johnknowles

Making me think that maybe you should be insensitive to certain users

Strong disagree to both of these points. Nothing "insensitive", save your comment. Devices have audio controls, no need to repeat them in a video player-especially not one on a landing page for a product. Background music for promotional material is standard, and all too necessary.

Yes, we should feel deep shame. We have benefitted from this for years, with lives of convenience, at the expense and exploit of millions of our brethren worldwide. It would only be naturally American to attempt to distance ourselves, to say its "just" the CIA, not us.

But it is our greed, our demand for cheaper and faster, our uncaring nature to the extractive business practices that push the CIA into action. We are complicit, every one of us, and it is only after we admit this that we can start to change. Its not about burying our heads in the sand in shame, but about understanding what we are benefitting from and having a heart for the millions pushed down to push you, as an American, up.

I don't care about the Russians. That's their problem. I'm an American. This is MY problem.

Yes, I'm sure the fact that they are denying any public oversight wouldn't suggest any nefarious activities. Obviously it is not directly equatable, but to dismiss their history and pattern of actions as not continuing into the present day is ridiculous, frankly. To say that I'm being "needlessly" inflammatory. Are you kidding me?

The CIA has murdered and lied with reckless abandon for almost a century. They murdered at least one US president (JFK), and have controlled more (HW, Clinton,..). The CIA has infiltrations in major media, in our news, in our bestselling novels, the top tv shows and movies, the celebrity culture.

Their shape on the world is immense, and immensely evil. So I'm sorry if that is too far for you, but its not even close to far enough to account for the depths of darkness to the CIA.

While other countries engage to some degree, I'm attempting to be hyperbolic to emphasize the sheer difference between US and them, which often (as it is now) gets downplayed and filtered out.

How, in the face of being presented with a list of evils the world over, are we all (us Americans) not prostrate in shame? Why do we search for some other vestige of evil to make rational our actions?

There is no rationality to the atrocities. There is no "other countries". There is US, and there is evil that must be admitted and atoned for.

Not every country has yielded control of their top-level of government to their intelligence wing(Bushes, Clinton, Obama and their teams all have ties), nor do other countries have the operational resources to conduct as far-reaching activities as the US.

No other country purposefully develops the types of technologies and techniques that we engage with to monitor and affect global power structures.

No other country develops propaganda networks (Radio Free ___) like we do, in order to corrode the trust of non-US citizens towards their governments. We literally have to invent stories of "Russian hacking" and "Russian interference" to try and conjure up some parity.

Don't try and make false equations. We are not like the world. We may possess the same apparatuses, but we use them as the devil would.

and yet, the machine churns on. Just wanted to put a reminder here that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has not been able to audit the CIA for over 40 years [0]. Evil likes to be unaccountable, and it's gotten just that. How much more blood will we allow to spill as an American populace before we demand an end to the CIA? This list focuses mainly on foreign engagements by the agency. The domestic activities by the CIA are vast and unaccounted for, bordering on the unimaginable.

We (Americans) have been living in lies, living in shadows, living in death. There is no tangible difference between the acronyms USA and CIA. We have been sold to the devil, and we've made him our master.

[0] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-01-975t.pdf

I'm curious if Notion has any plans to make the "type" property user-extensible. Given the current data-structure, which decouples the block data from the way its rendered through the type property, a user has to define only one template for rendering arrangements of UI components (boxes, bullets, etc), titles and children. Extension could operate even at the level of derivation, where users could extend current base types with custom styling (color, font, size, border, etc) and child layout. As a plus, derivation would allow for blocks to be shared, with a fallback default rendering if users don't share custom types. Given the multi-dimensional nature of the uses of Notion (for work, personal projects, life management, etc), having types that were specific to their domain (grocery list, monthly budget table, contact card) would be a useful tool to semantically separate blocks by their presentation.

I'm curious what you're using to build this. I've been playing around with a similar idea, and have been prototyping in Godot. Visually representing the connections/structures between items has been a sticking point, but I've settled on two main abstractions: stacks and surfaces, mapping to 1D and 2D arrangement. I've been hesitant to explore 3D, as it unlocks many novelties in the design of a micro-world; but I do think that a 3D space brings a lot of our instincts from the physical world into digital ones. Would be curious to hear how you're approaching the problem, if you feel like sharing.

I've thought about this for awhile, and I can only come up with two ideas: a) laziness or b) lack of imagination.

It's a bit of a harsh criticism, but we are spatial creatures who live in a world full of objects that are organized into different forms. The "list" is a very valuable organizational structure and convenient to implement digitally, but it is a rather simple structure, being a 1D-structure. We use "lists" (in the form of shelves and stacks) to store objects and give the collection order, but in order to interact with objects, we remove them from their list and interact with them in higher dimensions (spreading out on a desk, pinning to a wall, arranging in space, etc). The fact that we only have 1D structures in most software UIs may well be that higher-order structures are too complex to practically implement or are not viewed as necessary, but again, this is an argument out of "laziness", convenience to the developer who is implementing the UI. Or, designers and developers genuinely believe that we are most-suited to composing with 1D structures (eye-roll).

(Note: I am in the early stages of developing out ideas for a similar tool, so feel free to answer with discretion.)

Part of my problem with the current software toolset is that almost all allow a single view over a document or a webpage. In the physical world, I can have multiple books or papers open in front of me, drawing from a collection of sources concurrently rather than a single one serially. Additionally, if I open something between different apps, there is no integrated way to annotate at a layer above documents.

- What do you envision as a proper interface for digital exploration? - Will it allow for digesting multiple sources at once? - What will annotation, tagging and relations between documents look like?

There are references to "structured content" and the organic "building up [of] knowledge" in the Beam-ifesto. The most ready structure that I have been working with is a network of nodes, each representing a unit of digital data (a document), which can be found by file URL or by http URL. To relate these nodes, one could form "node structures" that abstract multiple nodes into a structure of some form (list, table, group, hierarchal links, etc). This offers abstraction and composability between digital concepts. While this may be private, I'm curious how you are picturing the "database" aspect of your product.

- Are you drawing at all from what we know about neural storage in your development of a "digital database"? - How are you enumerating the possible relational structures for multiple objects?

I feel right there with you, a few years behind, but also feeling adrift post-graduation. It feels as if there's been a "junk foodification" of digital bytes (pun intended), with our relationship with digital content becoming more ephemeral. For all the miles we scroll and all the paths of URLs we travel, there is very little that allows us to create maps, way-markers or any form of bread-crumbs for us to follow later.

Because we don't have good ways to store away content for later, it sometimes feel like we are cursed to wander aimlessly, creating files and bookmarks here and there, with no real aim or purpose. On the one hand, the world of cyberspace is almost seductive for its incredible vastness and on the other, it is almost paralyzing to explore without a proper set of tools.

I am anxious for tools designed to assist in forging paths through digital ecosystems, establishing a map over digital landscapes that enable me to understand the land, and how to travel through it. Without these, it feels that whatever I do will radically fall short of what I could do.

I commented elsewhere, but look up "Insectothopter". Nefarious orgs like the CIA seem to love symbolism, so I'd imagine there's some connection between embedding themselves in public and private research and being "flies on the wall".

lol, 2 day old account with generic [Word]+[Word] username pumping up the CIA....hmmmm, something's Fishy FishKey.

From your article:

“This is helping maintain US dominance, particularly from a technological perspective,” says Meyerriecks. “That’s really critical for national and economic security. It also democratizes the technology by making it available to the planet in a way that allows the level of the water to rise for all.”

Such a skeevy way to paint this picture -- it's not about global democratization to rise the water level, we know from history that the cia cares about the ability to impose controls through more powerful, more distributed tech.

a little too on the nose for me, especially given the cia's history trying to develop a dragonfly UAV [1] as a listening device. now they're seeking to be approved "flies on the wall" at the top labs in the country. given their history with abuse from tech development, i'm hoping people are approaching this with caution.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/meet-...

"Update" which includes the most basic of iterations. I mean 95% of the current offerings could be completed in a few 2-week dev cycles. Its been almost 500 weeks of existence....@'ing people and pinning...c'mon!!! That's default stuff. The "iPhone" should be called the "iMessage" if it was true to it's purpose.

Threading, better search, tagging, sharing message bits with others, temporary group messages, better in-message features (polls, lists), better ways to send multiple pieces of media in a singular unit, ways to spend "live" time within imessage, higher-level walkie-talkie, ways to schedule messages, ways to send longer forms ("bursting the bubble"), sending rich text in messages,......

Threading, better search, tagging, sharing message bits with others, temporary group messages, better in-message features, better ways to send multiple pieces of media in a singular unit, ways to spend "live" time within imessage...i could go on for awhile

Anyone else tired of this underlying form for IDEs? I get why the side toolbars make sense, from a space efficiency perspective, but the amount of information to take in is always overwhelming from a zoomed-out perspective, considering the whole app window. Why do app designers continue to force us to select what to focus on amongst a sea of visual stimulation? Make it hidden by default, and appear only when we want it!

"Powerful Updates to Messages", lol. Apple hasn't put an ounce of power into messaging. It's been 10 years, and they haven't innovated at all in the message space in any meaningful way (no, Memoji is not a meaningful extension of the messaging space). It's sad to see the lack of energy to actually create powerful and useful software, rather than to doing the bare minimum to compete in the smartphone market.

people like you, who insist on patronizing at every opportunity given, are what make online conversations, particularly on this site, awful.

what do you mean "has been done"? is software a one-shot game?