Sevoris

What do we do, why? Thinking, listening, learning and talking about personal knowledge management, the tools we use, and what helps us why.

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npub16nsxy0rtdfdsjydsz0s7yshugalv345flr3cc98zwsh7qystfnussd38mx

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spinningthoughts_at_pkm.social@mostr.pub

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nprofile1qqsdfcrz834k5kcfzxcp8c0zgt7ywlkg66yl3cuvzn38gtlqzg95e7glqvzc6

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npub16nsxy0rtdfdsjydsz0s7yshugalv345flr3cc98zwsh7qystfnussd38mx

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Last Notes

2024-09-24 05:58:52

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@npub1j55…tkvt Honestly? I don‘t think I really buy that "the ancients couldn‘t do better". Graph analytics tools are age-old (to the point of frustration - good luck finding a modern software) and the papers for such research tools are strewn throughout the 2000s and 2010s.
(The changes in compute and multiprocessing certainly help making some of their ideas more feasible.)
If thinking asssistance is the problem, I suspect it is more rooted in a lack of HCI research and cost of engineering.

2024-06-04 12:20:05

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@npub1f8g…2sa0 "My name‘s Nicole, and I work in Crisis Cloud Zombologie. Whenever half the company suffers accute decision paralysis from lack of cloud reasoning, me and my team step in…"

2023-11-01 07:35:33

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@npub1j55…tkvt TBH I think that in of itself can be "blamed" in part on a slew of minimum-functionality, user story-oriented design without fundamental decomposition. I wrote about this months ago as something I think #Capacities is defying. But consider for example how full of special features Notion is. New fields, data structures and documents just to support one more application- instead of having it all emerge from the same data structure and tooling, connecting differently.

2023-11-01 07:02:33

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@npub1j55…tkvt I think the big challenge of mobile design is that mobile apps *will* have different use cases from the desktop app. You can‘t just transpose the same workflows - you have to rethink everything again from basically first principle while keeping the data and system foundations the same. That‘s a tricky balance and depending on the MVP use case, might not be compatible at all.

2023-10-28 19:21:48

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@npub1j55…tkvt Capture yes, structured lookup honestly as well. Deep editing I can do without on mobile

2023-10-23 05:14:05

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@npub1j55…tkvt Honestly even more funny because - I‘ve been hacking along on an open-source note-taking system, and it looks like precisely that‘ll happen! All inline metadata is declared through a single syntactic element. Namespaces provide distinction.
Without any concealment it doesn‘t look as elegant, but it‘s much less restrictive everywhere else. We have a cleaner metadata database layer, more options for extension, and metadata appearance is wholy customizable in the conceiler.

2023-10-21 16:04:54

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@npub1j55…tkvt I feel like tag‘s biggest hangup was/is ironically that they don‘t have namespaces. There‘s only one kind of tag, and there‘s (to me feels like) a big debate over how you might use tags. Do they represent lexical keywords of interest, or workflow states? Do they apply to the whole document or only parts of it in a discovery process? What UX is available on them?

2023-07-20 13:36:31

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@npub16j8…0y7m and especially being able to surface single blocks.
I get it that long-form markdown doesn‘t give as much structuring as a strict outliner but it‘s always felt like a weakpoint of many other apps that you can‘t do paragraph-wise queries.
Maybe a slight hot take but I find it annoying that Obsidian does not ship with strong bullet outliner capabilities. Both workflows should be first-class citizens of a good app.

2023-07-16 11:51:51

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@npub1dwa…307m @npub16j8…0y7m these people are incredibly focused and are fast to figure out what can be done how. They also seem to have laid their foundations well.
Tbh these people just seem well-organized, systematically tackling problems. It‘s how you *should* be doing software development.

2023-07-16 10:05:46

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@npub16j8…0y7m namespaced tags can be kind of that, but the question here is more about what you use tags to communicate.
An article today actually differentiated it in maybe a more understandable fashion. Using tags to define a common *concept* or *entity* (i.e. a location or a person) or using tags to define *context* of some information.

2023-07-16 08:42:46

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@npub16j8…0y7m Obsidian‘s canvas spec isn‘t capable of supporting free drawings with vector elements, so bluntly - I‘m not considering it here.
For the database case, I think those are legit interests and should be transferable. My main observation derives from Personal Information Systems like #TreeLine or #omnioutliner, which support the more data-rich storage of entities. Those *have* a use-case and shouldn‘t be ignored entirely - and sometimes a purposeful JSON is probably better.

2023-07-16 08:21:28

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@npub16j8…0y7m that said, I also wrote the above because I feel understanding the three basic file types lets you converge open-source software on a common set of file formats for future-proofing and extensibility. The first two are solved, the third feels like a tossup between Excalidraw and whatever format Logseq uses.

2023-07-16 08:20:14

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@npub16j8…0y7m I know of them very well! Potluck is something I keep coming back to as a design tool. Matching information dynamically with Regex is one of those Other Brainbugs I keep bouncing back to.
Crosscut I haven‘t had a look at yet, though. Ink-and-switch papers are long. Should really take more time to sit down with them.

2023-07-16 07:22:13

#AHypothesis of #pkmDesign - the power of modern PKMs is captured the most in three basic file formats:
- free-form flowing text, usable for outlining with bullets and long-form writing. Ideally it supports increased degrees of advanced formating. Individual segments can be elevated into structured data.
- OPML-like structure-first systems for personal databases. Stores things with high native categorization.
- Free-form Canvas tool for connecting other two file types and free drawings.

2023-07-15 12:30:51

A question for #pkm design - how can we regard tags?
In #obsidian and #logseq I treat hashtags as transporting ontologies - they define some type.
But in various setups I have seen tags used to refer to knowledge semantics. And especially #capacities encourages this because tags are database-discoverable.
Which makes me ponder - what are the limits and usage patterns of tags in #pkm and where do you place your patterns why?

2023-07-13 17:59:01

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@npub16j8…0y7m @npub1dwa…307m and it would still have unlinked mentions.
It‘s a christmas candy box five months early.
This might legit be the first software I can say manages to bridge outliner and long-form editor *and* database into one thing.
Dayum people got work to do. Exciting stuff.

2023-07-13 16:33:23

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@npub1dwa…307m i find the fact that these tables are titled "block" not "page" or "name" on the left extremely 👀👀👀
SiYuan may be about to explosively upmix the pkm space.
(And that just a month or two after I posted about capacities being poised to do some great things)

2023-07-10 08:56:20

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@npub16j8…0y7m …what‘s the Pandoc AST definition of a "definition“? I‘m a little hesitant these might get mangled in a bad way by representation in other formats, given the name…

2023-07-10 08:56:20

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@npub16j8…0y7m …what‘s the Pandoc AST definition of a "definition“? I‘m a little hesitant these might get mangled in a bad way by representation in other formats, given the name…

2023-07-10 05:13:26

#AHypothesis: Discoverability is going great. The minimum piece of context needed to make most information objects exploitable is more and more doable. Information on the net is not garuanteed to persist or be discoverable, so yank it to your own system.
So chill out with the Hoarder‘s fallacy.
#pkm #ToolsForThought

2023-07-09 19:41:48

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@npub16j8…0y7m Ouh, RDF property graphs. That is really cool stuff. Lots of possibilities in the future.
And this has type safety right in the standard. very, very nice.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention, this is getting forwarded to some folks.

2023-07-09 18:05:51

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@npub16j8…0y7m @npub147a…zglh Now just to solve the questions of things like "how can we get more structured metadata in there" and "how can you render neat graphics, interactive UI and drawing canvas without destroying that baseline usability" and mayybeeee...
Idk. I am poking my notes into the open source space around pkm. We will see.

2023-07-09 17:43:38

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@npub16j8…0y7m @npub147a…zglh this approach appeals to me a lot. Design with materials, not features. The bigger and bigger power of good #pkm apps in my mind is that they let the users mix and match together whatever bits they want however they want.

2023-07-09 17:43:38

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2023-07-08 08:40:39

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@npub16j8…0y7m @npub1dwa…307m :flan_hacker: :flan_hacker: :flan_hacker: :flan_hacker: :flan_hacker:
xD

2023-07-08 08:12:54

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@npub16j8…0y7m @npub1dwa…307m i wonder if you could create a plugin that periodically "flattens“ the JSON and database state down to Markdown or some other target file.

2023-07-08 08:12:54

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@npub16j8…0y7m @npub1dwa…307m i wonder if you could create a plugin that periodically "flattens“ the JSON and database state down to Markdown or some other target file.

2023-07-04 08:33:05

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@npub16j8…0y7m So generally your process workflow does not spin off evergreen notes to the tune of "thoughts not captured well are timestealers", to yank an example from my system.
I like the general idea of starting with generic terms, growing the note, then "punching out" the growth of more specialized things into their own notes, leaving the backlinks behind. It can grow natural index files pretty nicely.

2023-07-03 19:02:35

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@npub16j8…0y7m so for your linking system you rely pretty strongly on "intuitive" links? How does that work out with "evergreen“-like notes whose title is specific to you and five to ten words in length?

2023-07-03 18:48:55

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@npub16j8…0y7m deviating a bit from the opening question, but what are hashtags for you? I presently keep a pretty strict separation of "links define entities, tags only define entity states in relation to the workspace system" (to keep the language plain).

2023-07-03 13:47:02

So this just popped up in my review stack and I both wanted to share *and* ask - has anyone had experience with this in the #pkm space? This begets the question of what structural tools you have available, of course, but a more specific example case would be interesting.
https://sb-pkm.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/110/650/456/949/677/813/original/1a67162acd7d3033.jpeg