[HN Gopher] Memex is already here, it's just not evenly distributed
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Memex is already here, it's just not evenly distributed
Author : samwillis
Score : 197 points
Date : 2023-08-06 08:23 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (filiph.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (filiph.net)
| kykeonaut wrote:
| Is it me, or a Git repository, (either externally hosted or self-
| hosted) sounds like could work as a memex?
|
| You have a shared folder backed by version control.
|
| You have projects which can serve as memex projects, and issues
| which you can edit via markdown and link to the files in the
| repo.
|
| Plus you got CI-CD that allows you to have access to a cloud
| environment to perform work.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I agree, version control is absolutely necessary when you are
| copying documents from other sources and modifying them. You
| need to know if the document has changed upstream since you
| cloned it and you need to be able to see the diff of the
| changes you made.
| fit2rule wrote:
| [dead]
| nologic01 wrote:
| > On the other hand, memex is something that will give you an
| edge
|
| Umm, no. That is the problem really. An "edge" is something
| defined in societal context. Rightly or wrongly society is
| largely unaware of memex and its gifts.
|
| Memex, hypertext, wikis, semantic web etc. These are just early
| visions of plausible ways we can capture, organise and share
| knowledge at scale, using digital technologies. Alas it is a
| catalog of paths that the digitally interconnected society _did
| not opt for_.
|
| Why this (on the face of it) irrational behavior? The very short
| answer is that "an edge" is only loosely coupled to superior
| knowledge management. In the vast majority it is obtained by
| proximity to existing power structures. The proverbial rolodex
| rather than the memex.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > The very short answer is that "an edge" is only loosely
| coupled to superior knowledge management. In the vast majority
| it is obtained by proximity to existing power structures
|
| I somewhat disagree. A memex is effectively the plain old
| notebook/wiki, with the potential capability raised to the
| second or third power.
|
| Does a personal diary, calendar, home budget, or a small
| library help you get into places of power? For average people,
| no. But it does make organising life, and figuring out where
| you are, and charting how to get to where you want to be, much
| easier than it would be for your peers without such tools.
|
| So yes, it gives you an edge. Whether that edge has anything to
| do with power is a completely orthogonal concern.
| nologic01 wrote:
| I would readily admit that my analysis of memex's (non-)edge
| is a bit of a quick extrapolation, weaving together some
| broader themes as potential explanatory factors.
|
| There is an empirical fact though, that begs for some
| explanation: These tools are not used as much as one would
| think is commensurate to their (potential) added value. There
| is no virtuous cycle that would fund more development, create
| sharper "edges" etc.
|
| The connection with "power" might appear remote but consider
| e.g. why powerpoint (no pun) - a manifestly inferior piece of
| software - became so succesful.
| amelius wrote:
| Shows that inventing things is more about being at the right
| place and time than about anything else.
| samwillis wrote:
| The key connecting element of a lot of the examples of "Memex" is
| the web platform - http, html, css, js, etc. - and that it is
| both a document _and_ app delivery system. That is the secret
| that has made it work. All the examples of file sharing still
| have a http interface to connect to.
|
| As he touches on, the missing, or a least somewhat disjointed,
| element is local data and connecting to that from other web
| destinations. My hope, and belief, is that we are breaking down
| those local <-> server barriers with newer JS APIs for better
| file like local storage.
|
| It's just a pity in a way that the web browser and web server
| were not combined into one element from the start. It's still too
| hard to make content available on the network from your personal
| device without a server.
|
| His conclusion about the need to cognitively organise such
| trails/collections though could well change in the coming years -
| and potentially sooner. It's clear the LLMs are good at
| organising and summarising text and data. I'm expecting us to be
| using tools that will ingest all our work activity (documents,
| meeting, email, calls, browsing) and automatically curate and
| file it with a chat based ui to extract that data. We just
| desperately need that to be _local_ and not server based.
| pintxo wrote:
| Didn't Netscape Navigator have a server included? And an email
| client and an HTML Editor?
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| At the risk of diverting this into yet another discussion of note
| taking apps...
|
| I'm using Notion. Its ok, but I'd like to have a way to snapshot
| documents to incorporate into my notes. And lately I feel like
| I'm paying for all their new AI stuff that I just don't use.
|
| So help me HN: whats a good open source, self-hostable,
| replacement with decent desktop/mobile tooling and a practicable
| migration path from a Notion export/backup?
| jddj wrote:
| Logseq is as close as it gets.
|
| In my humble opinion these tools aren't quite there yet, which
| is not to say they aren't polished, but that they don't
| disappear from view like good tools should.
|
| There's still a noticeable impedance mismatch due to having to
| use their editor, for example, which has its quirks and is
| different enough to a standard text editor to cause a context
| switch.
|
| But it's open source and it's pretty good.
| cobertos wrote:
| Used to use Notion. I haven't found any good open source
| alternatives either.
|
| I was using Typora for a while, before Obsidian got better. It
| was just a tree of Markdown files and a _really_ nice Notion-
| like editor.
|
| I had to write
| https://github.com/Cobertos/notion_export_enhancer to get my
| data out of notion in an actual nice tree-like structure.
|
| I tried Obsidian again recently and their editor caught up to
| Typora's (and it was faster than the last time I used it). I'm
| trying to switch to it now, as the tree is more "file-y" than
| Typora (which removes blind spots for me, as I save PDFs and
| other stuff in my note tree).
|
| I've resorted to writing my own though now. Notion, Typora, and
| Obsidian are great for one specific type of management
| (documents, markdown-like), but I think there's a higher level
| abstractions here.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by snapshots, and it's not open
| source -- but if you haven't tried it yet, check out Obsidian.
| "Vaults" are self-contained, just markdown files in folders,
| with an extra folder for the Obsidian stuff, i.e. all settings
| and state and even the plugins. Plays great with SyncThing etc.
| And there are so many great community plugins, which is where
| the real magic of it is for me.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I really do like the data model of obsidian. For the most
| part the data (markdown files) and the meta data (the
| .obsidian directory) stay out of each other's way.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| It's interesting how the author settles on plain old files as the
| data access paradigm. A file cannot be yanked from under your
| feet, like a link can. It remains where it is indefinitely until
| deleted, it does not change (so cannot be tampered with or
| damaged by the author), it normally is not subject to artificial
| access restrictions a la logins or DRM. It's an artifact that can
| actually be archived for the rest of your natural life.
|
| I don't see any reason why the folders in question should
| necessarily be shared, though. I get the impression that as
| defined by Bush originally, the memex is first and foremost a
| memory expander for _your private_ memory, and any sharing would
| take place infrequently, or on a narrow subset of data contained
| within.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| What do you have available to you when the internet is down?
| (It was for me last week, for pretty much a whole day.) That's
| the point (or at least one of them) of personal control.
|
| What do you have available to you after a hard drive failure?
| _That 's_ the point (or at least one of them) of having stuff
| in the cloud.
|
| How do you balance the two? Local, personal storage backed up
| in the cloud?
| frizlab wrote:
| As much as I can locally, with Time Machine for backups. I
| have access to everything and do not fear hard drive
| failures.
| fragmede wrote:
| What's your plan for a natural disaster like a fire that
| takes out your house?
| frizlab wrote:
| I did not mention, but I also have off-site backups.
| [deleted]
| johnnyworker wrote:
| > What do you have available to you when the internet is
| down?
|
| Everything, because I pretty much started shunning everything
| I can't reduce to a bunch of files I can use anywhere, and am
| using the same folder structure on all machines. If an
| application has a portable version (and doesn't have
| configuration that may vary between machines, e.g. hardware
| sensors displayed in the tray), I always use the portable
| version, install it on one machine, and then sync that to the
| rest. I love it so much. I can open a Sublime Text project
| file anywhere and it just magically works, because the paths
| are the same.
|
| The only reason I sync some things manually instead of using
| Syncthing for _everything_ is that I don 't want to
| needlessly cause more SSD wear. E.g. Firefox/Thunderbird
| constantly write and delete stuff in the profile, so if I
| want to use a profile on another machine, I close it, sync,
| and open it on the other machine.
|
| My source of truth is completely in those files, including my
| web stuff. Which, admittedly, is rather simple: just PHP and
| JavaScript and MariaDB really, or sqlite where that's enough.
| I thought I liked golang, but after spending an hour
| yesterday trying to compile something I haven't touched in 5
| years, I decided to just rewrite it in PHP - because
| something that is slow but doesn't require constant hand
| holding beats _anything_ else for me. I want to be able to
| pick up where I left, regardless of whether 10 years passed.
| PHP and JavaScript are unsurpassed in my personal experience
| when it comes to that. Even the shittiest JS still works fine
| 20 years later, and when you use PHP with warnings turned on,
| upgrading to new versions tends to throw very few errors, and
| they 're actually helpful, so making the changes is trivial.
|
| I miss out on a lot of fancy things that way, but I don't
| miss any of them. I love thinking of my stuff as where it is
| in my "home cloud" folder structure, and that though they're
| not actually thin clients, the particular machines really
| don't matter. Of course I also have backups, but the plan is
| to never need them because I always have more than one "live"
| working environment, which reads from and writes to that
| shared set of files.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| When the Internet is down, I have the TexLIVE(tm)
| documentation files, _and not much else to read_ - I need to
| fix this somehow.
| teddyh wrote:
| I'd suggest you look into Kiwix1 and also Zeal2.
|
| I wrote more about offline documentation here:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838105>
|
| 1. https://www.kiwix.org/
|
| 2. https://zealdocs.org/
| mikewarot wrote:
| There were 3 main features of the Memex that we just don't have.
|
| Annotation - The ability to mark up hypertext... yeah... HTML
| claims to do it, but you can't change a document once it's read
| only. You should be able to layer annotations _on top of_ a
| document. HTML simply is not a Language for the Markup of
| Hypertext Documents.
|
| [Edit/Extend] - Annotation is anything you could do with a
| printout, at minimum. Circle something, highlight a section,
| black something out, attach links, etc. It's not just tagging a
| file as a black box.
|
| Trails - the ability to store a trail of annotations, linking up
| parts of two documents together, or more. Like a stack of
| bookmarks, except bookmarks can't anchor to part of a document.
|
| Publication - One of the crucial features of the Memex was the
| ability to output a collection to allow sharing with others. It
| could spit out a copy of everything linked to a trail, all the
| files, all in one dump. Copyright holders would have a huge
| problem with Memex if it were implemented as originally shown.
|
| I think it should be possible to build a proxy that records ALL
| local http(s) traffic, and thus record all the sources to
| documents you've seen... and then only keep those that you've
| tagged or linked to after a few months, purging the rest. A
| private Memex, but it couldn't even be an open source project, as
| copyright holders would work to squash it.
| hinkley wrote:
| Someone at NSCA implemented annotations in Mosaic, but the bus
| number dropped to zero when they left and the available
| evidence seems to be that none of those of us after the exodus
| were familiar with Memex. I think a coworker recommended
| Vannevar Bush to me around 2006. Boy was that a Tyler Darden
| moment.
|
| I think what the world has needed basically since then is
| browser integration for something like annotations, so that web
| sites and commentary about them can live together. And with
| less of a direct line to advertising dollars. Perhaps something
| that could live in the Fediverse. Sometimes I want HN's opinion
| and sometimes I want someone else's.
| bouvin wrote:
| Oh, we did all that. I even wrote my PhD dissertation on it
| (2001). Back then, there were quite a few research projects
| working on what I then termed 'Web Augmentation'. You could do
| it serverside, in special proxies, or in the browser through
| extensions or scripting. The earliest browser based system I
| know of that allowed users to insert links and annotations into
| existing Web pages was DHM/WWW, developed by yours truly in
| 1997 - we even won best paper for it at Hypertext 1997. This
| was a specialised case of what was then known as Open
| Hypermedia, i.e., a hypermedia system that could integrate
| (more or less) arbitrary documents and systems through links
| and other structures.
|
| Using a more general architecture, it was possible to add many
| kinds of structures on top of existing Web pages
| collaboratively. Navigational or spatial hypermedia, guided
| tours, etc. Link bases were stored outside of the linked
| resources, so that you could have different sets of structures
| applied to a corpus of documents.
|
| There were also quite a few commercial attempts in this space.
| However, all, commercial and research alike, ultimately failed,
| and I believe that there were several reasons behind this: Web
| site owners disliked that others could annotate their pages;
| shared link bases often became polluted; bookmarks were 'good
| enough' for most users; maintaining link anchor consistency in
| (increasingly dynamic) Web pages became more and more difficult
| (despite our best efforts); and while I remain enthused about
| the notion of the MEMEX scholar carefully annotating their
| corpus of literature, I don't think the appeal is all that
| widespread.
|
| Still, there are remnants in some systems - e.g., I enjoy to
| see that others have highlighted the same passage as I in a
| Kindle book.
| cvwright wrote:
| > I think it should be possible to build a proxy that records
| ALL local http(s) traffic
|
| There was a Microsoft Research project in the early 00's called
| "Stuff I've Seen" that did basically this. I don't know why it
| never really went anywhere - I've wanted one ever since I saw
| the talk.
|
| Edit: Link - https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/research/publication/stuff-i...
| k__ wrote:
| I think, the Permaweb comes pretty close.
|
| You can annotate any upload (arbitrary data, files, or
| collections of files) with tags and since the data is
| permanent, your links don't break.
|
| Publication is possible too, and with the Universal Data
| License, copyright holders can define the terms for their part
| of the publication right at upload time.
| [deleted]
| derefr wrote:
| > Annotation / Edit / Extend
|
| It's weird -- we, the builders of HTTP-based APIs, very well
| _understand_ the concept of "REpresentational State Transfer"
| ...but I've never seen a web-app server that actually accepts
| PUT or PATCH or POST _of HTML Content-Type_ against the baked-
| out server-rendered HTML views, such that if you were to push a
| modified version of said _representational state_ (the post-
| edit HTML), it would get "decompiled" on the backend into a
| delta of the _internal state_ (e.g. Markdown in a CMS), and
| that change to the _internal state_ would get persisted,
| reflecting back as a change in the _representational state_
| when the page is fetched.
|
| If anyone would just actually _implement_ that on a web-app
| backend, then you 'd be able to "annotate, edit, and extend"
| HTML-presented content using freakin' NSCA Mosaic from 1993. Or
| the "edit in Frontpage" feature of IE4.
|
| (No modern equivalents, though -- the features that would
| generate a "native" browser PUT or PATCH against an HTML page
| have since shrivelled up and died, after it became clear that
| no server would ever bother to allow them.)
|
| To dodge the chicken-and-egg problem of browser support, you
| could do this today, with a Javscript SPA serving the browser
| role: the frontend app would ensure that it's reflecting all
| internal state changes in its in-memory client-side internal
| state into changes to the HTML (even if those changes don't
| cause any presentation changes on the client side); and then,
| where a regular SPA would push those changes by calling an API
| endpoint that accepts a version of its in-memory client-side
| internal state, this SPA would just push the updated HTML, as a
| PUT or PATCH to the very same URL that was loaded to deliver
| the SPA.
| hinkley wrote:
| This might have been a "Missed Connection" for micro formats.
| We could/should have been able to PATCH those parts.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I'm not sure about others but I'd prefer my extended brain
| not live on other people's servers. The Memex always seemed
| to me to be a personal archive and notebook. You would pull
| in material from outside and store it locally along with your
| links and annotations and then only publish the work that you
| wanted to make public.
| euroderf wrote:
| I would think that Apple has the level of integration that
| would make this possible, but then... where's the potential
| profit that would make it worth their while ?
| brookst wrote:
| If users found value and bought Apple devices because of it?
|
| Apple has lots of software that only exists to sell hardware.
| This seems compatible with that business model to me.
| euroderf wrote:
| Point taken. But things sold by Apple must have an
| immediate, easy-to-digest appeal. Is it possible here ?
| throwuwu wrote:
| Congrats, you just reinvented the early web and made no
| improvements. You just have an index of documents with no
| hyperlinks. Even Notion is a step up from this and it's no where
| close to having the features of a memex. I'm always amazed that
| people completely miss the entire point of the trail feature.
| DennisP wrote:
| What would you say is the entire point of the trail feature?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| A trail (IIRC) charts a journey through a set of documents,
| or perhaps sections of documents.
|
| Think about a case where you are trying to figure out a
| problem based on a bunch of error messages. You search the
| web for solution to the first message, then the second
| message and so on, until you arrive at the root cause and the
| solution to _that_. You then save this as a trail (or the
| memex does this for you automatically, using some fancy ML
| method).
|
| Now, imagine you encounter a similar or identical issue 6
| months down the line. You remember that 6 months ago you
| searched for a solution, and that you found one. Maybe you
| forgot to bookmark it. Not a problem, you find the original
| trail using some simple heuristics (how long ago it was, the
| keywords from the error message), and then you follow it to
| the end. Solution found, reasonably quickly.
| filiph wrote:
| Yes, and until we have the fancy ML method, one way to do
| it is to have something like a Google Doc where you
| document your search by copypasting from the source
| documents and linking to them.
|
| That was my point with the original article. I'm with you
| that it would be fantastic to have memex that's described
| in 'As we may think' (only better), but until we do, I'm
| doing it the hard/manual way.
| haswell wrote:
| > _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._
| [0]
|
| I'm personally at a stage of disillusionment with the modern
| web such that I think returning to the early ideas without
| improvement _is_ an improvement over the status quo.
|
| It may be true that what the author describes is rudimentary,
| but to me, that's kind of the point.
|
| This isn't to say that better tools aren't needed. But I'm
| fully on board with what I see as a movement/mindset shift back
| to the fundamentals of the early web.
|
| If memex becomes a concept of interest in the 2020s, perhaps
| interested people will invest in building better tools.
|
| - [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| sambapa wrote:
| A nice counterpoint to this idea:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34137751
| heckerhut wrote:
| Check https://memex.garden/
| undebuggable wrote:
| Check the original article on memex in Life magazine. Something
| like 25% of the real estate of the article are ads interrupted by
| five full page ads and followed by another two full page ads.
| Prophetic. It's actually difficult to extract the article itself
| while reading.
| amelius wrote:
| At least these were not user-tracking ads.
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| I am pretty sure wikimedia addresses this use case entirely. Some
| extensions may be needed.
| Whatboard wrote:
| | the reason those shiny new apps don't stick is
| interoperability.
|
| Shameless reference to Whatboard.app where we are working hard to
| address this issue. Admittedly, we are over-focused on sales, and
| less intra-document linked. Much work ahead for us, and several
| enhancements in the pipeline.
|
| www.whatboard.app if you want check us out. Reach out if you have
| interest in getting involved with us.
| harrego wrote:
| The openness of this approach will allow for great recall
| potential with GPT models when we eventually get them running
| locally. Dave Winer has already been experimenting with this
| (admittedly not locally) based on his large backlog of blog posts
| and has found it effective[1].
|
| [1]
| http://scripting.com/2023/08/06/131842.html?title=miriamIsGr...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| When I think about memex, I think about being able to share my
| "trails." On this matter, I'm often irritated by how little value
| I get for my carefully developed web browsing history. Why is it
| so hard to extract personal value from our histories?
| undebuggable wrote:
| It's not limited to your web history. File paths are URIs as
| well, and so is a path to a specific page in a PDF or to a tab
| in a spreadsheet. Nothing prevents you from composing both
| local and web URIs and reopening them automatically at any
| time. The value you extract depends on the quality and
| reliability of the content you picked to bookmark.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| True. Closest to this I know was Gelernter's lifestream
| DonHopkins wrote:
| David Gelernter's tired old plagerized Lifestream and
| Mirror Worlds ideas (which he illegitimately patented) were
| hardly original or unique (which even Leonardo da Vinci and
| Bob Graham invented long before he did), and now he (and
| his son Daniel Gelernter) have degenerated into yet another
| couple of dime-a-dozen foaming at the mouth batshit crazy
| alt-right extremist Trump boot licking big lie spreading
| climate change denying misogynistic racist birtherism
| promoting sociopaths, who are religiously and sexistly
| against women in the workforce, and angrily think working
| mothers harm their children and should stay at home.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestreaming#Before_lifestre
| a...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter#Politics
|
| >Politics
|
| >He is a former national fellow at the American Enterprise
| Institute and senior fellow in Jewish thought at the Shalem
| Center. In 2003, he became a member of the National Council
| on the Arts.[21] Time magazine profiled Gelernter in 2016,
| describing him as a "stubbornly independent thinker. A
| conservative among mostly liberal Ivy League professors, a
| religious believer among the often disbelieving ranks of
| computer scientists..."[22]
|
| >Endorsing Donald Trump for president, in October 2016,
| Gelernter wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling
| Hillary Clinton "as phony as a three-dollar bill", and
| saying that Barack Obama "has governed like a third-rate
| tyrant".[23][24] In his capacity as a member of the Trump
| transition team, Peter Thiel nominated Gelernter for the
| Science Advisor to the President position; Gelernter did
| meet with Trump in January 2017 but did not get the
| job.[25]
|
| >In 2018, he said that the idea that Trump is a racist "is
| absurd."[26] In October 2020 he joined in signing a letter
| stating: "Given his astonishing success in his first term,
| we believe that Donald Trump is the candidate most likely
| to foster the promise and prosperity of America."[27]
|
| >Gelernter has spoken out against women in the workforce,
| saying working mothers were harming their children and
| should stay at home.[13] Gelernter has also argued for the
| U.S. voting age to be raised, on the basis that 18-year-
| olds are not sufficiently mature.[28]
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/trumps-science-
| advis...
|
| https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/01/25/gelernter-
| denies-m...
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/david-
| gelernter-...
|
| https://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/donald-trumps-
| shadow-...
|
| https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/08/why-i-need-an-ar-15/
|
| https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/who-would-you-shoot
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| I usually prefer a Google Doc shared among the team to work on a
| given problem or feature instead of the so popular Miro. Diagrams
| are nice, yes, I agree, but they are not a substitute for actual
| text. Engineers think that because they draw boxes and lines and
| add little notes here and there the design is Done. Product
| managers usually like this approach too because "we don't have
| time to read a whole page of text". Drives me nuts.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The diagram is a thinking tool, or a supplement to written
| text, but not the whole thing.
| hermanradtke wrote:
| The import from URL feature on Google docs is perfect for
| importing mermaid.live diagrams to accompany the text. A
| mermaid.live URL contains the complete diagram state, which
| allows anyone to follow the original URL, make modifications
| and update the Google doc.
| metaphor wrote:
| That's a hard sell for those who work in companies that
| prohibit dependencies on free 3rd-party web services to
| discuss business confidential ideas in an unsecure way.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| You know what drives me nuts? People spending two pages on a
| convoluted description of what could have been a simple
| diagram. It goes both ways.
| 39 wrote:
| Agree, most people cannot write concisely, sequence diagrams
| are generally a safer bet.
| quaddo wrote:
| "A picture is worth a thousand words" or some such.
|
| That said, I've certainly heard that different people prefer
| different ways of learning/consuming knowledge. I myself will
| choose video for some things, illustrations/graphs/images for
| other things, and text/tables for yet others. I do have a
| fondness for well done images, though.
|
| Even the style of text can have an impact. Bullet points for
| providing instructions, instead of a long paragraph of
| sprawling text.
|
| Another thing I picked up some 15 years ago is borrowed from
| newspapers: the concept of "above the fold"; get the main
| points out there near the top, and keep it concise.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| A picture is worth a thousand words, but most instances of
| "a thousand words" cannot be expressed by a picture.
| quaddo wrote:
| Pictures/visuals just communicate differently.
|
| A well-done graph can communicate data and the desired
| message quickly. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we
| have poorly done or deceptive graphs.
|
| An illustrated magazine will communicate a story
| differently, compared to a text-only novel. There's
| nuance to each approach that the other can't quite
| capture.
|
| A photograph or painting can elicit a different level
| (breadth, depth) of mood/emotion that words might merely
| hint at.
|
| Of course, what's useful in one context could be
| pointless in another. An introduction to photography
| would do well to include some illustrations, whereas a
| book on meditation could probably do fine with few, if
| any, images. Another example is Gray's Anatomy, which
| would probably be more challenging to consume if there
| were no illustrations.
|
| Some subjects such as learning a martial art can be
| helped by using pictures/illustrations, but realistically
| when used as the only source of knowledge fall short of
| adequately communicating proficiency in said martial art,
| where only in-person instruction would really suffice.
| ivanhoe wrote:
| Text is for details, diagrams are to quickly communicate the
| whole idea in a single place. IMHO every complex-enough project
| needs both.
| multicast wrote:
| The need to adapt it for the average user is mentioned. The
| average person uses a pc (if ever - good luck with this on
| mobile) mostly for work (ms office + some ERP) and in some cases
| for private uses (e.g. news, e-banking, mails, important
| administrative work). If you go a bit deeper maybe reddit and
| video games. An average user would never want to link around
| stuff on the web with a hundred arrows and multiple colors. He
| simply does not care.
|
| The author and the old guy in the video he linked to behave
| almost cult-like, especially the old guy: He literally claims
| that this IS the best method for working with documents ever, the
| www is a fork of his idea based on a "dumbed-down in the 70s at
| brown university", he does not understand why it has not already
| taken off and he thinks its the most important feature for the
| human race. Really?
|
| If people really see potential in this and work in spaces like
| journalism and academic research there would be already big
| programs out there.
|
| Yes it is good to have passion about something and yes it is good
| if someone has a real need for this and his delivered with a
| solution, but this will never go mainstream. And in my opinion
| not even in the segment of technical skilled people like
| engineers.
|
| This is the typical invention that fits the "I know it is the
| best thing, I love it and almost pressure people to use it, but
| it has not taken off the lightest for decades" case.
| patterns wrote:
| The old guy in the video is Ted Nelson, the man who coined the
| term hypertext, made significant contributions to computer
| science, inspired two generations of researchers and continues
| to inspire as his works are being rediscovered.
|
| There have been "big programs" but when the web came,
| fundamental hypertext research and development on other systems
| came to a grinding halt. Ted Nelson, and many other
| researchers, predicted many of the problems that we now face
| with the Web, notably broken links, copyright and payment as
| well as usability/user interface issues.
|
| I don't know what an average user is, but what a user typically
| does or wants to do with a computer is somewhat (pre)determined
| by its design. Computer systems have, for better or worse,
| strong influence on what we consider as practical, what we
| think we need and even what we consider as possible.
| (Programming languages have a similar effect).
|
| One of the key points of Ted Nelson's research is that much of
| the writing process is re-arranging, or recombining, individual
| pieces (text, images, ...) into a bigger whole. In some sense,
| hypertext provides support for fine-grained modularized
| writing. It provides mechanisms and structures for combination
| and recombination. But this requires a "common" hypertext
| structure that can be easily and conveniently viewed,
| manipulated and "shared" between applications. Because this
| form of editing is so fundamental, it should be part of an
| operating system and an easily accessible "affordance".
|
| The Web is not designed for fine-grained editing and
| rearranging/recombining content and has started as a compromise
| to get work done at CERN. For example, following a link is very
| easy and almost instantaneous, but creating a link is a whole
| different story, let alone making a collection of related web
| pages tied to specific inquiries, or, even making a shorter
| version of a page with some details left out or augmented.
| Hypertext goes far deeper than this.
|
| Although a bit dated, I recommend reading Ted Nelson's seminal
| ACM publication in which he touches many issues concerning
| writing, how we can manage different versions and combinations
| of a text body (or a series of documents), what the problems
| are and how they can be technically addressed.
|
| [1] "Complex information processing: a file structure for the
| complex, the changing and the indeterminate"
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800197.806036
| majormajor wrote:
| > One of the key points of Ted Nelson's research is that much
| of the writing process is re-arranging, or recombining,
| individual pieces (text, images, ...) into a bigger whole. In
| some sense, hypertext provides support for fine-grained
| modularized writing. It provides mechanisms and structures
| for combination and recombination. But this requires a
| "common" hypertext structure that can be easily and
| conveniently viewed, manipulated and "shared" between
| applications. Because this form of editing is so fundamental,
| it should be part of an operating system and an easily
| accessible "affordance".
|
| Here's where I'm stuck:
|
| Hypertext - whether on the web or just on a local machine -
| can't solve the UX problem of this on its own, though. People
| can re-arrange contents in a hypertext doc, recombine pieces
| of it... but mostly through the same cut-and-paste way they'd
| do it in Microsoft Word 95.
|
| The web adds an abstraction of "cut and paste just the link
| or tag that points to an external resource to embed instead
| making a fresh copy of the whole thing" but all that does is
| add in those new problems of stale links, etc.
|
| So compared to a single-player Word doc, or even a "always
| copy by value" shared-Google-doc world that reduces the
| problems of dead external embeds, what does hypertext give me
| as a way of making rearranging things easier? Collapsible
| tags? But in a GUI editor the ability to select and move
| individual nodes can be implemented regardless of the backend
| file format anyway.
|
| TLDR: I haven't seen an compelling-to-me-in-2023 demo of how
| this system should work, doing things that Google docs today
| can't that avoids link-rot problems and such, to think that
| the issue is on the document format instead of user tools
| interface side.
| patterns wrote:
| Yes, I agree a demo would be good.
|
| I have to catch some sleep, but I will address your
| questions as good as I can later. In the meanwhile, you
| might want to take a look at how Xanadu addresses the
| problems of stale links, and maybe some of your other
| questions will be answered.
|
| [1] https://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
|
| Also, I highly recommend reading Nelson's 1965 ACM paper I
| mentioned to better understand the problems hypertext tries
| to solve and the limitations of classical word processing
| (which also expands to Google Docs).
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Yep I have a folder called Obsidian in my Dropbox with markdown
| files I edit with VSCode :-)
| coliveira wrote:
| The big problem with files is that they are linear. Up to
| computers, the standard interface for people to work is the sheet
| of paper, which is a two dimensional surface. In fact, it was
| even better because you can organize papers into books or
| collections, which gives a 3rd dimension. Files, being linear,
| make it difficult to parse and analyze, which is always the
| problem we need to solve with computers. This problem is much
| easier to solve when we can work on 3 dimensions and organize
| data spatially (this is the guiding principle of charts and
| tables).
| cobertos wrote:
| I disagree. The linearity is super helpful for scanning and
| finding quickly, by time, by name, etc. Id argue that any app
| that makes the interface "spatial first" will have to add these
| linear features on top of what they're doing to find things
| fast, at a minimum for full-text search.
|
| I do think spatial organization can help for human consumption
| of not easily orderable datasets >1000 items, but I think
| that's a niche case for everything ive interacted with so far.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| >I do think spatial organization can help for human
| consumption of not easily orderable datasets >1000 items, but
| I think that's a niche case for everything ive interacted
| with so far.
|
| What did you have in mind?
| ccozan wrote:
| To be honest, I find JIRA + Confluence(+ lets say Gitlab) a
| strong memex system. You can link everything very easily, the
| software is happy to create the links for you as well. Adding
| Gliphy as well ( for charts and other usages ).
| eviks wrote:
| This approach where even the basics are broken - links require
| full manual management (what happens when you rename some target
| file) - is another 50 years away from Memex
| [deleted]
| undebuggable wrote:
| Well... URIs, URI fragments, URLs, URL shorteners, hyperlinks,
| symbolic links. With good will and some effort, it could be
| fixed I guess.
| input_sh wrote:
| Or you use something like Obsidian, Logseq, Notion and so on
| that have already abstracted this problem away. You rename a
| file or move it to some subfolder and every single reference
| to it gets auto-updated without you having to do anything.
|
| I'd argue that this sort of interlinking flexibility
| (alongside easy-to-use plugins) is what separates the current
| era of note-taking apps over alternatives that people seem to
| (ab)use: a folder of Markdown notes edited via VSCode, a
| Google Docs folder, or even a static site generator.
| eviks wrote:
| After wasting much time on fixing the bookeeping you'd get to
| the next basic issue - content search across devices. Then to
| tracking changes done by various people. Then... backtracking
| a couple of steps and dropping the whole thing
| OO000oo wrote:
| Honestly this sounds like a terrible platform for advertising.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| The physical desk surface as a clean interface motif hiding all
| the internal complexity is a big part of the Memex that people
| tend to skip over in the conversation about how hyperlinks solved
| this all years ago. The use of windows as an approximation for
| physical depth perception allowing something to be 'on top' is
| still only a very limited implemention of what is digitally
| possible.
| winter_blue wrote:
| I think it should be possible to build a Chrome/Firefox
| extensions that adds annotation and editing to pages (storing a
| superset copy of the page somewhere), adding links/trails to
| pages, and sharing these deltas wit others, etc.
| coldblues wrote:
| We definitely need open source tools. I personally use Logseq and
| have a lot of notes. I want to use AI to better search and make
| connections, using something like ChromaDB. Logseq is mainly for
| text. What My Mind (mymind.com) does for "smart bookmarking" is
| really great. No folders, collections at most if you really need
| it. Making the most use of digital knowledge is something that
| really needs to be focused on. It can accelerate a lot of things.
| And we must stop doing this with yet another cloud note-taking
| app with OpenAI integration with a bunch of (personally) useless
| collaborative features. I want my own mind that works for me and
| in my interest.
| brazzy wrote:
| First time I heard of My Mind. Looks really nice, but how is it
| not yet another cloud note taking app?
|
| To me, the biggest problem of this kind of tool is that if you
| use it to its fullest potential, it necessarily becomes a
| crucial part of your daily life, something that will cause very
| serious problems if you lose it.
|
| And that means anything proprietary or closed SaaS is an
| absolute no go. My Mind's promise to respect privacy and stay
| independent of outside influence is nice, but worthless. They
| can change their mind at any time - or get bought up, or go
| bankrupt. Being a paid service might reduce the likelihood, but
| does not eliminate it, especially not over a timespan of
| decades.
|
| So at an absolute minimum, such a tool needs to be able and
| willing to export all of my data in an easily processible
| format. This is far more important than shiny features.
|
| My current solution is a self hosted TiddlyWiki. It may not
| have all the shiny features, but it is mine, and always will
| be, even 50 years from now. The worst case scenario is that it
| stops working on new browsers and nobody maintains it anymore -
| but I still have the data. Easily processible text files are
| actually its internal storage format.
| cobertos wrote:
| I think files are too limited to be the base for a memex. I've
| been managing a lot of my data recently in my custom built
| "memex" and have found them a poor abstraction in many cases. An
| example is my music collection. I have 2000+ songs, of which I
| have music metadata, metadata for myself (added date, found
| source), and the music itself. Bundling this into the mp3 is
| unideal. A json file per song is also not great, doable but
| overwhelming at 2000+. My ideal is a json file for all of it and
| then linking to the path of the mp3. The abstraction I've made
| allows you to pick arbitrary positions in the data "tree" when to
| break from a file tree abstraction to a intra-file data format
| (JSON, YAML, etc...)
|
| I also think the interoperable argument breaks down when you want
| to do anything off the beaten path. The author mentions how you
| might have a folder with a presentation or document. But
| attaching any kind of nonstandard data for the format is
| impossible, and requires the format parsing clients to know about
| it. You're limited by what each format supports and the total
| number of available, mature formats with mature parsers/editors.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| My system is basically to emphasize easy rebuild of a database.
| So I have directories that contain a text file that can be
| easily parsed to build databases or process workflows. I have
| found this works extremely well even in draconian IT
| environments.
| cobertos wrote:
| That sounds nice. I've diverged a bit from actual files on
| disk (even though I wanted my system to stay there for
| simplicity) into an abstract tree structure with a fs-like
| API. Though you can get back to plain files by just using a
| single FSTree (in my system). Would love to hear more about
| the structure of those plain text files you use for
| regeneration
|
| I think it's very important to have the ability to work
| directly with files, for draconian environments you describe,
| but just because it's the simplest, stable, most portable,
| least-time to _something_ abstraction. It just has to be
| balanced with more complex functionality files alone can't
| handle.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| Whats overwhelming about the json per file? You need to fill up
| all that data either way whether you divide it up into a json
| per mp3 or a single mega json.
| cobertos wrote:
| Well, with a single json file I can pull it into my text
| editor (Sublime) and do find and replace (and it's a little
| nicer than find in all files) and I can do things like code
| block folding, and probably others Im forgetting. Also, I'm
| not sure how to `jq` across 2000 files but how to with one
| json file. I've also heard that the filesystem is not a great
| place to store larger amounts of files like, say, 500k
| records?
|
| My "memex" tries to use well-known abstractions so that I can
| do certain tasks in other programs until my "memex" can do
| it. That and because for quite a few operations, I'd like to
| simply mount the window of a separate program into my "memex"
| as a sort of window manager (but deeply integrated with the
| other stuff the "memex" does, like data and tab management)
| instead of trying to remake such monolithic, decently-built
| programs
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