[HN Gopher] Note-taking apps are designed for storage, not insig...
___________________________________________________________________
Note-taking apps are designed for storage, not insight - can AI
change that?
Author : isaacfrond
Score : 75 points
Date : 2023-08-25 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| Rochus wrote:
| The word "smarter" or even "smart" doesn't appear in the text, so
| I guess this is not the claim of the text; I would have
| appreciated a summary or at least a conclusion. I did not have
| the patience to read it all, but just skimmed over it and think
| it's more about information overflow in general.
|
| It's not true that note-taking and well designed apps to do so
| don't make us smarter. Being smart means "having or showing a
| high degree of mental ability" (point 1 of 7 in
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/smart). Applications
| which support our information management increase our mental
| abilities.
|
| Since I take notes of every meeting, I still know days or even
| years later what was decided and for what reason, and I can check
| the arguments afterwards to see if they are still valid and, if
| necessary, make sure that they are returned to if circumstances
| change. If I don't take any notes or only keyword notes, I can't
| do that because after two hours you only remember a fraction of
| the meeting, and after a day full of meetings you hardly remember
| any details. I've done big enough projects for long enough and
| participated in meetings of 2 with up to 50 people in a room, and
| have been able to observe very well how what kind of notes
| affected the aftermath of the meeting on individuals.
| Rochus wrote:
| Ok, now it's another headline (no longer "Why note-taking apps
| don't make us smarter"). But I doubt that "Note-taking apps are
| designed for storage, not insight" is more correct. When I'm
| taking notes, I'm collecting facts and evidence, from which I
| later draw conclusions, i.e. get insight.
| kazinator wrote:
| The phrase "improve our thinking" appears, which can be
| understood as the article author's clarification about what
| "make us smarter" refers to.
| Rochus wrote:
| Thanks, though "thinking" is a mental process and "make
| smarter" or "showing a high degree of mental ability" applies
| to a quality.
| kazinator wrote:
| The entire article can be summarized like this:
|
| "I define intelligence an innate ability to juggle
| information well, which is independent of memory. If you're
| trying to think, but have forgotten some key information
| and not have taken notes, you're not less intelligent, only
| less informed; therefore, note taking cannot make you more
| intelligent, only better informed."
|
| Yawn ...
| Rochus wrote:
| Thanks for the summary.
|
| > _I define intelligence an innate ability to juggle
| information well, which is independent of memory ..._
|
| Well, if people start using their own definitions, then
| we should not wonder that they come to unusual
| conclusions.
| slushh wrote:
| Note taking apps can make us smarter when note taking apps allow
| people to cooperate.
|
| It can already happen on Twitter that people complete each
| other's thoughts but the Twitter timeline is not the medium to
| publish half-finished thoughts that could tarnish one's
| reputation.
|
| Still, there is some joined thinking. HN shows that it's fun to
| pool notes on poplar topics. The difficulty lies in managing the
| attention on notes. Popularity voting doesn't work to navigate
| note collections.
|
| The headline is about our smartness, but it doesn't mean us as a
| group. There is no joined thinking in his note-taking apps.
|
| He is right when he talks about his isolated thinking:
|
| >But the original promise of Roam -- that it would improve my
| thinking by helping me to build a knowledge base and discover new
| ideas -- fizzled completely
|
| Where should new ideas arise in old notes when nobody sees them?
| Old notes just remind us that something is important. Revisiting
| them later, with new connections from new memories, it's possible
| to have new insights.
|
| There is an easier way to access new memories: When notes are
| published, other brains, with many more, and different memories,
| can find solutions or advancements.
|
| Historically, scientists only publish polished results, apart
| from exceptions like Hilbert's problems. Even those were
| remarkable problems. Who would dare to publish their minor
| nuisances or shallow observations (unless they come with a nice
| picture)?
|
| The author hopes that AI can find answers. Why should we wait for
| AI when there are already intelligent humans? The problem lies in
| managing access to our thoughts. We don't want to allow everybody
| to see each of our notes.
|
| >One interpretation of these events is that the software failed:
| that journaling and souped-up links simply don't have the power
| some of us once hoped they did.
|
| >In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software
| to improve our thinking.
|
| Software could improve _our joined_ thinking. We need an
| acceptable format to publish our notes.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > It turns out that a fresh note created each day, labeled with a
| date, is a good canvas for collecting transient thoughts, which
| can serve as a springboard into deeper thinking.
|
| This type of notetaking has been around forever. Ten years ago I
| was using TiddlyWiki exactly that way. Click the button to create
| a new journal and organize them by date.
|
| > The second is known to note-taking nerds as "bidirectional
| linking."
|
| Also strange to attribute this to Roam. It was around long before
| Roam. TiddlyWiki had it forever. I never saw much use to it, but
| it was there, even if the author didn't know about it.
|
| > In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software
| to improve our thinking.
|
| It's tough to draw that conclusion based on the arguments up to
| that point. Software is really helpful. I could use a plain text
| editor, but quality search, hyperlinks between notes, automatic
| naming of notes, ability to make task lists with checkable boxes,
| etc. is a clear win for me.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Even in the original c2 wiki, clicking on the title of a page
| went to a page listing all the pages that linked to it. Still
| does.
| nvahalik wrote:
| I tried taking notes and then organizing them afterward.
|
| Then, I switched to spending a little bit of time organizing my
| notes before taking lots of them. This changed the game for me
| considerably.
|
| It definitely doesn't make me smarter but it does keep me more
| organized. To the point where I'm not in a conversation
| remembering something I missed from earlier. This does make me
| more effective in those conversations and more able to focus on
| the people I'm conversing with.
|
| And that can definitely make me _seem_ smarter...
| vlark wrote:
| I can't recommend the Zettlekasten Method enough:
| https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/
|
| You can do it with index cards or you can use software to
| practice the method and grow your note collection. I now prefer
| Zettlr (https://www.zettlr.com) after using Joplin
| (https://joplinapp.org), which are both FOSS.
|
| One of the core strategies of the Zettlekasten Method is to link
| notes to each other. That's how knowledge grows: connections and
| synthesis (internalization/application of the connections)
|
| Here's a 3-year-old video on the method that serves as a good
| primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFZHuWLA09M
| floren wrote:
| Guess I'll toot my horn slightly: I made a Zettlekasten-ish
| tool for the CLI a few years ago and have used it for my work
| notes (including daily TODO), project logs, and personal diary
| stuff ever since. At this point I've got a hierarchy of 114
| notes, with some notes linked into multiple locations in the
| tree. The hardest part is trying to decide if you want a new
| note for a topic, or if it should fit into an existing one.
|
| Maybe somebody might find it useful:
|
| https://github.com/floren/zk
|
| Everything is just files in a directory, so I use Syncthing to
| have access to it everywhere.
|
| It's also got a thing that lets you associate files with a
| given note, but the tooling around that isn't very good yet.
| I've been slowly working on a client for the Acme text editor,
| and I've also wanted to make a proper Go GUI client.
|
| (man I need to re-do the CLI with some library that does built-
| in help, because some commands like `zk orphans` [which finds
| notes that have no parents] aren't documented _anywhere_ )
| wfhBrian wrote:
| [INSERT OS] (or any platform) doesn't make you smarter...
|
| But, how you use it can make you smarter,
|
| or suck you into a cult.
| pixel_tracing wrote:
| The feedback loop needs to be very small, from thought to
| insight, to storage, to retrieval at a later time. Probably the
| best is maybe audio => transcription => storage The audio =>
| transcription UX isn't too great at the moment Edit: I should add
| the BEST experience here is direct thought => storage =>
| retrieval This is how our brains work but we need a module
| extender for our brain when we are doing a fuzzy search
| wduquette wrote:
| I do find note-taking to be a useful way to learn and remember
| things. Usually if I'm studying something seriously I'll make
| notes using pen and paper, and then later consolidate them and
| synthesize them into an Obsidian vault.
|
| But I admit that the Zettelkasten method has had marginal benefit
| for me, possibly because I'm not working that way all day every
| day; and simply copying and pasting articles from the web into
| your knowledge base isn't going to accomplish much of anything
| for anybody.
| toastal wrote:
| Is there an open source option to Obsidian? This is the type of
| thing I wouldn't want reading or tracking my inner thoughts.
| Preferably something that isn't using a limited format like
| Markdown.
| freshchilled wrote:
| There's LogSeq, which is a bit of a different model, but is
| open source and has all the basic functionality that Obsidian
| has.
|
| I don't know what kind of formatting you're looking for, but
| most of the apps I'm familiar with are markdown or just plain
| text. I use Vimwiki in markdown for my notes, but it can also
| be exported to HTML, which I don't use often.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Obsidian stores everything in markdown files, which are just
| text, so you can use any software you want to read and edit
| them.
| thecodrr wrote:
| I think all note apps are just databases. Some day an LLM might
| be able to make sense of the messy notes in my note taking app
| but I am not holding my breath. My notes are not supposed to
| stand the test of time. They are ephemeral thoughts relevant only
| for a specific period - a best-worst case against the risk of
| forgetting them.
|
| The most an AI should do is find relevant notes on a topic I
| search. That's it. I don't need its robotic voice summarizing my
| grotesque ideas in a painless, unpassionate way. The last thing I
| need is more of my ideas seeping into more of my computers in
| hopes of somehow making me smarter.
| keeptrying wrote:
| 1. The main reason we don't leanr from notes is that its
| exhausting to go back and review.
|
| 2. Learning requires a risk of loss. Without some kind of loss
| being averted, your mind won't retain nor focus on the subject at
| hand.
|
| This is why TV and entertainment or fiction rarely help us learn
| anything.
|
| BENEFITS
|
| The biggest benefit of note taking is 1. Writing the notes helps
| your instantly retain - hand written notes much more so 2. you
| miss about 20%-80% of verbal information when its presented first
| tiem - especially subjects we aren't familair with.
| LispSporks22 wrote:
| I used to be a note taking nerd. I switched to handwritten notes.
| Supposedly writing vs. typing helps with recall. Who knows.
| Anyway, shortly after that I became a fountain pen connoisseur.
| Started to see the pattern/problem... Now it's just dumb notes on
| a legal pad using a ballpoint. Minimum distraction. Sometimes I
| do a document scan with my phone.
| bityard wrote:
| The article is a nothingburger, as others have noted.
|
| But quite often, you get replies in the comments saying that
| _all_ note-taking and organization is a procrastinating waste of
| time. ("Why can't everyone just memorize everything like I
| do???") Which is wrong too.
|
| Notes are just a tool for knowledge work. They are necessary but
| not sufficient. If you're not writing things down SOMEWHERE every
| day, you are leaving a LOT of mental capacity on the table. All
| the while setting up Future You to relearn the same things over
| and over again.
|
| (Final tangent: apprentice woodworkers and blacksmiths would
| craft their own basic tools when just getting started, I think
| most apprentice software devs should do the same.)
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I graduated from college because a classmate took notes.
|
| I rarely ever attended class in my major. I was notorious for
| it. I had 3 jobs. I would ride the bus an hour and a half to
| school and spend most days sleeping in the student union. I'd
| go xerox her notes right before the test, study them a few
| times during lunch breaks and afterward at work, and then go
| take the exams.
|
| She took such good notes that I almost always had higher grades
| than she did. Studying notes is more important than taking
| them, but having great notes means As if you understand what
| you're reading.
| helix278 wrote:
| Note taking can help to offload your brain.
| demetrius wrote:
| This is such a strange headline.
|
| > Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter
|
| Because... they're not supposed to?
|
| To me, this sounds like "Why pen doesn't make us smarter" or "Why
| lamp doesn't make us smarter". Why was the author expecting it to
| make us smarter anyway? Where did they get that expectation?
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've changed the title to a more representative phrase
| from the article.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > This is such a strange headline.
|
| This is such a strange comment.
|
| "They're designed for storage, not sparking insights. Can AI
| change that?"
|
| That's the sub-header. The followup. The next line.
|
| > Because... they're not supposed to?
|
| Tell that to the note-taking apps that are adding AI to their
| apps in order to "make us smarter" as some would say. To
| improve our knowledge, to think bigger, to brainstorm for us.
|
| > Why was the author expecting it to make us smarter anyway?
|
| The headline doesn't say that at all. In fact, the article
| starts off by making it very very very clear that they aren't
| doing this.
|
| > Where did they get that expectation?
|
| They didn't. That's your conclusion.
|
| > To me, this sounds like "Why pen doesn't make us smarter" or
| "Why lamp doesn't make us smarter".
|
| They sound nothing alike. The sounds are completely different.
| You should get your hearing checked. =)
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| The title gets even funnier when bookended with the author's
| conclusion: "The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in
| your brain."
| tomcam wrote:
| My wife vehemently disagrees
| dkarl wrote:
| Heh, you haven't looked around for a note-taking app recently.
| Note-taking is like the nerdy version of weight loss. There's a
| cottage industry around note-taking apps and techniques,
| complete with dozens (at least) of people producing influencer
| content on how they make their life amazing using <notetaking-
| method-A> with <notetaking-app-B>.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| No, you see, they're not "note-taking apps", they're _PKMSs_
| - Personal Knowledge Management Systems. (bleh)
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The problem is that people confuse information for
| knowledge.
| doubled112 wrote:
| This sounds like the equivalent of a gas station attendant
| calling themselves a petrol product distribution
| technician.
| pavlov wrote:
| Yes, it feels like people are desperately searching for "This
| one crazy hack that will make you think better!"
|
| In my experience, thinking more is the only thing that will
| reliably make you think better. And to think more, you need
| space and time, not a breathtaking density of inputs and
| outputs surrounding your thoughts, which seems to be the
| note-taking industry's solution.
| atoav wrote:
| Curiously there have been indications that the way we take
| notes does indeed affect our thinking -- but not in the way
| those note app devs would like: Taking handwritten notes is
| linked to better memorization in various studies over e.g.
| typing.
| taude wrote:
| Agreed. Everyone is overthinking it, and spending their
| brain cells on the wrong thing looking for that one
| panacea.
|
| Wanna get fit: watch what you eat, burn more calories than
| you intake, exercise, probably minimize alcohol intake.
|
| Wanna learn stuff: intake new information from a reliable
| source, write it down (in anything), reprocess the
| information in your own words, and review often enough for
| you to pick it up.
|
| Anything I'm missing?
| boredemployee wrote:
| >> you need space and time
|
| ie.: a simple walk in a park or a calm and silent place
| taude wrote:
| Yeah, this is dumb. Gotta study your notes and things you write
| down. Most people don't have the raw IQ or photographic memory
| to get it first try.
| tgv wrote:
| I think the pen and the lamp have made us smarter. You need
| tools to "scale up" knowledge distribution and acquisition (and
| reliability). Writing and printing did are essential in that.
| It's not an unreasonable starting point to think that note-
| taking apps can help us further.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I never understood the purpose of doing the daily note for these
| apps but I completely disagree with the author. Multiple times
| now I've been writing, gotten stuck, went to go look at relevant
| notes, and found a note thinking about the issue in a completely
| different way that I could then integrate with my current form of
| thought. The fact of the matter is that storage is a bit like
| expanding your conscious world. You think about things
| differently depending on context, mood, etc. If you have your
| thoughts about the same subject from two different contexts, it's
| like reaching back into your brain and pulling out subconscious
| truths that you would've forgotten otherwise.
|
| The issue with the daily note is that it doesn't sort by content.
| That's why I just constantly make notes based on topic of
| discussion. Whenever I have an idea, I take a voice memo on my
| phone. Then I send that voice memo to whisper AI for
| autotranscription, and a little script on my server formats it
| for Obsidian MD. I used to try to write from scratch. Now I
| realize that writing from scratch is a terrible method of
| writing.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >I never understood the purpose of doing the daily note for
| these apps
|
| I mostly use Obsidian for taking notes during D&D (arguably its
| killer app), but I think "session" notes are a good enough
| analogue to "daily notes".
|
| To that end, these notes serve as an excuse to force you to
| list your individual notes in chronological order (which makes
| it easy to trigger further memories/details that came next),
| which then prompts you to spin out any specific-enough
| information into atomic notes, adding backlinks which provide
| context and organic categorization that might not otherwise be
| obvious.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I was sort of exaggerating. I do get how it can be a useful
| process but it does seem like the author had blind faith in
| that type of organization without understanding the pros and
| cons of it, and I do think that the cons are way bigger than
| people seem to think they are. Some of my more rambling voice
| memos approach a "daily note" style of chronological
| organization. I've tried to create outlines for them but it's
| pretty time consuming. Someday soon I'll try to use ai to
| create summaries and see where that takes me.
|
| My point was that I think the authors problem is the daily
| note rather than the note taking app.
| gochi wrote:
| I don't see the benefit of this when you can reach for the
| internet and find a magnitude of thoughts on the very same
| issue with a very different perspective. I also think thoughts
| from others are the only way to adjust your own bias about the
| issue.
|
| Rather the benefit seems to mostly stem from freeing up mental
| space by removing whatever the thought was that you want to
| cling to, and putting it somewhere else that "feels" permanent.
| That feeling is important because it allows your brain to drop
| it, rather than feel like you have to continue to think about
| it out of fear of "forgetting".
| kouru225 wrote:
| It doesn't help to find different thoughts on the same issue
| because you can't relate to the majority of them. When you
| find out that you, yourself, came to different opinions of
| the same subject, then you end up having a practical
| understanding of that POV.
|
| You have to understand where that differing POV connects with
| other POVs. The bridge between the two is what matters here;
| not the content.
| gochi wrote:
| Why can I not relate to the majority of them? It's a basic
| feature of empathy.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Relating may be the wrong word. Its one thing to
| empathize with someone's pov, but it's another to
| recreate it. We all are living, in some respect, in
| response to our environment. You can empathize with
| another's pov but that doesn't mean you have a full
| understanding of the ecosystem of thoughts that led them
| to their conclusions. What I'm saying is that as our
| environment changes over time, your ecosystem of thoughts
| change, and if you put those thoughts down at the moment
| then you can find moments in your past when you, too,
| came to the same conclusion as other people. That way you
| can relate not only to their opinion, but to the
| environment that the opinion was (in some respect)
| created in response to. You can then relate not just to
| their conscious pov but to the unsaid subconscious
| aspects of their pov as well. It allows you to find
| connections you previously wouldn't have found. It also
| has helped me change my perception of myself.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| In my experience, going to the internet to get whatever
| random thoughts a search algorithm turns up for me can feel
| interesting, but is almost always counterproductive. Other
| people have different circumstances, different experiences,
| and while some content on the internet is good, a lot of it
| is just crap.
|
| Most of the work is in thinking through things for yourself,
| organizing information, and synthesizing some outcome.
| Internet browsing is like junk food, and doesn't do a good
| job substituting for that.
|
| Also, you mention "thoughts from others are the only way to
| adjust your own bias." I definitely agree with that, but I
| want to get thoughts from people who I know and trust. If you
| adjust your biases based on the cacophony of the internet
| it's much more likely that you'll get swept up in other
| people's biases instead
| aschearer wrote:
| I'm not "smarter" but keeping a daily journal where I can dump
| stream-of-consciousness onto the page and look back at it has
| been very helpful for me. It frees up memory for other things. It
| facilitates a better working relationship between my analytical
| and intuitive sides. And most of all it's a greenhouse for mental
| seeds, which sometimes germinate unexpectedly but would otherwise
| be discarded.
|
| I feel approaching journaling with a goal in mind,
| instrumentally, may undermine the process. Better to just till
| the mental soil and see what happens. Like going on a hike or a
| bike ride.
| milesvp wrote:
| I've been watching a youtube psychiatrist who seems to be
| abreast of the latest research on some of this stuff. He had an
| interesting insight around learning and journaling. His take
| seems to be that journaling is something you do to help process
| big things, mostly emotional. Or to write things down so you
| can clear your working memory. But there seems to be evidence
| that you don't want to write down certain things you want to
| recall. Or at least, you don't want to write them down prior to
| sleep. Seems there's some research that suggest sleep brain
| activity will proritise emotional problem solving, then non
| emotional problem solving, then recall. So to get better recall
| of facts, writing down things to clear the brain of everything
| but what you want to remember is a good strategy.
|
| edit: healthy gamer is the channel, and I really enjoy when he
| talks the science behind some of these topics
| kkfx wrote:
| My notes (Emacs/org-mode/org-roam/attachments/agenda and so on)
| makes me able to find anything at my fingertips without
| traversing a filesystem, carefully storing files in a hyper-
| curated hierarchy etc, ultimately they made my life easier, more
| productive.
|
| In smartness terms they give me:
|
| - good reference when I need them
|
| - details on something when I want
|
| My brain is still the same, no IT tool so far can extend my
| neural processing, but the overall results are pretty positive.
|
| My note against much other "apps" is:
|
| - not integrated with anything else, so you can't link things
| like mail, financial transactions etc
|
| - not easy to run automation on top of notes (something more
| complex than simple agenda reminder)
|
| That's not much a "note app" issue but a system design issue.
| Emacs is a fully integrated tool, like classical systems, in the
| modern era for business reasons anything is just an isle with all
| the flexibility and usability issue of the case.
| matt_daemon wrote:
| Notes really are such a fraught topic. One one hand you might say
| note taking is superfluous if you're just trying to get
| information in your brain (you'd be better off using a spaced-
| repetition system like Anki). On the other, they can be
| beneficial as a kind of personal archive, however it usually
| requires a lot of manual work (even with some kind of AI
| assistance).
| gdubs wrote:
| There's a kind of busywork in note-taking, list-making,
| organizing, that can often feel like you're getting something
| done, but is a kind of procrastination.
|
| Then, there's real value to taking notes that for me is most
| pronounced when I write them with a real pen and paper. I may
| never actually go back to these, but the act of writing them down
| solidifies things for me. Things like WWDC sessions, online
| courses. The value is the act of deliberately recording. There's
| a kind of brain/physical connection that happens.
|
| Ultimately, intentionality matters. There are some projects where
| the note-taking itself _is_ the point. The notes are the end
| product; you 're producing something like a catalogue of
| thoughts. Hypercard.
|
| But, it's easy to get lost in that if what you're really trying
| to achieve is 'over there' somewhere. It can be a way of avoiding
| the work entirely.
| nottorp wrote:
| > but the act of writing them down solidifies things for me
|
| Did that in uni when cramming for some exams. Writing (a good
| part of the course) by hand in the days prior to the exam
| helped a lot.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| This is the secret of professors who tell you can bring a
| cheat sheet to an exam. The trick is that _making_ the cheat
| sheet helps you study.
|
| I had a few teachers who would twist this a bit by saying
| "you can bring a single note card" or similar. Once you've
| had to figure out how to stuff a calc-exam's worth of help
| into a 3x5 card, you'll damn sure know more than when you
| started!
|
| I'll often make myself little docs or cheat sheets for some
| onerous process at work, and again - getting to the point
| where I have a doc that's foolproof even on my stupidest
| mornings does a lot to make sure I know the material well.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| I share the same perspective. There's a notable subculture
| dedicated to meticulously refining their note-taking, to-do
| lists, and other organizational tools. It appears that
| communities like HN and various tech circles tend to have a
| heightened interest in this, which makes sense since tech
| enthusiasts often enjoy fine-tuning tools just like writing
| scripts for tasks. However, akin to yak shaving in programming,
| there's a parallel phenomenon in personal productivity tools.
| While I appreciate Obsidian and similar tools (though
| apparently not as much as the next guy), it seems somewhat
| futile to invest excessive energy in crafting the perfect
| organizational system, as in reality, most of what we jot down
| or bookmark goes untouched. So, while it may _feel_ productive,
| as you rightly noted, it can often be a form of
| procrastination.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > there's real value to taking notes that for me is most
| pronounced when I write them with a real pen and paper. I may
| never actually go back to these, but the act of writing them
| down solidifies things for me.
|
| Yes, this is me. I've gone through all sorts of ways to
| "improve" my note-taking, including various note-taking apps.
| But they all actually reduce the value of note-taking for me,
| because the valuable part of note-taking is that act of taking
| notes itself. If I'm not writing them long-form by hand, as
| opposed to tapping or typing, that value is eliminated.
|
| An exception to all of this is when attending lectures or
| presentations -- in that setting, taking notes _always_ reduces
| my comprehension of what it being presented, because I can 't
| take notes and listen at the same time. For me, it's similar to
| photography -- if I'm taking photographs of a place or event
| that I'm at, the act of taking the photographs removes me from
| that place or event and I can no longer fully take it in.
| vlark wrote:
| Yes, this exactly: sometimes I don't write things down to
| review them later, but write them down to remember them now.
| [deleted]
| tin7in wrote:
| I'm using (and working on) a note taking app that has
| bidirectional links and a bunch of other "second brain" features
| that help me find information quicker.
|
| Since a few weeks I started playing around with embeddings and
| the results are pretty mind-blowing although it's just an
| improved search for now. One unexpected outcome for example is
| that search now includes snippets with similar meaning but in
| different languages.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I simply use the Notes app on my iPhone, and even that got over-
| complicated with the introduction of iCloud. Idk how but it
| deleted all my notes when I enabled that back in the day. My bad
| for not just using a plaintext file.
| nottorp wrote:
| I think they were still there but it started showing your
| icloud notes instead of asking you to import your local notes
| into icloud.
|
| Apple still hasn't learned how to do online stuff...
| squokko wrote:
| The fact that most people don't want to face is that their notes
| don't contain any valuable insights and their ideas are
| worthless.
| fattless wrote:
| Im a student and have been slowly messing with other note taking
| strategies for class. I switched first to joplin for md and html
| which was jeads and shoulders above google docs for speed and
| organization. This semester im giving obsidian a shot for its
| links and an automatic flashcard plugin, hoping it helps me
| review quicker and gets me to think about how these topics
| connect instead of just copying information from start to end.
| But admittedly i was convinced by one of those "my second brain
| changed my life forever and cured cancer" videos
|
| So far its been good and an improvement, thanks to md im taking
| great notes fast and efficiently and im putting more thought into
| connections. But all the videos and posts claiming its changed
| their lives or something is a bit much. I cant imagine it being
| that much more useful outside of school.
|
| On a side note, any other useful programs/techniques feel free to
| share.
| Zetice wrote:
| Notion + GoodNotes is where I'm at currently. I do wish I could
| combine the two, but no app I've found does tablet+pen and
| typed notes seamlessly together, so I just split them out for
| this setup.
|
| I'm also experimenting with Asana to track class assignments,
| but I'm currently trying to get them to let me buy "only" one
| seat of Business level, since the "workload" tool seems
| immensely valuable to keep my work spread out evenly through
| the semester.
| ravishi wrote:
| This trend is indeed weird. It reminds me of my journey with
| Vim. In the beginning it was life changing. Like I felt like it
| really gave me an edge. I had all kinds of customizations on
| top of it. After a while I changed to Vim plugins inside full
| IDEs. No customization, just my plain comfortable text editor
| of choice. I feel nice while using it. Feels at home. I can't
| use mouse based text editors and feel happy anymore. Or at
| least I don't bother trying. Also I see no point in comparing
| this with anyone else using their tools. It's their tools and
| they could have more than a decade of experience in it.
| floren wrote:
| > But admittedly i was convinced by one of those "my second
| brain changed my life forever and cured cancer" videos [...]
| But all the videos and posts claiming its changed their lives
| or something is a bit much.
|
| Would you have clicked on the video if the title was "My second
| brain has been kinda useful, I guess"?
| melagonster wrote:
| I sure someone had published a url about "personal assistant",
| rely on LLama and work notebook. guess this is the dream of
| author of this article ?
| jrm4 wrote:
| Again for those who choose not to read, the answer is probably
| not.
|
| I love this article, because I've had to discover this
| independently.
|
| The specific point that I realized was the following: You know
| the whole mindmapping thing with the bidirectionality and the
| fancy graphs and so forth?
|
| That's REALLY appealing to us for the following reason: We, as
| humans, are already very good at it. It's literally how our
| brains work.
|
| But also, consequently, that's why the apps suck at it -- we do
| this WAY better than they likely EVER will. That was one of those
| "once I realized that, I was enlightened" things in this space
| for sure.
|
| I've just kind of found that, good bookmarks/article tools (for
| me that was Shaarli, and later Shiori) and then just making notes
| to myself ALL THE TIME, even if I don't read them as much, does a
| much better job of this. I'm the real computer here :)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nottorp wrote:
| The article does mention that the "AI" current fad may improve
| note apps. Or at least generate more sales.
|
| Personally, I'd just like an assistant that will automatically
| label my mails. Per project, utility bills, accounting stuff, all
| in their own bucket.
|
| The per project stuff is the problem because just using the
| sender won't work, and there are even emails referring to
| multiple projects. Which i'd like filed as multiple copies in
| multiple folders. Can the current LLMs sort that?
|
| On my local machines not on someone's cloud thank you very much.
|
| I'd pay maybe a Starbucks coffee per year (not month).
| vendiddy wrote:
| Forgetting about insight, I'd even love an AI powered search
| engine on my personal notes.
|
| "Hey what notes did I take this week related for my job? What are
| the actionable things I owe others?"
| cratermoon wrote:
| I use a text analyzer to help with the search on my notes, and
| it does provide value for a free text search. It can finds
| notes that use similar words and phrases, purely by token-
| match. If I needed to answer questions like you ask, I'd tag my
| notes, "work" or "todo", and use those.
|
| My hunch is that generative pre-trained transformers can help
| provide insights, and I'm interested in trying it out. For
| those struggling with their note-taking systems and stuck with
| exact/regex matching, the ideas in this article, while not new
| to me, would provide some ideas. Leaning on "AI" to be the
| answer to a mess of random notes probably won't get the value
| this article is hyping.
| bekantan wrote:
| I keep notes, but my main problem is that I don't read them often
| enough. Somehow I have tendency to keep moving ahead and I really
| need to have a good reason to go back and look something up.
|
| So for me, main benefit is extra information which I retained
| while/because I was writing it down. I stay away from commercial
| apps, just org(roam) mode since emacs is not going out of
| business
| JellyBeanThief wrote:
| The thing is I never picked up tools like Obsidian or Anytype
| because I wanted them to do my thinking for me. On the contrary,
| I use them because they help me be rigorous in my thinking. The
| process of methodically recording and organizing what I find and
| where I found it ensures that there are some questions I always
| ask about everything.
|
| Like, my template record for a company has slots for the C-suite
| that link to records for persons, and slots for parent and child
| companies. Because of that, whenever I add a new company to my
| database, I'm prompted to add that information. I don't _have_
| to, but what 's important is that I don't have to worry about
| forgetting to deliberately make that choice. And in the future I
| can count on being reminded of what I omitted.
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