Oof ... default font sizes on that blog are obnoxiously large. Paragraph font size is barely smaller than the header size.
Makes the whole thing unreadable since you are constantly scrolling to fit the next tiny chunk of text onto the screen. It is impossible to read at any sort of reasonable pace.
Same here, I don’t want to squint to read cool 10pt font, I prefer to see 16pt easily. I’m not fifteen anymore, my eyes need all the help they can get :)
> Pointlessness of Organization: my Calibre and Zotero libraries are a mess. But is that bad? Is there any point to organizing them? I can always find what I need, either by searching or browsing, because I have a spatial sense of where each book is in Calibre’s big grid view. If I went through everything in Calibre and Zotero, and fixed the titles, added missing authors, publishers, publication years, fixed the cover images—what then? What have I gained? Nothing. It is a waste of time to organize things too much.
On reading this, I felt like I already sort of knew this, and this internet stranger validated my thoughts.
About once every year or two, I remember something I read maybe 15 years ago and realize it would be absolutely perfect for some reason, but I can't find it. And being an engineer and an HN poster, my brain immediately leaps to "Oh, if only I ran a system that archived everything I browsed so I could build my own personal search engine that could search on just what I've ever looked at."
Then I smack it down, because that is a crap-load of effort to recall a link every year or two. And let's be honest, the marginal value of that link isn't all that great either... in the moment the need may seem large, but sitting here typing about this I couldn't tell you even a single such thing I've forgotten about, because that's how important they are... just more ephemera in the stream themselves.
My MP3 collection is a bit of a mess. I've cleaned up the worst instances of "Band, The" "The Band" "Band" "Band - The" sorts of duplication, but that's about it. My book collection is similarly messy. Heck, even my family photos are basically sorted only by year and not much else. So what? I can fix it. I can fix it all. But it's hard to even so much as recover the time I'd put into it once over, let alone in multiples.
(Much more important, especially for the family photos, is not losing them. So I've got a backup solution. But it's just a fire-at-directory solution, not all gloriously organized by type either.)
So I've learned to just sort of let the desire to have greater organization pass over me, Litany-against-Fear style. It's just a siren call.
I'm through at least three complete reorganizations where I even dusted off old backups and collected all photos (because I felt I was deleting photos too liberally last time), de-duplicated (and de-quadruplicated) them all, and built the new "forever" structure.
It sucks that I just know I'll do it again at most five years from now.
Photos are a good example of why a filesystem hierarchy is insufficiently expressive. You might want to search for pictures of me at parties, or pictures with me and my wife, or pictures from 1999, or pictures of LA, and the same photo might belong in all of those searches. No single category will ever be a good place for a photo.
I personally agree with your point (and find the loose textual search offered by phones these days to be mostly adequate).
But reading your comment gave me a thought: filesystem hierarchies are indeed insufficient, but what about filesystem hierarchies with liberal use of hardlinks?
That seems equivalent to a graph to me, and yes, I'm unaware of any kind of search that a graph does not permit. Indeed it could be the basis for a system that, in my opinion, would dominate any of the existing knowledge graph / tool for thought products. It would consist of three more pieces:
* A database for backlinks. (Links from file X to file Y would only be possible when X has an appropriate file format -- `.txt`, `.md`, `.org`, etc.)
* A search grammar with the following primitives:
* find children of (links from) query results
* find parents of (links into) query results
* take the disjunction (OR) of queries
* take the conjunction (AND) of queries
* group queries with parentheses
* The ability to pipe files found via ordinary shell commands into that grammar.
Given the size of most peoples' knowledge graphs, you wouldn't even need to keep a text index (ala Lucene) -- `find` and `grep` would be more than sufficient.
I’ve been looking for a good tagging system for image and video files, something I can use to quickly and easily go through a stack of files and tag them, then search by tag later. Bonus points for being able to recompress on the way through, since phones seem to have terrible compression ratios compared to offline compressors.
That's a good example because it leads to truth that NO up-front tagging will ever anticipate all the searches you might make in future. There are so many possible searches.
I figure that a combination of wetware and software is the current sweet spot. My brain usually has enough associations and context to turn every photo search into a time or place filter - "I think it was downtown last year" or "some time in summer at home" or "it had my wife in it". The photo storage system need only provide search/filter on date and place to narrow it down to a few hundred thumbnails, plus machine-learning to tag people. Which is basically what iOS provides, no more, no less.
Any other up-front categorization or tagging is basically wasted effort.
For me, I wrote a bulk tool that renames my photo file names by reverse geocoding the GPS information via Open Street Maps. That way I can do text search for place, as well as 2d map search. It's at https://unto.me
That does seem like a really good solution. Google Photos will prompt you, if I recall correctly, to identify a few faces, and then automatically id the rest. That's fantastic, if you don't have to worry about putting their privacy in Google's hands.
For me photos are solved problem now. I no longer do any cleanup on them, just assume that Apple AI will show me best photos when I search for them. I think that it is simply good enough already.
Does your smartphone not already do that for you? iPhone does, I think Android does and I think iPhoto on macOS does as well. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google online photos or Facebook do also.
(That is, let you search using words for things in the photo or themes like “winter”).
Google Photos search function leverages some automatic categorization, it's pretty good. I wish I had some way to run something at that level over my Lightroom 5 catalog.
Digital photos are easy to organize... I store everything in d:\masterarchive\yyyy\yyyymmdd\ folders, and have since 1997
Tagging them with embedded IPTC tags is the way to go. DigiKam works (mostly) as a substitute for the late Picassa. (I'd use that, but the last version has a nasty bug in that it sometimes swaps faces in the recognition database, which then tends to corrupt it all).
The major problem I've had is that in the beginning I didn't really have enough free disk space to keep up. That is no longer an issue, nor is it likely to be again.
> My MP3 collection is a bit of a mess. I've cleaned up the worst instances of "Band, The" "The Band" "Band" "Band - The"
MusicBrainz Picard cleans and labels your music automatically using sound signatures, even when the file has no metadata. You can just give it your files and let it run, rarely have I felt the need to monitor it. It gets stuff right 99% of the time, the rest 1% is easily fixable whenever you come across it.
> "Oh, if only I ran a system that archived everything I browsed so I could build my own personal search engine that could search on just what I've ever looked at."
Bookmarks are a good middle ground between saving everything and not being able to find something you read later.
It is integrated in the browser's address bar as autocompletion/search and if you can vaguely recall some words from the title you can find it.
I've been using this system for years, works great with Firefox sync and Firefox on Android too (to remember articles I discover on both mobile and desktop in same place)
For sure. I get the appeal of Having Everything Organized. It's conceptually compelling. But I think the right way to look at it is in terms of minimizing total cost of retrieval and filing.
As an example, take physical paper. Receipts, bills, anything that ends up in one's mailbox and doesn't immediately get recycled. I used to oscillate between two approaches: over-elaborate filing systems and just ignoring the problem and letting the mail pile up in snowdrifts.
Eventually I realized that my love of elaborate systems was a giant fucking problem for my actual life. I thought about it like I was designing a production system. I very rarely needed to retrieve old documents; most of it was for "just in case" conditions. I needed to frequently file things, and if the cost of filing was too high, I wouldn't pay it. So I bought 8 filing boxes, each 3 or 4 inches high and big enough to comfortably hold legal-size paper. Each one is marked with a year, and almost everything for that year just gets tossed on top. A few exceptional kinds of paper then have their own separate file folders (e.g., tax documents, my current landlord, key retirement paperwork, key medical stuff). Once a year I throw out the contents of the oldest box and relabel it.
This works great. It turns out I almost never need anything from an old box. When I do, it's a quick rummage in one spot. With infrequent, hard-to-predict retrieval, storage-optimized organization is the best organization.
I have been handling physical organization by prioritizing filing. My reasoning is that if the house is a mess, filing isn't keeping up with retrieval, and I need to reduce friction on filing, because dealing with the mess is consuming more time than inefficient retrieval.
For paper, I don't have much trouble. Things go on the fridge if I will need them soon, or in one small sterilite plastic file box. It's nowhere near half full and I would not be surprised if it lasts 10+ years before I need any more storage for paper.
As an experiment I've been working on sorting things by category in a more general way, like the dewey decimal system rather than true categories, to remove the overhead of half full containers used to sort things. They're based on observation of what was already stored vaguely together rather than starting with an idea.
One common category is BAM, bulk artificial material. This includes paper towels, laundry soap, paint, water repellant spray, etc.
Another is TAM, tapes attachments and materials, containing tape, steel wire, foam, webbing, carabiners, key split rings, screws, and all similar things often having to do with either attaching things together or long things sold by the foot.
With wider categories I have fewer places to memorize, and organization within a category isn't that critical because they can be rummage-searched, without the overhead of a buch of individual drawers or boxes in some ever evolving system. It's just a formalization of random boxes of junk.
Yes, same spirit for sure! Rummage-searching is very effective as long as the total rummage space is low, like a single box.
The main place where I'll depart from that is with higher access frequency. E.g., I have a box that is sort of "LRU tech stuff". In there my various cables are sorted by type into gallon ziplocs. Finding the right kind of USB cable is something I do too often to want to pull it out of a 50-wire snarl.
Oh I didn't think of that. LRU makes a lot of sense, especially since it's just the default big mess with an expiry.
My first line of defense with tech is volume reduction on the stuff itself. Bluetooth over cables, software over hardware, USB-C over everything else, resisting any kind of random tinkering gadgets in favor of phone apps and zero-friction stuff I'll set up and never bother to upgrade, etc.
If you never buy random stuff just because it looks cool, then when you really do want something you can afford to future proof it and sometimes get one thing that replaces multiple separate things.
I have one box dedicated just to power(Which I may split up into separate cables and batteries boxes) that has all my USBs not in active use.
USB-C has been fantastic. If you don't do a lot of fancy stuff with high data rates, it's an amazing way to collapse down the number of unique objects.
> Each one is marked with a year, and almost everything for that year just gets tossed on top.
This is what I do. Things organize themselves organically this way - the important stuff bubbles to the top, and the rest is already sorted by linear time.
Because there's a certain element of dopamine release associated with this act of digital tidiness. And for a lot of people it's a good way to provide the illusion of feeling productive while stalling on the act of creation... which is hard.
As a heavy user of TfTs (and one who finds immense value in them as a personalized reference guide more than anything else), I've come to a similar conclusion. If search is good, not much else matters (the bad search in Roam was one of many things that led me to leave it). I'm not exploring my own notes for fun, I'm digging through them for something actionable and usually have a vague idea of what I'm looking for. Linking, tags, and other organizational tactics (even just a directory scheme) are only there to assist that.
Anything more than that is a recipe for burnout - and I've definitely been there.
> People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.
One idea suggested by Antinet Zettelkasten is to set up an analog system that acts as a "second brain." Interacting with these boxes of notecards is supposed to be a form of discourse, enabling surprising associations and strengthening existing memories.
The argument against a digital form is that this kind of interaction occurs at a neural level that just is impossible without deliberate reflection of handwritten material.
It's important to mention this system is worthless to merely contain information. The point is to publish works that synthesize these ideas. Otherwise, it's just a form of knowledge Pokemon.
Feel like the fresh take is really that you can’t just synthesize new ideas by rearranging the ideas that you suck up from the inter-nets, no matter how much offline fermentation you put them through. Similar to how “publish or perish” merely results in incremental, nearly worthless ideas being sold as breakthroughs. Maybe people need to internalize twitter as a source of jokes amd entertainment, not insight. Maybe alcohol and psychelics need to be seen as brain damaging instead of vision inducing.
I tried something similar a while back after struggling to use obsidian myself. I unbundled and subscribed to todoist as well, switched to supernotes for notecard style notes etc.
I think ultimately it just comes down to people having different needs. It turns out I don't really need a second brain style knowledge base. All I need is a solid mobile text editor. It also turns out I only need to plan out tasks on a weekly scale. A daily scale is too granular for me at this given moment in time.
When you adopt these heavyweight systems before really understanding why you need them or if you even need them to begin with it very quickly becomes a procrastination trap where, as the article mentions, you're spending far more time managing the system for the sake of the system than you are actually using it for anything meaningful.
The author has some really good points, and I think anyone building or using a tool like this should be able to take a hard look at what the tool is actually doing for them personally, vs what it seems like it could potentially be useful for.
One big limitation is time: it takes a lot of time to write things in, say, Roam. You need to be getting commensurate benefit for the time invested. If you aren't sure what the benefit is, except "one day maybe I'll read through all this again and then..." it's probably not worth it. You can make write-only documents anywhere, no need to organize and hyperlink them.
On the other hand, sometimes the amount of friction in using a tool is the issue. Something can be completely impractical when it's doable in principle but has high cost, vs when it is pervasive and effortless. Software that actively searches for associations with what you're currently writing and presents them to you could be much more valuable than software that lets you follow hyperlinks if you want, but you don't actually bother doing it.
Finally, I'll say there's also the fact that humans need to accrete habits slowly over time. If you find/build a notetaking tool with 10,000 plugins, well ok, knowing that the plugins exist is one thing, but you won't actually use them or get value out of them until your brain has indexed them and you've formed a habit that is triggered by a recurring context you will find yourself in.
I'm still not 100% happy with the existing tools for thought.
So far, Google Keep is by far my favorite in terms of experience, because it's blazing fast, plus it has Android widget and Google Assistant integration..
But I don't fully trust it to always be around, so I don't use it for anything long term, just shopping and to do lists, and quick notes to be copied somewhere safer later.
For calendar-like stuff, I use Google Calendar, for the same reasons.
I tend to think of privacy as a specialist tool not generally needed, so I use BitWarden's secure note feature to record anything I'd rather have encrypted.
Finally, for long term notes and journalling, I use Obsidian and SyncThing. But I dislike that Obsidian takes 8 seconds or so to load up, and has no widget to keep always-open, that's just way too much friction for something I'm relying on as a second brain.
If Keep had a markdown sync feature that would keep all notes synced to a portable folder of markdown guaranteed to be there if the service goes down or an app update breaks something, and if they had hierarchal organization features, I would probably use them for everything.
All in all, with all the talk about tools for thought, it's way behind a lot of other areas of software despite having no real technical challenges besides the difficulty of maintaining a cross platform set of apps with all the integrations and widgets and performance optimizations.
I guess that's the problem, there's a lot of tedium and no interesting algorithms, so it doesn't get as much interest.
I am pretty sure you hit the spot. I do not even write notes these days. I just work and if it is important enough for me, I trust my brain to recall. If it can't recall, I search the web. However, this time I have different context so each new search is unique. I discover different ways of doing things. Sometimes, it's better than what I used to do. As a result, I only focus on high level problem solving. This way, I don't care about small details and remain faithful to general context. What do I gain from this? Long term ability to solve problem. Each problem I solve, makes me think more on my thinking process. As a result, I optimized surroundings in a way it helps me think and reason rather than note and forget.
The value in bundled "Tools for Thoughts" isn't just that you can interconnect everything - unless you actively research and want to synthesize something new, that's in fact overvalued.
The true value (at least to me) lies in the fact that all my information is stored in a human-readable and interchangeable format. It makes you independent of vendor whims. It enables the creation of custom tools if and when you need them.
The fact that I can click on shiny links just satisfies my desire for toys :)
I use Logseq currently. I just simply write in my Journals or a page, then I add the backlinks on a whim, and leave it be. Whenever I need that information again, it will be found by using the backlinks, if I don't remember what I'm even searching for.
That's all I do. It's simple, convenient, and doesn't break my flow with unnecessary complexity. I just write and link.
That kind of Zettelkasten note-taking workflow is what caught my attention and it's currently the only way I can take notes.
People who create complicated note-taking workflows using databases and such, they're very bizarre people to me. I can't do any of that without recoiling. But I can dump information into my graph and link it all together all day if I got into the flow. It's just "natural".
Part of the appeal for "Tools for Thought" is that by using them we feel we are taking action towards being productive, regardless of whether that turns out to be true of not.
The falacy comes, I believe, from the combination of two facts: 1. much of the intellectual work we do these days simply takes time. No amount of writing can accelerate that beyond our biological limit of learning, so we might as well just sit and think. 2. Just sitting and thinking is considered unproductive and regarded as lazyness, so we believe we should be writing even more instead.
In that regard, using tools for thought may be pointless, since all we need is time to think. But perhaps that pointlessness serves a purpose. Like a guardrail in a highway, tools for thought are not something we "really need", but they're there to at least keep us on track in case we were to drift away while our minds move forward.
I believe that a fine-tuned autoregressive language model such as GPT, enhanced with your personal notes, has the potential to serve as a highly effective cognitive aid, potentially even fulfilling the role of a "second brain" that many of us are looking for.
It's not scalable, but as an existence proof of what you're saying, my partner and I fulfill this role for each other - we each are tasked with remembering different facets of our lives (e.g. I know the plot and cast of every movie we've ever watched, she remembers to pay taxes :).
It seems pretty obvious we're heading for that utopia/dystopia where everyone is assigned a personal assistant loaded onto a pervasive mesh (your glasses, watch, phone, computer, desk, house). On the one hand it sounds great to have an AI assistant that knows what I know, a model of how I think, and the ability to fill in the gaps instantly. On the other, it's so ripe for abuse/deepening inequality, the idea almost qualifies as "don't create the torment nexus".
The point of the article is that we don't like being idle. We'd rather spend our idle time "pretending" we are being productive, and tools for thought are what we use for that.
Being actually productive (quality > quantity), I argue, is a process that takes physical time. Absorbing information, internalizing it, and summarizing it with our own understanding requires a lot of energy.
This process cannot be massively accelerated. Same as with physical fitness, one can operate close to optimum and see and maintain great results, but one cannot operate better than optimum given one's own physical constraints.
For intelectual work, defining what "operating close to optimum" means is much harder because the quantity of output is usually the metric, and that varies so much from discipline to discipline and person to person. I believe many of us are already operating close to optimum (reading and writing, attending meetings, presenting our work), so there is no point in investing even more towards productivity. But the falacy is that because we don't have a proper metric for productivity, we believe investing even more is worthwhile since it increases output, and so we perceive ourselves as better.
I don't see AI changing the picture for us because the problem is not what we are doing, but how we perceive to be doing it. That's what's up with tools for thought and personal wikis.
Using or not using paper is not at all similar to working out or resting. When you're thinking with paper in front of you, you're free to not use paper or switch back and forth in a matter of seconds. It's a strict improvement, the downsides are all logistical.
For me, the benefit of linked knowledge is just that I tend to forget a LOT of things, including many details of things I've learned in the past. For me, the principles and concepts remain, but all the steps and "how to do X" vanish rather quickly. So having essentially a personal documentation database (using Obsidian) that I can quickly jump into to recall lost knowledge is very important.
My "Second Brain" is not so much about making my brain better, as it is filling in the missing gaps of where my brain struggles at.
I do the same. Obsidian is just a pretty editor with a fast search/switcher, and everything beyond that is gravy. I find many people try to make it much more than it's capable of, and that's where we're running into problems.
I tried taking notes for learning and brainstorming over the years but found it incredibly difficult, not because of a lack of note taking frameworks, apps or technologies but because _sustaining_ this process is hard. Reading posts like these makes me quite envious of author’s dedication. Recently I was contemplating about a possible lightweight middle ground solution where I think a more polished software would certainly help - _highlighting_. Imagine if you could simply highlight/select any text/image on the screen of any app (ok, let’s start with the few), optionally assign different colors, tags and have those highlights automatically synchronized in a sort of a searchable personal diary format. The main feature of such tool would be cropping and indexing what’s already read and seen as opposed to having to summarize/rephrase or enrich it with your own notes. Why I think software in this case reducing friction to a minimum would help? As opposed to taking notes, identifying illuminating corner-stone paragraphs and sentences mostly feels like an implicit process that happens naturally at least in my experience.
>How often, truly, do you find yourself wanting to link a task in your todo list app to a file in Dropbox
Links are much more useful once notes and todo lists are shared and published. I am surprised that not all tools for thought have standardized on ActivityPub to enable their users to connect each other's notes. People with an account could correct mistakes or link to crucial knowledge that was overlooked.
Like Wikipedia, information would grow "on its own". Important ideas could be identified, information could be collected until it is enough for further steps.
Zettelkasten is great for one person but that's for prolific people who process a massive amount of information. With the internet, a group of average people can turn into a genius by collectively collecting information and turning it into a useful form.
The printing press made it easy to quickly share finished thoughts, boosting science and bringing the industrial revolution. There should be an equal opportunity for progress when we start sharing unfinished thoughts.
What could change our attitude about privacy? We share code, but only good looking code. We share thoughts, but only finished articles and good looking tweets. This inhibits collaboration on the most difficult part of creating ideas.
AI like ChatGPT can become supportive. But why wait for a technical solution if a social solution is possible? What's better than a to-do list which is resolved or made easy because others just happen to have the necessary resources available?
A side note, but is anyone else experiencing a font size so large as to make it almost unreadable?
Viewing it on my laptop, the CSS font size is set to 2 rem, which means each letter takes up four times as much space as default body text (which is 1 rem, usually 16 px -- so this is 32 px size). Even worse, if you zoom out, it detects that and compensates by setting it to 2.5 rem (40 px), or over 6 times as large in area! It's trying to force bizarrely big-headline-sized body text, even against the user's wishes.
I've seen this bizarre creeping growth of font sizes across some personal blogs over the last decade, but I've never seen a case this extreme.
(And remember that, for comparison, traditional OS UI elements tend to be around the 12 px size and sometime even smaller, so a 32-40 px size is truly gargantuan.)
I actually had the opposite reaction -- on most websites I have to zoom in to 150 - 200% to get it to be readable (HN is at 175% for me). Here I had to do no zooming.
By coincidence I am moving off of Evernote right now. I broke down everything I used Evernote for right now to plan the roll off.
I largely use EN for the GTD system. The first GTD step is just capturing info. EN still does this better than any other tool.
EN used to be better at managing large data - but the last major release broke all that. For some reason they favored the new user over the power user.
Some of the things I used to use EN for are now baked into the OS. For instance, the latest release of MacOS now has text search on images. The rise of icloud also got rid of many of my use cases.
What I am doing now is putting files in files and notes in notes. I am converting some notes to files.
I took to heart the scalability issues in EN, and decided to run several note taking apps in parallel. After a while I will just pick a winner.
Sadly - I have not found a replacement for data capture. EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note. I might keep the free version of EN around for this task, but I am still looking for a replacement.
> EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note.
Do you keep the original mail format? As far as I can see (and I recall), Evernote just embeds the original mail and attaches an HTML copy as well (so you can view it).
The EN email note is somewhat kludgy. It was better before the last major upgrade. Before the last upgrade it was seamless to other EN notes. I suspect but don't know what broke.
BTW - they kept around the EN classic app because so many things broke. For a while I was going back and forth between the two.
The EN competitors want you to convert email to a PDF.
One of the competitors said they would have to have an email server to convert email to a note. They said this is hard.
I am OK that it is hard for everyone except Apple. Apple does already have an email server. Why are they forcing me to convert the email to a PDF?
It's hard to do right, because the mail format has to deal with MIME types, and all kinds of ancient kludgy stuff. They send mail in multi-part, and you see the part that your mail client wants to render. Sometimes they send only html, sometimes you get text and html. Sometimes it's a an image embedded in the e-mail message.
On top of that every mail service wants to do something different.
Really enjoyed this read, but also couldn't help but feel sorry for the author still trapped in the labyrinth. "Just one more CMS and I'll be free..."
The jewel in the post is the rejection of Vannevar's acolytes and their hand-wrought memexen. Biology already gave me a perfectly good memex in my skull. If its shortcomings give you anxiety, take 2 YAGNI until productivity resumes.
Much of the backlash to these tools seems to assume that they require significant devotion and time.
I just use it to store my stuff. I don't spend much time organising it.
I had trouble organising my data in folders, so I tried Bear Notes, and it helped.
From there, I just came up with a few conventions to deal with the problems that emerged over time - similarly to how someone would define their personal folder-hierarchy.
For example, having a page for every contact helped, because I often find myself looking for "that thing that Tom showed me".
But the biggest advantage is that whatever I'm looking for is in one location, only a short full-text search away.
---
> Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.
I have 5000 notes - most of them are useless. But it costs me nothing to keep them.
Capture now, fast. Organize on the fly with searches and filters.
I have this whole app sketched up where the idea is you just focus on writing notes and thoughts in one continuous stream, jumping around topics as you go like most professionals do, and then use searches and filters you can save to render different contexts easily from the single stream.
So you can switch between reviewing your work 1 on 1 history and your Christmas gift ideas with a change of a filter. You don’t have to worry about organizing anything, it’s all just a single stream of content and then searches.
I’ll likely never build it, but I’m convinced that would be the way I want to write notes. I don’t want a knowledge graph, I want a stream of consciousness capture tool with a way to use tags searches and filters to make sense of it.
Oh also: I want to write some notes in handwriting on my iPad, and then ocr and clean up those notes to be liked I typed them, but still preserve the original handwriting. I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.
It wouldn't take much work to make filter lists first-class citizens in Logseq, if you want to try hacking it in: https://github.com/logseq/logseq
It would be a good feature to have, and it's better than starting from scratch.
> I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.
Logseq doesn't currently have saveable filter lists, but you can create pages with any title which will still collect and display direct and indirect references to that title/tag. This gets you 80% of the way there already, if you get used to the workflow.
- voice to text, rapid fire, get all my thoughts out in big paragraphs
- once every few day re-read
+ add heading to sections
+ add a couple hashtags
+ but otherwise leave it in a terrible spelling mistake ridden, grammarless mess
--------
> Every note is an extra cost
For notes where remembering / reviewing are important (i.e. todo lists), I've found:
"Bullet Method",
which is essentially keeping an analog journal of bullet notes.
It really makes you slow down and track what is important , so you have a nice clean journal
> Oh also: I want to write some notes in handwriting on my iPad, and then ocr and clean up those notes to be liked I typed them, but still preserve the original handwriting. I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.
This sounds like something you could implement most (or all?) of in minutes with either of two methods: (a) a single text file with grep and, optionally, your own custom tags; or (b) a dedicated email account and client. With (a) you get a stupid-simple system with no setup, myriad sync/backup/versioning options, and unlimited scale; with (b) you get every device and OS conceivable, file attachments, and infrastructure you’re already using anyway.
201 comments
[ 7.7 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadMakes the whole thing unreadable since you are constantly scrolling to fit the next tiny chunk of text onto the screen. It is impossible to read at any sort of reasonable pace.
Cmd+- to opt out, as usual :)
On reading this, I felt like I already sort of knew this, and this internet stranger validated my thoughts.
Then I smack it down, because that is a crap-load of effort to recall a link every year or two. And let's be honest, the marginal value of that link isn't all that great either... in the moment the need may seem large, but sitting here typing about this I couldn't tell you even a single such thing I've forgotten about, because that's how important they are... just more ephemera in the stream themselves.
My MP3 collection is a bit of a mess. I've cleaned up the worst instances of "Band, The" "The Band" "Band" "Band - The" sorts of duplication, but that's about it. My book collection is similarly messy. Heck, even my family photos are basically sorted only by year and not much else. So what? I can fix it. I can fix it all. But it's hard to even so much as recover the time I'd put into it once over, let alone in multiples.
(Much more important, especially for the family photos, is not losing them. So I've got a backup solution. But it's just a fire-at-directory solution, not all gloriously organized by type either.)
So I've learned to just sort of let the desire to have greater organization pass over me, Litany-against-Fear style. It's just a siren call.
I'm through at least three complete reorganizations where I even dusted off old backups and collected all photos (because I felt I was deleting photos too liberally last time), de-duplicated (and de-quadruplicated) them all, and built the new "forever" structure.
It sucks that I just know I'll do it again at most five years from now.
But reading your comment gave me a thought: filesystem hierarchies are indeed insufficient, but what about filesystem hierarchies with liberal use of hardlinks?
I figure that a combination of wetware and software is the current sweet spot. My brain usually has enough associations and context to turn every photo search into a time or place filter - "I think it was downtown last year" or "some time in summer at home" or "it had my wife in it". The photo storage system need only provide search/filter on date and place to narrow it down to a few hundred thumbnails, plus machine-learning to tag people. Which is basically what iOS provides, no more, no less.
Any other up-front categorization or tagging is basically wasted effort.
For me, I wrote a bulk tool that renames my photo file names by reverse geocoding the GPS information via Open Street Maps. That way I can do text search for place, as well as 2d map search. It's at https://unto.me
Problems local to my machine, not Orwellian nightmares.
photos and pictures organization should be a solved problem.
(That is, let you search using words for things in the photo or themes like “winter”).
Tagging them with embedded IPTC tags is the way to go. DigiKam works (mostly) as a substitute for the late Picassa. (I'd use that, but the last version has a nasty bug in that it sometimes swaps faces in the recognition database, which then tends to corrupt it all).
The major problem I've had is that in the beginning I didn't really have enough free disk space to keep up. That is no longer an issue, nor is it likely to be again.
MusicBrainz Picard cleans and labels your music automatically using sound signatures, even when the file has no metadata. You can just give it your files and let it run, rarely have I felt the need to monitor it. It gets stuff right 99% of the time, the rest 1% is easily fixable whenever you come across it.
Well, that makes two of us.
I have many questions, about backup and disk space. I’m going to give it a try.
Thanks!
As an example, take physical paper. Receipts, bills, anything that ends up in one's mailbox and doesn't immediately get recycled. I used to oscillate between two approaches: over-elaborate filing systems and just ignoring the problem and letting the mail pile up in snowdrifts.
Eventually I realized that my love of elaborate systems was a giant fucking problem for my actual life. I thought about it like I was designing a production system. I very rarely needed to retrieve old documents; most of it was for "just in case" conditions. I needed to frequently file things, and if the cost of filing was too high, I wouldn't pay it. So I bought 8 filing boxes, each 3 or 4 inches high and big enough to comfortably hold legal-size paper. Each one is marked with a year, and almost everything for that year just gets tossed on top. A few exceptional kinds of paper then have their own separate file folders (e.g., tax documents, my current landlord, key retirement paperwork, key medical stuff). Once a year I throw out the contents of the oldest box and relabel it.
This works great. It turns out I almost never need anything from an old box. When I do, it's a quick rummage in one spot. With infrequent, hard-to-predict retrieval, storage-optimized organization is the best organization.
For paper, I don't have much trouble. Things go on the fridge if I will need them soon, or in one small sterilite plastic file box. It's nowhere near half full and I would not be surprised if it lasts 10+ years before I need any more storage for paper.
As an experiment I've been working on sorting things by category in a more general way, like the dewey decimal system rather than true categories, to remove the overhead of half full containers used to sort things. They're based on observation of what was already stored vaguely together rather than starting with an idea.
One common category is BAM, bulk artificial material. This includes paper towels, laundry soap, paint, water repellant spray, etc.
Another is TAM, tapes attachments and materials, containing tape, steel wire, foam, webbing, carabiners, key split rings, screws, and all similar things often having to do with either attaching things together or long things sold by the foot.
With wider categories I have fewer places to memorize, and organization within a category isn't that critical because they can be rummage-searched, without the overhead of a buch of individual drawers or boxes in some ever evolving system. It's just a formalization of random boxes of junk.
The main place where I'll depart from that is with higher access frequency. E.g., I have a box that is sort of "LRU tech stuff". In there my various cables are sorted by type into gallon ziplocs. Finding the right kind of USB cable is something I do too often to want to pull it out of a 50-wire snarl.
My first line of defense with tech is volume reduction on the stuff itself. Bluetooth over cables, software over hardware, USB-C over everything else, resisting any kind of random tinkering gadgets in favor of phone apps and zero-friction stuff I'll set up and never bother to upgrade, etc.
If you never buy random stuff just because it looks cool, then when you really do want something you can afford to future proof it and sometimes get one thing that replaces multiple separate things.
I have one box dedicated just to power(Which I may split up into separate cables and batteries boxes) that has all my USBs not in active use.
USB-C has been fantastic. If you don't do a lot of fancy stuff with high data rates, it's an amazing way to collapse down the number of unique objects.
This is what I do. Things organize themselves organically this way - the important stuff bubbles to the top, and the rest is already sorted by linear time.
Anything more than that is a recipe for burnout - and I've definitely been there.
> People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.
The argument against a digital form is that this kind of interaction occurs at a neural level that just is impossible without deliberate reflection of handwritten material.
It's important to mention this system is worthless to merely contain information. The point is to publish works that synthesize these ideas. Otherwise, it's just a form of knowledge Pokemon.
I think ultimately it just comes down to people having different needs. It turns out I don't really need a second brain style knowledge base. All I need is a solid mobile text editor. It also turns out I only need to plan out tasks on a weekly scale. A daily scale is too granular for me at this given moment in time.
When you adopt these heavyweight systems before really understanding why you need them or if you even need them to begin with it very quickly becomes a procrastination trap where, as the article mentions, you're spending far more time managing the system for the sake of the system than you are actually using it for anything meaningful.
One big limitation is time: it takes a lot of time to write things in, say, Roam. You need to be getting commensurate benefit for the time invested. If you aren't sure what the benefit is, except "one day maybe I'll read through all this again and then..." it's probably not worth it. You can make write-only documents anywhere, no need to organize and hyperlink them.
On the other hand, sometimes the amount of friction in using a tool is the issue. Something can be completely impractical when it's doable in principle but has high cost, vs when it is pervasive and effortless. Software that actively searches for associations with what you're currently writing and presents them to you could be much more valuable than software that lets you follow hyperlinks if you want, but you don't actually bother doing it.
Finally, I'll say there's also the fact that humans need to accrete habits slowly over time. If you find/build a notetaking tool with 10,000 plugins, well ok, knowing that the plugins exist is one thing, but you won't actually use them or get value out of them until your brain has indexed them and you've formed a habit that is triggered by a recurring context you will find yourself in.
So far, Google Keep is by far my favorite in terms of experience, because it's blazing fast, plus it has Android widget and Google Assistant integration..
But I don't fully trust it to always be around, so I don't use it for anything long term, just shopping and to do lists, and quick notes to be copied somewhere safer later.
For calendar-like stuff, I use Google Calendar, for the same reasons.
I tend to think of privacy as a specialist tool not generally needed, so I use BitWarden's secure note feature to record anything I'd rather have encrypted.
Finally, for long term notes and journalling, I use Obsidian and SyncThing. But I dislike that Obsidian takes 8 seconds or so to load up, and has no widget to keep always-open, that's just way too much friction for something I'm relying on as a second brain.
If Keep had a markdown sync feature that would keep all notes synced to a portable folder of markdown guaranteed to be there if the service goes down or an app update breaks something, and if they had hierarchal organization features, I would probably use them for everything.
All in all, with all the talk about tools for thought, it's way behind a lot of other areas of software despite having no real technical challenges besides the difficulty of maintaining a cross platform set of apps with all the integrations and widgets and performance optimizations.
I guess that's the problem, there's a lot of tedium and no interesting algorithms, so it doesn't get as much interest.
The true value (at least to me) lies in the fact that all my information is stored in a human-readable and interchangeable format. It makes you independent of vendor whims. It enables the creation of custom tools if and when you need them.
The fact that I can click on shiny links just satisfies my desire for toys :)
That's all I do. It's simple, convenient, and doesn't break my flow with unnecessary complexity. I just write and link.
That kind of Zettelkasten note-taking workflow is what caught my attention and it's currently the only way I can take notes.
People who create complicated note-taking workflows using databases and such, they're very bizarre people to me. I can't do any of that without recoiling. But I can dump information into my graph and link it all together all day if I got into the flow. It's just "natural".
The falacy comes, I believe, from the combination of two facts: 1. much of the intellectual work we do these days simply takes time. No amount of writing can accelerate that beyond our biological limit of learning, so we might as well just sit and think. 2. Just sitting and thinking is considered unproductive and regarded as lazyness, so we believe we should be writing even more instead.
In that regard, using tools for thought may be pointless, since all we need is time to think. But perhaps that pointlessness serves a purpose. Like a guardrail in a highway, tools for thought are not something we "really need", but they're there to at least keep us on track in case we were to drift away while our minds move forward.
It seems pretty obvious we're heading for that utopia/dystopia where everyone is assigned a personal assistant loaded onto a pervasive mesh (your glasses, watch, phone, computer, desk, house). On the one hand it sounds great to have an AI assistant that knows what I know, a model of how I think, and the ability to fill in the gaps instantly. On the other, it's so ripe for abuse/deepening inequality, the idea almost qualifies as "don't create the torment nexus".
Being actually productive (quality > quantity), I argue, is a process that takes physical time. Absorbing information, internalizing it, and summarizing it with our own understanding requires a lot of energy. This process cannot be massively accelerated. Same as with physical fitness, one can operate close to optimum and see and maintain great results, but one cannot operate better than optimum given one's own physical constraints.
For intelectual work, defining what "operating close to optimum" means is much harder because the quantity of output is usually the metric, and that varies so much from discipline to discipline and person to person. I believe many of us are already operating close to optimum (reading and writing, attending meetings, presenting our work), so there is no point in investing even more towards productivity. But the falacy is that because we don't have a proper metric for productivity, we believe investing even more is worthwhile since it increases output, and so we perceive ourselves as better.
I don't see AI changing the picture for us because the problem is not what we are doing, but how we perceive to be doing it. That's what's up with tools for thought and personal wikis.
For me, the benefit of linked knowledge is just that I tend to forget a LOT of things, including many details of things I've learned in the past. For me, the principles and concepts remain, but all the steps and "how to do X" vanish rather quickly. So having essentially a personal documentation database (using Obsidian) that I can quickly jump into to recall lost knowledge is very important.
My "Second Brain" is not so much about making my brain better, as it is filling in the missing gaps of where my brain struggles at.
Links are much more useful once notes and todo lists are shared and published. I am surprised that not all tools for thought have standardized on ActivityPub to enable their users to connect each other's notes. People with an account could correct mistakes or link to crucial knowledge that was overlooked.
Like Wikipedia, information would grow "on its own". Important ideas could be identified, information could be collected until it is enough for further steps.
Zettelkasten is great for one person but that's for prolific people who process a massive amount of information. With the internet, a group of average people can turn into a genius by collectively collecting information and turning it into a useful form.
Because most of my notes, and to-do lists are private. I don't want them to be shared, just available to me.
What could change our attitude about privacy? We share code, but only good looking code. We share thoughts, but only finished articles and good looking tweets. This inhibits collaboration on the most difficult part of creating ideas.
AI like ChatGPT can become supportive. But why wait for a technical solution if a social solution is possible? What's better than a to-do list which is resolved or made easy because others just happen to have the necessary resources available?
While procrastination is bad, and excessively logging is also bad, global systems are incredibly powerful - just look at physics.
Viewing it on my laptop, the CSS font size is set to 2 rem, which means each letter takes up four times as much space as default body text (which is 1 rem, usually 16 px -- so this is 32 px size). Even worse, if you zoom out, it detects that and compensates by setting it to 2.5 rem (40 px), or over 6 times as large in area! It's trying to force bizarrely big-headline-sized body text, even against the user's wishes.
I've seen this bizarre creeping growth of font sizes across some personal blogs over the last decade, but I've never seen a case this extreme.
(And remember that, for comparison, traditional OS UI elements tend to be around the 12 px size and sometime even smaller, so a 32-40 px size is truly gargantuan.)
I largely use EN for the GTD system. The first GTD step is just capturing info. EN still does this better than any other tool.
EN used to be better at managing large data - but the last major release broke all that. For some reason they favored the new user over the power user.
Some of the things I used to use EN for are now baked into the OS. For instance, the latest release of MacOS now has text search on images. The rise of icloud also got rid of many of my use cases.
What I am doing now is putting files in files and notes in notes. I am converting some notes to files.
I took to heart the scalability issues in EN, and decided to run several note taking apps in parallel. After a while I will just pick a winner.
Sadly - I have not found a replacement for data capture. EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note. I might keep the free version of EN around for this task, but I am still looking for a replacement.
Do you keep the original mail format? As far as I can see (and I recall), Evernote just embeds the original mail and attaches an HTML copy as well (so you can view it).
BTW - they kept around the EN classic app because so many things broke. For a while I was going back and forth between the two.
The EN competitors want you to convert email to a PDF. One of the competitors said they would have to have an email server to convert email to a note. They said this is hard.
I am OK that it is hard for everyone except Apple. Apple does already have an email server. Why are they forcing me to convert the email to a PDF?
On top of that every mail service wants to do something different.
The jewel in the post is the rejection of Vannevar's acolytes and their hand-wrought memexen. Biology already gave me a perfectly good memex in my skull. If its shortcomings give you anxiety, take 2 YAGNI until productivity resumes.
I just use it to store my stuff. I don't spend much time organising it.
I had trouble organising my data in folders, so I tried Bear Notes, and it helped.
From there, I just came up with a few conventions to deal with the problems that emerged over time - similarly to how someone would define their personal folder-hierarchy. For example, having a page for every contact helped, because I often find myself looking for "that thing that Tom showed me".
But the biggest advantage is that whatever I'm looking for is in one location, only a short full-text search away.
---
> Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.
I have 5000 notes - most of them are useless. But it costs me nothing to keep them.
I have this whole app sketched up where the idea is you just focus on writing notes and thoughts in one continuous stream, jumping around topics as you go like most professionals do, and then use searches and filters you can save to render different contexts easily from the single stream.
So you can switch between reviewing your work 1 on 1 history and your Christmas gift ideas with a change of a filter. You don’t have to worry about organizing anything, it’s all just a single stream of content and then searches.
I’ll likely never build it, but I’m convinced that would be the way I want to write notes. I don’t want a knowledge graph, I want a stream of consciousness capture tool with a way to use tags searches and filters to make sense of it.
Oh also: I want to write some notes in handwriting on my iPad, and then ocr and clean up those notes to be liked I typed them, but still preserve the original handwriting. I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.
One day.
I think most obsidian users will agree. I never quite understood the hype behind it. 'second brain' stuff never really made sense to me.
It would be a good feature to have, and it's better than starting from scratch.
> I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.
Logseq doesn't currently have saveable filter lists, but you can create pages with any title which will still collect and display direct and indirect references to that title/tag. This gets you 80% of the way there already, if you get used to the workflow.
Logseq multi-device sync is now in beta, as well.
This is exactly right.
My method for rapid journaling/ thought logging:
- use note app of choice, (for me it is Obsidian)
- voice to text, rapid fire, get all my thoughts out in big paragraphs
- once every few day re-read + add heading to sections + add a couple hashtags + but otherwise leave it in a terrible spelling mistake ridden, grammarless mess
--------
> Every note is an extra cost
For notes where remembering / reviewing are important (i.e. todo lists), I've found:
"Bullet Method", which is essentially keeping an analog journal of bullet notes.
It really makes you slow down and track what is important , so you have a nice clean journal
You can try Nebo.