No. I forget things that I've learned, of course, but I don't forget that I've learned them so if I need to use something I haven't thought about in a while it's not hard to bring that knowledge back to the surface.
I work my memory out a lot, though. Some days I'll collect license plates, or of I am reminded of something but can't remember where it comes from I'll spend hours or days working to pull that memory back to the surface. I use search engines to gain new information or for confirmation of things I'm not sure of, never ever to help me remember things I feel I should remember but have forgotten.
Reading books and writing some things by hand are both helpful. I have some favorite books that I've read repeatedly and knowing whole passages is valuable. Writing is the best aid to memory. Often I'll make notes on something and then never look at them again because the act of writing (which is slow and tedious compared to typing) has helped to fix them in my memory.
Same. A complex set of org-mode files at home and work on various topics. Paired with git for syncing across devices (down to just one computer at home though, so this is mostly just for version control) and org-babel, I can practice and study nearly any programming topic within it.
I've started with org-drill recently (been using Anki) to try it out. Not sure if I'll switch, but may use it for topics that are inside of my org files already to help keep my memory fresh on topics.
I've also started experimenting with Incremental Reading [0] inside org-mode. I've only done this with a couple things. Take an article or ebook or other document and get it into an org-mode structure. Mark each item with READ, UNREAD, and NEXT (to track your place in the document). As I read through it I have a capture template for creating drill notes from a marked region (very basic, just makes an item with a tag of :drill: and the contents of the region). Then when you do your drills during the day, these items will be brought up for practice. When you return to the article or text (in theory, haven't been trying this long) you can pick up where you left off because you've got the important parts of the old, read sections in your memory (and practiced).
I will be trying it with some work documents soon (many spec and requirement docs for a set of systems I don't know well, pull out important details and document names so I at least know where to look for things). An experiment in building up a better understanding of complex systems that I didn't have a hand in developing. In the past, I've relied heavily on SMEs and test engineers, more than I should have, and on this project in particular we have no SMEs for the bulk of the system.
...which is the best thing I've found for notetaking (I'm the author). It needs simpler installation and added features but is stable and works really well, really efficient once you get familiar, and everything is on the screen. I hope to add anki-like features in the future. Contributions welcome.
Edit: this program is like a textual mind map that is highly efficient to use from the keyboard, uses postgresql, and can handle large amounts of data, having the same thing linked in more than one place, etc etc. I use it to keep lists of gift ideas, todos, calendar, all notes, personal journal, and it just gets the job done with the lowest impedance of anything i have tried or heard of. It has an auto "journal-generation" feature, some finicky import/export features, search, somewhat limited file storage, and more.
EDIT: ps: Anki is a really useful review tool, like flashcards that space things out to months or years depending on how well one knows the material (as perhaps others like it).
I use a personal wiki (I use Mediawiki) and private git repos (BitBucket).
It may make sense to open up a YouTube channel though, so I can go back and review things later on. Thanks for bringing this up, because I think that's a very actionable goal.
I started making mind maps to keep track of what I wanted to learn and what I knew already.
It was all one big mind map and was quite hard to manage so I decided to split it up and focus on semantically linking things together with mind maps and providing resources for these topics. I also decided to make it into a search engine so all have a chance to edit and fork the content.
I keep offline notebooks where I basically take notes of hopefully most things, that I read or think about. Ideas for programs, proofs of theorems, lecture notes and so on.
I also start small git repos with projects, e.g. for a set of algorithms I explore.
Haven't found a good system though, a hierarchy or learn graph or mind map (mind map programs kind of bore me).
My hope is that most of what I write down will compile (so to speak) into my brain, at least a little bit. And that the mind map will emerge actually in my mind as I move along.
This system is not perfect, but I haven't started to optimize it (maybe I should).
One next step that I think about is to product short texts in a top-down fashion. That is, start with some high-level idea to express or illustrate. Then descend into special concepts and so on. Writing is to thinking, what walking is to a map.
A motley combination of a wiki (I use Mediawiki), paper notebooks, and various OpenOffice / Google Docs documents. Also, I annotate paper books with those colored sticky page flags, and - rarely - light pencil marks (I mostly don't like marking on books).
All of that said, I don't have a good, comprehensive, over-arching approach. It's a bit of a jumble right now. That said, in the name of "eating your own dog food", I will eventually be applying some of the stuff we're working on at Fogbeam Labs, especially in terms of using semantic web tech and machine learning to automatically mine rich semantics from documents and automatically link them, etc.
Onenote... Helps me organize my thoughts and the search works well enough to find things. Not great for collecting things of the web though, as I don't think the clipper is powerful enough.
Github is a good place to store notes, etc. I use either .org or .md files for documentation.
Over the past year, I've been trying to go deeper with my Swift/iOS knowledge and creating small example programs so I have can build a reference as I learn something new:
I keep it in a personal wiki that lives in dropbox. I use this one (tiddlywiki.com), but anything with tagging and search would work. I appreciate the organization by time, tag, or list, and also the latex and markup support, but these are not essential. Semantic search would be even better. Ive used this to capture ideas, notes, code, writings and lists. It has been essential for my work/dissertation.
I see the personal wiki as an evolution of the commonplace book, that was kept in the past by the likes of Darwin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book). Here are some of my notes from the book Where Good Ideas Come From:
"We know much of Darwin's thinking on the development of his ideas from his extensive notebooks, which he read, and re-read and recombined. This era was the time of the 'commonplace' notebook, in which long passages of quotes from other sources and thoughts were recorded. Reading and writing were apparently quite related. These books may have struck a balance between silo'd organization, and utter chaos, allowing the development of theories beginning with hunches which could then be further developed. The key to developing a hunch into a theory appears to be writing it down "
This is a repost from a previous thread regarding ideas[1] , but 'learned information' and 'ideas' are both just types of information to be managed.
I use google docs and title the doc with a broad question or the search terms. I then answer the question or put in the research in the body of the doc. The search engine for the docs is then my own personal google.
What does it mean to "keep track of what you learn"? How do you determine what it is that you are learning and when, and what is the purpose of trying to log such an experience?
sorry, the question might have been poorly worded. I just didn't want to use the word "notes" to not bias the answers. I was referring to the process of learning, when you start with a new topic, you learn a lot of things, of which we retain the most important and abstract concepts. But sometimes it helps to write it down, make some notes to come back to, etc... In a way that you can easily get back to follow your footsteps
I have created a very simple web application specificly for this. I find keeping things that I have learned extremly important, that's why I didn't want to use any other hosted service, so I have complete control about how I store (end-to-end encrypted) and organize (tag-based) my notes
If I learn something, it's usually because I want to implement it. After it's implemented, it's in a source control repo somewhere. While I often don't remember exactly how something works, I will remember where/when I implemented it, so I can just pull up the code from that repo and I have a working example, which I myself wrote.
I keep track of short snippets for languages, applications, etc, using a simple CLI tool. I call it quickref, and the command is `qr`. Usage:
$ qr
show available quickref files (in directory $QR)
$ qr topic
show all lines from $QR/topic.txt
a "topic" can be anything, but generally something like a language (py),
application (blender), package (django), command (git). also things like audio,
pdf manipulation, CLI image editing.
$ qr topic pattern
show all lines from topic.txt that match regex pattern
$ qr topic term1 term2 ...
show all lines from topic.txt that match all terms
$ qr add topic "line with spaces"
append "line with spaces" to topic.txt
$ qr edit [topic1 [topic2 ...]]
open specified topics with $EDITOR
I keep a personal collection of dev notes in Markdown stored in Standard Notes, which I highly recommend as I have had a great experience with it so far. They're committed to security and privacy and I find it to be very portable (Android, Linux AppImage and web app all supported). I've settled on it after years of bouncing around: Text -> OneNote -> Laverna -> SN.
I write everything down in a simple wiki I made: https://cowyo.com. [1] I have a personal instance that is password protected. I make pages for categories (art, music, math, etc.) and use it to write quick notes.
I also have a git-based go-to journal program that I use to write down other things I learn. [2]
Other than a web browser and a terminal, these are two of my most used programs...
72 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadI work my memory out a lot, though. Some days I'll collect license plates, or of I am reminded of something but can't remember where it comes from I'll spend hours or days working to pull that memory back to the surface. I use search engines to gain new information or for confirmation of things I'm not sure of, never ever to help me remember things I feel I should remember but have forgotten.
Reading books and writing some things by hand are both helpful. I have some favorite books that I've read repeatedly and knowing whole passages is valuable. Writing is the best aid to memory. Often I'll make notes on something and then never look at them again because the act of writing (which is slow and tedious compared to typing) has helped to fix them in my memory.
I've started with org-drill recently (been using Anki) to try it out. Not sure if I'll switch, but may use it for topics that are inside of my org files already to help keep my memory fresh on topics.
I've also started experimenting with Incremental Reading [0] inside org-mode. I've only done this with a couple things. Take an article or ebook or other document and get it into an org-mode structure. Mark each item with READ, UNREAD, and NEXT (to track your place in the document). As I read through it I have a capture template for creating drill notes from a marked region (very basic, just makes an item with a tag of :drill: and the contents of the region). Then when you do your drills during the day, these items will be brought up for practice. When you return to the article or text (in theory, haven't been trying this long) you can pick up where you left off because you've got the important parts of the old, read sections in your memory (and practiced).
I will be trying it with some work documents soon (many spec and requirement docs for a set of systems I don't know well, pull out important details and document names so I at least know where to look for things). An experiment in building up a better understanding of complex systems that I didn't have a hand in developing. In the past, I've relied heavily on SMEs and test engineers, more than I should have, and on this project in particular we have no SMEs for the bulk of the system.
[0] https://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm
The other way would be taking notes. I'm really bad at managing notes at this time but when I take notes I can recall them for a few months.
But, going back to my previous paragraph due to the fact I learn by doing I remember things that I do repetitively.
Also check out AnkiApp
http://onemodel.org
...which is the best thing I've found for notetaking (I'm the author). It needs simpler installation and added features but is stable and works really well, really efficient once you get familiar, and everything is on the screen. I hope to add anki-like features in the future. Contributions welcome.
Edit: this program is like a textual mind map that is highly efficient to use from the keyboard, uses postgresql, and can handle large amounts of data, having the same thing linked in more than one place, etc etc. I use it to keep lists of gift ideas, todos, calendar, all notes, personal journal, and it just gets the job done with the lowest impedance of anything i have tried or heard of. It has an auto "journal-generation" feature, some finicky import/export features, search, somewhat limited file storage, and more.
EDIT: ps: Anki is a really useful review tool, like flashcards that space things out to months or years depending on how well one knows the material (as perhaps others like it).
It may make sense to open up a YouTube channel though, so I can go back and review things later on. Thanks for bringing this up, because I think that's a very actionable goal.
It was all one big mind map and was quite hard to manage so I decided to split it up and focus on semantically linking things together with mind maps and providing resources for these topics. I also decided to make it into a search engine so all have a chance to edit and fork the content.
Here is the search engine : https://learn-anything.xyz/
I still keep my notes as mind maps, just don't publish them in the search engine :
https://my.mindnode.com/4gWrZs1WYDYbuxaBm9NsxKchqDt1qV7nCy4L...
I also start small git repos with projects, e.g. for a set of algorithms I explore.
Haven't found a good system though, a hierarchy or learn graph or mind map (mind map programs kind of bore me).
My hope is that most of what I write down will compile (so to speak) into my brain, at least a little bit. And that the mind map will emerge actually in my mind as I move along.
This system is not perfect, but I haven't started to optimize it (maybe I should).
One next step that I think about is to product short texts in a top-down fashion. That is, start with some high-level idea to express or illustrate. Then descend into special concepts and so on. Writing is to thinking, what walking is to a map.
All of that said, I don't have a good, comprehensive, over-arching approach. It's a bit of a jumble right now. That said, in the name of "eating your own dog food", I will eventually be applying some of the stuff we're working on at Fogbeam Labs, especially in terms of using semantic web tech and machine learning to automatically mine rich semantics from documents and automatically link them, etc.
Over the past year, I've been trying to go deeper with my Swift/iOS knowledge and creating small example programs so I have can build a reference as I learn something new:
https://github.com/melling/ios_topics/blob/master/README.md
For a better search, I load the local repo into Sublime.
The markdown files are published to my site...which I accidentally overwrote https://www.aizatto.com/notes/
Google Spreadsheets example: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15J9dbIjHmKP9ShYuy3wm...
I see the personal wiki as an evolution of the commonplace book, that was kept in the past by the likes of Darwin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book). Here are some of my notes from the book Where Good Ideas Come From:
"We know much of Darwin's thinking on the development of his ideas from his extensive notebooks, which he read, and re-read and recombined. This era was the time of the 'commonplace' notebook, in which long passages of quotes from other sources and thoughts were recorded. Reading and writing were apparently quite related. These books may have struck a balance between silo'd organization, and utter chaos, allowing the development of theories beginning with hunches which could then be further developed. The key to developing a hunch into a theory appears to be writing it down "
This is a repost from a previous thread regarding ideas[1] , but 'learned information' and 'ideas' are both just types of information to be managed.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14546549
I also have a git-based go-to journal program that I use to write down other things I learn. [2]
Other than a web browser and a terminal, these are two of my most used programs...
[1]: https://github.com/schollz/cowyo
[2]: https://github.com/schollz/gojot