I've never heard of it! I will check it out. Have you seen it used successfully?
297 karma · joined September 20, 2012
We were hoping this second one would allow us to do deeper critques than the first, which was paced more quickly, but somehow none of us got more than 20 minutes to talk about our projects (which is why my notes are so short).
There are a couple projects that came up that were loosely based on the Zettelkasten:
- IdeaFlow by Jacob Cole - Roam Research by Conor White-Sullivan - "Cards" by Joel Solymosi
IdeaFlow and Roam are both basically WorkFlowly except that you can link bullets together, plus additional unique features. The ability to link bullets together basically makes it a Zettelkasten, and enables many cool features. As Conor puts it "You shouldn’t have to know the structure of your thought as you’re typing".
Cards was more faithful to the Zettelkasten in that the metaphor was index cards instead of bullets. The unique thing about Joel's approach is that you can transclude them into documents (sequences of cards), which was a feature inspired by Project Xanadu. That enables Joel to reuse cards across many documents, and had the benefit of letting him effectively update multiple documents at once by editing a single card.
I've been writing an encyclopedia for the last six years. When I heard the Zettelkasten idea it made me wish I had heard of it earlier. It seems like a potentially better way to organize information since the links are between paragraphs rather than pages.
> The database was originally found by security researcher Sanyam Jain, who said that he was able to locate phone numbers associated with several celebrities. It's not clear who owned the database nor where it originated from, but it was taken offline after TechCrunch contacted the web host. There is no word on why the data was scraped from Facebook or what it was used for.
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/09/04/facebook-phone-number-l...
Would Triplebyte mind sharing the data? I'd love if the numbers could speak for themselves, rather than having to rely on an interpretation of the numbers.
Would you mind briefly expanding on "Because it's so clear that Tether is simply used as a way to circumvent AML/KYC"? Not being contrarian, I just don't understand how this part works.
1. Perfect recall. Every little detail I read in a book/blog/article stays with me. Makes it easy to synthesize results from multiple pieces across time, which is useful when you only have a casual interest in something. (I really like downloading the cool education images/GIFs and and inserting them in articles- otherwise I don't know where I'd keep them.)
2. Reveals what I don't know about a subject. For example, whenever I start off writing a new article on some topic, the first thing I write is a definition, e.g. "A cat is an animal that ...". The process of doing that often reveals gaps in my understanding.
3. It makes me better at asking questions when I'm trying to understand something. The analogy I like to make here is that learning a second language is harder than a third language, because after learning the second you know what you need to know to understand a language. But there's no reason that should be limited to languages and couldn't apply to all things, and things themselves. Some questions I like to ask are "What is the function/uses of this thing?" "What are the parts of this thing and how are they arranged?" "How do we make this thing?" "What's the history of this thing?" "What subtypes of this thing are there?"
The downside is that it dramatically slows down my reading speed, since I now feel I need to take detailed notes, and then I often have to reconcile them with notes on other things which can be time-consuming. Considering the number of books a person could realistically read in their lifetime is limited, it's unclear if it's worth the tradeoff.
I'm curious how other people think about remembering things, and if they have a system, what tools they use. It seems unsatisfying to me to read a book and realize I'll probably forget it in four years, yet most people seem content to do so.
If anyone is interested in the specific software I use, here's the Github project: https://github.com/Ceasar/Encyclopedia. It uses restructuedText (as opposed to Markdown) for the text. I edit them using Vim. All the files are stored in Dropbox so it gets synced between my devices. A simple Flask web server renders the pages in a prettier format.
Still very primitive compared to what it could potentially be, but combined with regular Unix command line tools it's worked fine for my needs. (I like the idea of a hacker-wiki by the way, more than something like this which comes out of the box. Seems like an personal wiki designed for a power user could be way more interesting.)
What's hard for me to anticipate though is how much harder it would be to do things like shopping, or the occasional video call into a meeting.
Is this problem useful for anything? I've seen multiple variations of these prisoner problems now, and I can never remember any being useful in other contexts.
Really enjoyed the post though. I think a lot articles which give advice without personal experience don't ever really resonate. This one actually makes me feel hopeful.