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Comment by Henchman21 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, at what point do we just throw our kit in the trash and go back to pen & paper?

Reintroducing pen and paper to your note-taking repertoire might not be such a bad idea, anyway -- it's a much more creative medium than most digital, textual forms.

It's extremely complicated to organize it, though

I suppose it's harder to cross-reference and find things, though I suspect you could utilize some sort of organizational system to mostly overcome that.

I really do think pen and paper will slowly regain prominence; I personally find that it can be much more liberating than digital media.

It's great to be able to use the page as a canvas, writing wherever you want, without having to meet the constraints of a text editor or the likes. Doodles help to visualize and understand problems, too.

Tangent for macOS is my current go-to for note-taking, and it works quite well: it's mostly just a Markdown editor, a tree structure of folders (which is really just a normal folder), and the ability to cross-reference and embed images.

I suppose the primary problem of note-taking apps is that they sort of have to be opinionated in some way to be useful (that's been my experience, anyway.) Markdown files are also guilty of this: they constrain you to a certain layout, which can either be a negative or a positive. Anything too complicated can be off-putting, whilst anything too simplistic can also be limiting.

It's a surprisingly complex field, and it could explain why there's so many different apps for it.

What is complicated about organizing written notes?

Not complicated, but many people have never learned how to do it or developed a system.

No search, no making space in an existing page, no moving text around, cumbersome to take it with you everywhere, unlike a phone.

You don't really need most of this, or it can be solved simply by thinking and remembering.

By that logic you don't really need paper notes either.

A similar life hack is the next time you have to give a presentation, you know, what is normally a brain numbing powerpoint slide deck sort of thing, rehearse and do the slides live on a chalkboard. The novelty of the spectacle means people will actually pay attention. Whiteboards are ok but really lack that visceral staccato punctuation that a chalkboard brings to the table.

That is up to you but I don't see why. Just ignore whatever these entities do, run you free OS with your free software when and how you want it and 'your kit' is yours without interference by hostile entities. You won't be able to access much of what those entities put out there but that doesn't matter once you realise their offerings aren't worth their cost.

The 'net is a big place with a lot of things going on. Drop the hostile actors and it is still a big place with a lot of things going on. The only problem you might encounter is once created by authorities which insist on you interacting with them through those hostile entities. I have thus far managed to use their applications - Swedish BankID and Dutch DigiD being the main ones - without needing to resort to any hostile entities - no Google accounts or Google services on my devices yet everything still works once I get rid of the nag screens telling me things won't work without the aforementioned.

In short, drop hostile entities and keep 'your kit'.

Never, because you have to pay for pen an paper, and the most reliable way to determine what the internet will favor is simply "Does it cost money or show me ads". That is literally as deep as the internets interest goes.

Yesterday. Do we actually need any of this stuff? Probably not. But it's damn hard to stop enjoying it.

The moment you are reading this is not only peak digital trash, but also peak digital treasure!

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