fundamentally I believe "taking notes" is the wrong way to think about it. if you "know" everything, then notes serve no purpose.
Recording is not knowing, at best it is memorization of largely useless trivia. Sherlock has a good discussion on this (Sherlock solar system). To know something you have to have processed and at the very least achieved some compression of it.
Notes help with processing and thinking things through, aiding conscious and active understanding.
Unless recordings feed into one's process, they're a waste of space. Sturgeon's Law: The vast majority of what we encounter is junk, much of it even self-contradictory. The more you let into your corpus, the harder the problem of retrieval relevance.
My clippings are actively curated, carefully sized to fit in working memory while also independently comprehensible and guaranteed to have met my minimal standards on factuality. Because I have read them carefully before, I expand my mental canvas but am not slowed down too much by processing demands. The throttling on note growth means an easier time for information retrieval and much fewer irrelevant results to ignore.
As an exercise, look back at bookmarks that are 5+ years old. How many of them still load? Look back at your history of liked videos on YouTube. How many of them have been deleted?
I used to think that but the act of taking the note is itself important, as it integrates some of the info into your decision making process.
The indexed database would also be useful, but you have to understand enough to search in the first place.
I don't do actual note-taking there, I use NotePlan for that, which is just a directory of plain text files on my local filesystem. Automatically indexed by DevonThink.
I just dump everything there, including a regular weekly cronjob to archive my email accounts from different IMAP servers including Gmail.
I use DevonThink regularly and it never fails to deliver (except syncing, which sucks, my databases are too large). I have 25+ GB of data there in all sorts of file formats, from PDF receipts to over 1 million+ text documents including emails, and DevonThink can still find stuff instantly (under 500ms) for any full text search.
It's really cool to think that all of this data exists, but I'm not really sure that it's useful. Occasionally I've gone back through my old search history for that one old post that I wanted to re-read, or go through my Spotify listening history to find a song I really enjoyed but forgot the name of, but 99% of that data goes to waste.
Quantified Self [0] is an interesting project to me since it seems to make use of data from all of these disparate sources, but I'm still not sure what the outcome of tracking all of this data is. It seems cool but not useful.
It's also like all the wires I have in boxes and draws at my house. As soon as I throw them out I need them!
Not with gmail you can't.
As of a couple of years ago, gmail search was a crap-shoot. It would consistently fail on some things, occasionally fail on others, and work just fine on cases that looked (to me) to be the same.
Yes, this was on a paid account.
Most of my personal "note taking" is either time tracking entries for Customer billing or emails sent to myself with keywords in the subject line and the notes in the body.
I wish I could get at my phone's (iPhone) browser history, call database, and location services database easily to amalgamate into my "digital life panopticon" too.
I love being able to search over even this limited corpus of data. I can "remember" where I was and what I was doing on a given day pretty easily. I discovered that I can often get "organic" recollection when I prime my brain with a few context details gleaned from the digital corpus. ("I was at xxx site that day, I had lunch at yyy restaurant, and when I got back I looked at these websites... Ah, and now I remember what Bob and I talked about that afternoon!")
I'd love to have audio and low frame-rate video recording on my person during all my waking hours. If I had that, though, I'd keep it completely secret (and use parallel reconstruction if I need to divulge "memories" gleaned from it to others).
Hard disagree for a few reasons.
Even with history, sometimes I forget how to look up a paper I saw six months ago. A lot of stuff sits at the tip of my tongue, and I'm unable to adequately describe it well enough to find it again. Or if I can find it, it takes a great deal of effort. I'm pretty sure this problem isn't unique to me.
But even more importantly, writing helps your brain build connections. When you have to analyze, synthesize, and summarize, your brain is actively grappling with, contextualizing, and relating new concepts to the world you're already familiar with. It becomes an active part of your worldview.
Coupled with spaced repetition, note-taking is one of the best tools for learning.
notes have a purpose, but most people that I talk to use notes to basically just record reality to remember details
Yes. Summary in particular is surprisingly mind-expanding.
Also don't forget classifying! Note taking apps for e you to do that, and it can lead to important insights.
Think automatically downloading all youtube videos you liked, all tiktok videos you heart, all tweets you favorite, make a crisp HTML backup of every bookmark you have. It will grab all the videos you "save" and automatically ffmpeg to the resolution of your choosing (in my case x265 720p).
It's a large effort, but one that I think it 100% worth it. People are losing their connection to the past on the whims of a few corporations. It's time to decentralize that.
A swarm of my apps all online, all uploading/downloads the content as people search for it and consume it. No taking it down since there is nothing to take down.
Coming soon!
I'm using HPI [0] as a sort of universal API for almost all of my data (manual notes, bookmarks, instant messages, internet comments, etc)
Then I use it in tools like Orger [1] and Promnesia [2,3] which function as my second brain
[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI
[1] https://github.com/karlicoss/orger
I guess the completeness of your proposed "auto-memorize-everything" solution depends on what style of notes a person writes.
A lot of my notes are annotations or personal commentary that don't exist in the sources of the url text or video.
Here's an example of that type of notes I often take... E.g. I found some links that explain how one can grok "Docker" by going through the learning exercise of re-inventing it from basic os features with homemade scripts. But I wrote my own personal notes (in "##")about the limitations of the explanations in the urls:
## these tutorials explain the verb (runtime) but not noun (artifacts of image file)
https://github.com/p8952/bocker/blob/master/bocker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fi7uSYlOdc
EDIT add to categorize different types of "notes" to aid discussion:
(1) notes as memorization aid such as copying facts: a user writes a note that says "1 inch equals 25.4 millimeters" after seeing it on a webpage or something. So the "universal-record-and-index-everything" would help make these type of notes obsolete because one could just skip writing that note down and just recall it later by searching for "inch to mm conversion" in the digital archive
(2) notes as synthesizing/interpreting/connecting/commenting the content. These type of idiosyncratic notes generated by the user's brain often don't exist on the internet so they cannot be replaced by a universal recording tool.
> much knowledge work involves finding and re-using previously seen information. We describe the design and evaluation of a system, called Stuff I’ve Seen (SIS), that facilitates information re-use. This is accomplished in two ways. First, the system provides a unified index of information that a person has seen, whether it was seen as email, web page, document, appointment, etc. Second, because the information has been seen before, rich contextual cues can be used in the search interface.
Might be worth revisiting their papers to see what they learned.
[1] (PDF of SIGIR paper) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
I personally found the idea interesting, but I was too afraid to ever try it out. The mere idea of a video record existing of everything that's going on on my computer, even if it's never supposed to leave the computer, was too scary for me.
[1] https://apse.io
Recording only the inputs doesn't help me much, my notes are mostly always about the part of my brain it ticked off.
A lot of it is "I wonder if this will help me with X" connection points left off for me to follow up later rather than to go back to refer to the conversation in exact terms.
Good notes for me are a way of letting off my internal narrative pick up from there later and carry on paying attention to the conversation I'm actually having right now.
But people tend to dislike this idea that one company knows everything.
In practice I don't know how or why it currently feels so unusable.