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erganemic commented on Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life   johnnydecimal.com... · Posted by u/debone
erganemic · 6 months ago
Off the top of my head, all PKMs make trade-offs on discoverability, portability, maintainability, and ease of recall. Broadly, "discoverability" is how likely you are to stumble on something you'd forgotten (just recently, I found a file in my "taxes" directory listing all the documents I needed last year, which was a big help, and which I did not remember writing), "portability" is how resistant the system is to a company shutting down/project being abandoned, "maintainability" is how easy to keep your system consistent with its principles (including inserting a new note), and "ease of recall" is how easy it is to find something if you know you're looking for it.

When thinking about a lifelong PKM, I feel like I value portability more than most; something highly tied to a particular company like Notion is right out for me, and I'm leery of stuff like Obsidian or even org-roam, since even if the entries in those systems are just text, I just know that someday the logic that ties them together will stop being developed/maintained and I'll have to migrate.

I feel confident in directory structures and text files as long-term mediums though, and so JD is appealing to me, but its maintainability (specifically the cognitive load around inserting a new note) is such a stumbling block for actually creating content for it. Not to mention the primary thing it trades maintainability off for (ease of recall) is almost entirely solved by search functionality, leaving discoverability as the only benefit over just chucking everything in a flat "notes" directory.

I do something PARA-adjacent now, and I might just commit to that, although denote is interesting as an Emacs user for a slightly more portable tagging- and search-based option.

erganemic commented on Cuttle – a MTG like game using a standard 52 card deck   pagat.com/combat/cuttle.h... · Posted by u/7thaccount
erganemic · 8 months ago
I wish I knew more interesting games that could be played with a standard deck. My wife and I travel a lot and there's something I find deeply appealing about being able to walk into any gas station, corner shop, or airport store anywhere in the world and come out with a dependency-free way of entertaining yourself (or even making friends!), and I feel like I don't know enough games that take advantage of that.

That being said, I do have a few standbys:

Bullshit's a favorite for semi-large groups: https://www.pagat.com/beating/cheat.html

Egyptian Ratscrew is my pick for 3-5 players (although I'd caution it against playing it in quiet public spaces): https://waste.org/~oliviax/cards/ratscrew.html

Lastly, Duel 52 is a recent favorite for just my wife and I to play, and very much in the vein of Cuttle: http://juddmadden.com/duel52/

erganemic commented on Murderbot, she wrote   wired.com/story/murderbot... · Posted by u/lastdong
inanutshellus · 9 months ago
I haven't read the stories for many years now but for some reason both I and my wife assumed the bot would look female, and both of us were independently surprised to learn that the protagonist was cast as male in the upcoming series.
erganemic · 9 months ago
That's interesting! My wife and I both pictured him as masculine. In my case, as a cis, bi man who's honestly evaluated how I play my gender, it was because a lot of the way Murderbot feels about being amidst humans is IMO just dead-on how a lot of men feel being amidst women?

Like "everyone here is a little wary of me, and I can't even really blame them for it, because I just categorically am a more threatening presence."

erganemic commented on Learning to Learn   kevin.the.li/posts/learni... · Posted by u/jklm
erganemic · 10 months ago
Contra to a lot of what's being said in this thread, I think a lot of smart people get stuck in the trap of overvaluing quality of input relative to quantity of input. Put another way: the bitter lesson applies to the AI inside your skull too.
erganemic commented on Not by AI   notbyai.fyi/... · Posted by u/allenwhsu
echelon · 2 years ago
Art will continue to evolve with AI.

Another argument I keep hearing (most recently from pg), is that we'll always need non-AI training data. That, too, doesn't follow. Training new models on synthetic data does not mean we get stuck in a particular mode or style. We'll continue moving, improving, and trying wildly new things. Bootstrapping with synthetic data doesn't block evolution - it enables faster evolution, even. (I'm using synthetic data to train new models to great effect.)

People are angry that we've lowered the opportunity cost barriers and so they're expressing their frustration.

It's a good thing that life's choices no longer fence us in as much. Everyone should get a chance to learn how to express themselves through art with the new regime of tools. Despite changing economics, there will still be a top 1% that do better than the rest of us.

erganemic · 2 years ago
People aren't angry/worried because they don't have a competitive advantage any more--people are angry/worried because they sense (I think correctly!) that AI will eliminate the part of their work that they find enjoyable.

Artists, by and large, don't do art because they enjoy having art--they do art because they like /the process/ of producing art. If that process can be done faster and better by AI, then yeah, sure, they /might/ be able to still do art for a living (some artists will be able to leverage their experience to maintain an advantage; other, less flexible ones will lose work)--but the work they do will likely not be commensurate to the work they were doing before, and will likely be less enjoyable to them.

The thing that worries people about AI is that it'll make all creatives into middle-managers.

erganemic commented on Emacs: Feature/tree-sitter merged into master   lists.gnu.org/archive/htm... · Posted by u/signa11
erganemic · 3 years ago
I'm really impressed with the strides Emacs has made recently: native compilation, project.el, eglot, and now tree-sitter?

As a user who hadn't kept up with development news until recently, I'd always mentally sorted Emacs into the same taxonomy as stuff like `find`: old, powerful, with a clunky interface and a stodgy resistance to updating how it does things (though not without reason).

I'm increasingly feeling like that's an unfair classification on my part--I'm genuinely super excited to see where Emacs is in 5 years.

erganemic commented on Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?    · Posted by u/curious16
quaunaut · 3 years ago
I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it came out earlier in my life).

Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done(https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ...). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that most of how life is conducted is rife with forgetfulness, decision paralysis, prioritization mistakes, and massive motivation issues. This book gives you specific workflows to cut through these in a magical way.

Personal Knowledge Management- The equally classic, How to Take Smart Notes(https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Technique/dp/398...). Where GTD(above) does this for well-defined tasks/work, this book does it for open-ended work, giving you an amazing workflow for introducing "Thinking by Writing", which is frankly a superpower. This lets you see things your friends/colleagues simply won't, lets you deconstruct your feelings better, learn new/deeper subjects faster, and connect thoughts in a way to produce real insight.

For Product/Business Management, Gojko Adzic's "Impact Mapping"(https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Mapping-software-products-proj...) feels like it could make nearly every software team/business 10x better by just reading this book. I've personally watched as enormous portions of my life were spent on things that barely moved the needle for companies, or merely didn't keep the metric from rising. So many projects taken on faith that if you work on X, X will improve, without ever measuring, or asking if you could have accomplished that with less. The world looks insane afterward.

erganemic · 3 years ago
I adopted GTD right before I left college, and I sometimes wonder how I ever would have managed to adapt to the explosion of tiny, attention-grabbing tasks that adult life supplies without it. Admittedly, it feels a little clunky and "enterprise-grade" in places, but the underlying principles are so rock-solid and obvious-in-hindsight it feels magical.

Plus, org-mode really helps to make the over-engineered parts more frictionless--I run my life off of org-agenda now, where creating a new project, capturing tasks for it, and refiling them as needed are only a few keystrokes away. Keeping with the theme of hyped productivity books, I also take inspiration from Deep Work to tag certain actions as being ":deep:", so that after clocking into those tasks, I can look at a clock report at the end of the day/week to understand how many hours I actually spent working on "important" stuff. It's very motivating to make that number go up!

I know not everyone feels the need to be so intentional about their productivity landscape--indeed, a lot of very naturally productive people I know explicitly /don't/. But for those of us who aren't one of those magicians, I highly recommend putting some thought into at least a bare-bones system.

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erganemic commented on Self-control secrets of the Puritan masters   wyclif.substack.com/p/sel... · Posted by u/dash2
erganemic · 3 years ago
"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us."

- Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, KJV

erganemic commented on Magnus Carlsen resigns against Hans Niemann after one move   new.chess24.com/wall/news... · Posted by u/akbarnama
o_nate · 3 years ago
Not being that familiar with the chess culture, it's weird to me that the distinction of "over the board" vs "online" seems to carry so much weight. Is it considered more acceptable to cheat online than "over the board"? I would think cheating is cheating.
erganemic · 3 years ago
Think of the distinction between "over the board" and "online" as kind of like the distinction between "NBA game" and "pickup game". Even that might be understating it. The levels of importance are radically different.

Also, think about how much harder it would be to cheat over the board. You might use hidden devices, accomplices, secret signals--compare that to an online game where all you need to do is switch over to another tab to check the engine. Cheating OTB requires a significantly greater degree of forethought, planning, and commitment--a persistent and repeated willingness to cheat that is way less acceptable than an online player getting tilted and looking at an engine. Still cheating, yeah--but at least it's not premeditated.

u/erganemic

KarmaCake day211November 22, 2021View Original