So the top comment/advice on HN about how to avoid information overload is to collect a list of information to remind you to stop addictively collecting information.
Sounds about right.
Sounds about right.
I write much, sci-fi and always draft some articles (but never publish), so that keeping up with HN is a sort of reference material building activity, other than it I don't go on twitter, IG, reddit, slack, mastodon or whatever IRC channel, so I try to make the most of my constrained addiction, but it's always tough work to clean up a browser tab accumulation, as the Feynman quote quips, it's costly, you have to pay attention:
The method involves a paper notebook, which I use whenever I can in lieu of a PC for drafting, taking notes, planning etc. On a two-page spread I start sth like an index by arbitrary useful topics of my current researches. Each line is a one or two word topic, after the word I simply list the HN IDs separated by comma. It's nice to save individual comment threads or whole posts using the same interface. When useful I write a little two word note on top of the number. In this fashion I close dozens or hundreds of tabs and postpone/defer reading the interesting conversations to when I will take action upon it e.g. by writing a short story or poetry or articles. I also use the GTD golden 2-min rule: if I can read and/or take action on a useful discussion or link posted in a few minutes, I do it on the spot and close the HN post forever. Done.
Maybe you could automate pasting the url by copying it beforehand and having the new entry draw it from the clipboard.
I do look at mine extensively. Though I invested a significant amount of time organizing them. Having a way of quickly searching notes and previewing their contents does help. I use fzfx, which is basically opinionated shell functions on top of fzf to do the search. In the future I want to autosync the public notes to my site and implement an improved search system there.
> Maybe you could automate pasting the url by copying it beforehand and having the new entry draw it from the clipboard.
C-C + C-V isn't a huge hassle at least for me. I have a bind on Neovim to format the link in Markdown format so I don't have to type []() and carefully paste the link in the right place but honestly I always forget to use and lately I'm just pasting the raw link and not caring about formatting. I think formatting should be done automatically in the background. In the future I may adapt or write a formatter for those niche cases. It can be triggered by a save or pre-commit hook (everything is in a repo inside a single monorepo). Might even hook up a LLM to it. Developing my own Notion lol.
[1] as a matter of fact today I "launched" (on a barren desert let's say) a substack newsletter to feature code reviews by the chatG man (and soon feature open source AI projects too), and at first I'm having it review the old Vim plugins I once authored, including vim-seek on next issue, if you want to be my first subscriber, lol: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative-revie...
"Human" technology focuses on adapting the natural world to one's needs, the ultimate result being the whole natural world removed / replaced by said technology.
"Elven" technology focuses on adapting oneself, to remove the need to rely on, or change the natural world. The ultimate end being the complete removal of oneself from the natural world (while continuing to exist, of course). However that process still requires you to take "human" steps to ensure survival and progress.