reality itself. reality that could just be
| captured directly and indexed. computers can form the
| connections with human assistance. no notes required.
|
| notes have a purpose, but most people that I talk to use
| notes to basically just record reality to remember details
| echelon wrote:
| No hard feelings :)
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| > analyze, synthesize, and summarize
|
| Yes. Summary in particular is surprisingly mind-expanding.
|
| Also don't forget classifying! Note taking apps for e you to
| do that, and it can lead to important insights.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Pretty sure that is what happens with Google if you use their
| ecosystem (i.e. use Chrome, Google search, Gmail, hangouts,
| meet, docs, YouTube etc)
|
| But people tend to dislike this idea that one company knows
| everything.
| Vetch wrote:
| I run into this sentiment often and I believe it's
| fundamentally mistaken as to the purpose of notes.
|
| Recording is not knowing, at best it is memorization of largely
| useless trivia. Sherlock has a good discussion on this
| (Sherlock solar system). To know something you have to have
| processed and at the very least achieved some compression of
| it.
|
| Notes help with processing and thinking things through, aiding
| conscious and active understanding.
|
| Unless recordings feed into one's process, they're a waste of
| space. Sturgeon's Law: The vast majority of what we encounter
| is junk, much of it even self-contradictory. The more you let
| into your corpus, the harder the problem of retrieval
| relevance.
|
| My clippings are actively curated, carefully sized to fit in
| working memory while also independently comprehensible and
| guaranteed to have met my minimal standards on factuality.
| Because I have read them carefully before, I expand my mental
| canvas but am not slowed down too much by processing demands.
| The throttling on note growth means an easier time for
| information retrieval and much fewer irrelevant results to
| ignore.
| bhelkey wrote:
| Recording isn't knowing but archiving is better than losing.
|
| As an exercise, look back at bookmarks that are 5+ years old.
| How many of them still load? Look back at your history of
| liked videos on YouTube. How many of them have been deleted?
| igammarays wrote:
| That's what I use DevonThink for. Local macOS app with
| encrypted local filesystem. It just indexes basically
| everything from email to webpages to actual directories of
| plaintext files on my filesystem. And it can do automatic OCR
| of images/PDFs etc.
|
| I don't do actual note-taking there, I use NotePlan for that,
| which is just a directory of plain text files on my local
| filesystem. Automatically indexed by DevonThink.
|
| I just dump everything there, including a regular weekly
| cronjob to archive my email accounts from different IMAP
| servers including Gmail.
|
| I use DevonThink regularly and it never fails to deliver
| (except syncing, which sucks, my databases are too large). I
| have 25+ GB of data there in all sorts of file formats, from
| PDF receipts to over 1 million+ text documents including
| emails, and DevonThink can still find stuff instantly (under
| 500ms) for any full text search.
| notepalf wrote:
| For a simple note taking app I recommend https://simplenote.com/
| sdze wrote:
| I _love_ minimalistic tools! Thank you for that.
| _virtu wrote:
| Am I missing something or should v0.0.2 really be v0.1.0
| considering that there are more than bug fixes in the release?
| codazoda wrote:
| Yeah, that's true, I'm not properly following semver here. I'll
| try to improve that for the next release.
| rosstex wrote:
| For this I recommend Notes.app or TextEdit.exe
| shane_b wrote:
| I do this with two notion pages. One is Idea Inbox for any ideas
| worth exploring later. Then a second page called Journal which is
| a running list of entries for each day. I pretty much work out of
| this page and use Idea Inbox to remember what to write about that
| day.
|
| I've surprisingly seen health improvements as well.
| CapnKillbot wrote:
| Can you describe some of the health benefits? My "second brain"
| attempts have pretty much been a mess, but I like your system
| for its simplicity.
| shane_b wrote:
| For sure. I'm not exactly sure why but I make more consistent
| progress towards working out. Maybe I'm more aware.
|
| For instance, one day I'll write my neck hurts today. When I
| see that again, I think about why. Then start thinking about
| posture. I start doing a simple yoga routine. Find one area
| is super tight. Write it down. I learn my hip flexors need
| work. Now I'm on that simple yoga routine with some martial
| arts kick drills and I feel phenomenal!
|
| Mental clarity is greatly improved as well.
|
| The biggest benefit to me is not redundantly thinking about
| things. When I do, it's obvious because I see it in writing
| and can take action.
|
| I tried a bunch of complicated frameworks for organizing. I
| ended up with as simple as possible.
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