[HN Gopher] Serendipity is too important to be left to chance (1...
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Serendipity is too important to be left to chance (1996)
Author : thunderbong
Score : 91 points
Date : 2023-12-18 08:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (web.media.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.media.mit.edu)
| computersuck wrote:
| The modern equivalent of this is basically Obsidian and the
| "second brain" concept
|
| Not like chatgpt, which is a random garbage spewing agent leaving
| it to chance
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| Or Org-Roam, to stick with the Emacs connection.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Emacs is very awkward to use in a mobile phone sadly.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| It's not as seamless as I would like, but I manage pretty
| well with Emacs in Termux and files synced via Syncthing.
| kulor wrote:
| I'm working on a system similar to this to satisfy my own needs
| but can open up to brave alpha users if requested.
|
| I've a concept of boards/themes where you can add structured
| information like people (to remember contacts in context),
| bookmarks, thoughts, tasks and even RSS feeds to stay up-to-date
| on a theme (e.g battery tech). Emails and calendar will be coming
| soon so that your personal corpus is voluminous and of high
| enough quality to make a personal GPT actually useful. E.g "who
| was the CTO I met at the dinner last week".
|
| FWIW I'm already a founder of a company so this isn't intended as
| a commercial pitch.
| suoduandao2 wrote:
| I'd be interested in something like that, where do I sign up?
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I've been doing something similar based off of what I've been
| calling "intentionally overspaced repetition". I'm interested
| as well in how you're going about it.
| huehehue wrote:
| Years ago, I submitted an admittedly half-baked version of this
| to YC. The concept is interesting, but the implementation
| options are:
|
| a) require considerable and routine manual data entry from the
| end-user
|
| b) suck up every bit of data from e.g. email, phone, messaging
| apps, banks and end up with some privacy/security disaster
|
| Anyway, there are all sorts of things you could do with that
| data, like trawling for novel links in your social graph.
| nikhilgk wrote:
| Yes! Would be interested in trying it out if you are looking
| for alpha users.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| I'm doing something like this with https://histre.com/ I'd love
| to try your tool, and it would also be fun to chat about this
| if you like (k@histre.com)
| d1aesthete wrote:
| When i read the title i thought the idea may have been to
| engineer coincidence, which seems like a contradiction, but i
| wonder if is not impossible.
| j4yav wrote:
| You can definitely engineer the chance for interesting things
| to happen by surrounding yourself with interesting people in
| interesting places, and it's highly recommended imho to do so.
| d1aesthete wrote:
| that's an interesting and fair point. what about the
| computability of coincidence?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| "Engineer" was too strong of a word, IMO.
|
| You can increase the odds, so that it is likely to happen
| more often. You can't engineer an instance of it. You can't
| compute it. If you could, it wouldn't be coincidence; it
| would be design!
| j4yav wrote:
| Yeah, perhaps not engineer the time and moment in a
| predictable fashion, but instead just maximize your
| kismet per square meter.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| People talked about this on HN earlier:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25968751
|
| The short end of it is something like: serendipity = work +
| telling people about the work
| zoogeny wrote:
| Consider an alternative view, that coincidence is an immutable
| feature of reality that can be searched. In that case, you
| aren't necessarily _engineering_ coincidence. Rather you are
| searching with the intent to align your own actions with the
| inherent coincident bias of the universe.
| gwern wrote:
| I think it's possible. One problem that I have with
| Remembrancer, as well as all approaches based on the same basic
| idea of 'show the user a list of similar items', is that this
| is fundamentally guaranteed to be mostly useless because the
| user will already remember many similar items and have
| deliberately omitted them. Sometimes you will forget, and then
| it can be quite helpful, sure, but for the most part, this
| retrieval strategy is inherently limited.
|
| What you really get serendipity is from re-encountering things
| you don't know or have forgotten. And we know how to predict if
| you have forgotten something: _spaced repetition and the
| forgetting curve!_ To manufacture serendipity, you simply track
| 'flashcards' of important things, but optimize for the opposite
| of the normal spaced repetition goal: you want to review only
| things you are predicted to have forgotten by now.
|
| https://gwern.net/note/statistic#program-for-non-spaced-repe...
|
| Then, as a Remembrancer agent, you make it show preferentially
| items that are similar but you have probably forgotten. (The
| Remembrancer agent can be treated as a fraction of a review, on
| the grounds that even just showing you the title briefly can
| trigger serendipity and if it didn't provoke any reaction from
| you, then that is evidence it is not useful and that title
| should be downweighted and show up less.)
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Knowledge management reminds me of The Codeless Code on
| documentation: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/215
| distcs wrote:
| > The current Remembrance Agent uses the Savant information
| retrieval system developed in-house by the Jan Nelson and Bradley
| Rhodes. The Remembrance Agent runs through emacs, a popular text
| editor. The user interface is programmed in elisp, and the
| results are presented as a three line buffer at the bottom of the
| window.
|
| There is a nice retro screenshot of Emacs after this. Looks like
| a really old version of Emacs. A nice window into the history of
| computer stuff!
| smokel wrote:
| I am sure some of you here will enjoy the etymology of the word
| serendipity.
|
| Apparently the word was inspired by the fairy tale "The Three
| Princes of Serendip" [1], the latter being the Persian name of
| Sri Lanka. In the story, the princes would constantly find
| interesting things by accident.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Princes_of_Serendi...
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