Remembrance Agent (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Remembrance Agent (1996)

alumni.media.mit.edu

61 pointsbirriel11 comments

Back in the 90s when I lived in Emacs, I had this running. I was genuinely surprised at the insights it would enable. For example, I would be composing and email or writing a document and it would surface relevant chunks from emails and documents that I had not considered or remembered.

I have been wanting the equivalent for macOS for years.

Not the same thing, but something close: if you have _enough_ prior information stored, something like DevonThink can pick out "related fragments" (i.e. while running locally on privately owned data).

> I have been wanting the equivalent for macOS for years.

Is it really a macOS-type thing? Emacs is all about tying together everything one can do on a computer into one integrated whole where anything can talk to anything; macOS seems to be about a well-integrated UI over top of siloed, proprietary components which can only be integrated to the extent that they wish to be integrated.

Compare to Emacs, wherein one can just rewrite and replace a function in a package which does not play well with others.

In 2004 I tried integrating the RA into OS X via the Input Manager mechanism, a way to load external code into Cocoa apps that'd have access to the contents of any text field, so you could get the text that the user was currently looking at and send it to the RA for queries.

If I recall correctly, I never had enough time to make it very useful, and it wasn't clear how best to get its input sources - Mail.app stored email it could read, but other things like calendar and chats were inaccessible to it.

I did it as part of a generic project for making use of input managers: https://sourceforge.net/p/leverage/code/HEAD/tree/

(NOTE: the RA code isn't there, I think it was never even useful enough for me to share it)

My favorite use of that was the "ISIM", or emacs-style incremental search in text views. That was nice. But of course, loading arbitrary external code wasn't sustainable, and that mechanism went away, along with my ISIM.

I no longer track OS X development, so I'm not sure if there's a new equivalent way to do this stuff. It'd be neat to hear.

A couple small past threads:

Remembrance Agent: A continuously running information retrieval system (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8731217 - Dec 2014 (2 comments)

The Remembrance Agent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4246330 - July 2012 (4 comments)

I've implemented Promnesia [0] as a sort of remembrance agent that lives in my browser and shows me related pages/extended browsing history from my digital trace and personal knowledge base. Also discussed here a while ago [1]

[0] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668507

The RA is great. I've been playing around with Roam in org mode recently, and have been feeling it (or a modern version) might be really useful there as well.

Jethro Kuan, the author of org-roam, has also written an early version of what you're referring to, called org-remembrance:

https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/remembrance_agents/

Back in the day, I really enjoyed reading Nat Friedman's blog (yes, he of Novell/Ximian/MS/GitHub fame) about a broader system called Dashboard which provided a sort of live querying of your data based on activities you were performing at the time. It's mentioned on Slashdot at https://developers.slashdot.org/story/03/07/27/1849258/nat-d... but sadly his blog does not appear to be archived anywhere.. if anyone has any more info on it, do share as I was fascinated by it at the time. Maybe once he has wrapped up at GitHub I could gently prod him about it.. :-)

(Found a blog post from 2003 where someone actually described it as "a system wide Rememberance Agent"! https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/07/12/nats-dashboard/)

Reminds of Notational Velocity [1] and Deft [2]

[1] https://notational.net/ [2] https://github.com/jrblevin/deft

RA was an inspiration for del.icio.us as well.

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