"Do you have a job that you secretly believe is pointless?... you have a “bullshit job.”", and so do "millions of ... clerical workers, administrators, consultants, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, service personnel...".We built enough tech to free us, but instead "we’ve invented a whole universe of futile occupations tha…

Liberating Structures is a pattern language that "provides a menu of thirty-three Liberating Structures to replace or complement conventional practices... [which are] either too inhibiting (presentations, status reports and managed discussions) or too loose and disorganized (open discussions and brainstorms) to creatively engage people ... to…

Good starting point on pattern languages, ends with useful links.As a definition of what a pattern is: "a proven solution to a problem in a context. Each one documents a reusable solution, encapsulates knowledge about successful practices, and provides information about its usefulness and tradeoffs... Connected sets of interrelated patterns …

I do like a challenge."We live in the most distracted time in human history. Can we reclaim our attention spans?... A new book by the British journalist Johann Hari, called Stolen Focus, takes a close look at what’s happening — and what’s happened — to our collective attention... we’re all becoming lost in our own lives, which feel more and …

Kevin Marks used his personal site to scribe the Betaworx Render ToolsforThought conference (context), and I'm intrigued. Like a lot of scribed notes, it's difficult to follow, although there are plenty of good quotes. But every quote seems linked to a URL for the speaker (Twitter account, website), and given the speed of writing there&#…

Flancian of course used his Agora to scribe the Betaworx Render ToolsforThought conference (context). Like most Agora nodes it's very long - here are some highlights that stood out for me at the time of writing (his notes, like mine, are unfinished):On the risk of being a productivity geek: ""The pattern we see is people optimizing…

Another scribe of the Betaworx Render conference on Thinking Tools (context), this time in good old-fashioned blogpost form, with scans of handwritten notes to boot. Contrasting this with some of the other annotations, it's a good example of the difference between "someone else's notes" and "someone else's blog post&q;…

Chris Aldrich asks: "is anyone actively using Hypothes.is as an off-label zettelkasten just by itself?... [it has] most of the basic functionalities:imple note taking,Notes are editable and update-able,There’s a tag functionality for indexing notes,One can add links to other notes to cross link them if they liked,There’s a reasonably good sea…

"What does it look like to design a system [the internet] for survivability?" This different question - not design for efficiency, or profitability - led "to different answers, and breakthroughs that made the internet we have today".Rather than protect something, "the r-selected response ... LOCKSS stands for "Lots o…

One of the scribes from the Betaworx Render TfT conference (context): "The discussion of AI/ML/semantic-woo was one trigger for me adding some notes about the manual process of Digital Gardening... some folks are tweeting with hashtag ToolsforThinking."Like anyone's notes, these are hard for someone else to follow, although they do …

Notes on Gordon Brander's demo at the Render conference (context): "I’m using different note-taking tools to scribe different conference sessions - this Hedgedoc was automatically created by [[flancian]]'s [[an agora]] page for the conference".He introduces Noosphere, a lowlevel permissionless p2p protocol he hopes will allow …

A YANSS interview with Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know. Generally an "extensive exploration of how to rethink your own thinking", including his WorkLife podcast interview of Margaret Atwood on procrastination.(When annotating a podcast I really like a transcript, but there was none for this epi…

"Feeling stuck?" This YANSS podcast is with "professor, author, therapist, and speaker Britt Frank, a trauma specialist who ... helps clients to get out of the feeling of being stuck."This was well-timed, because stuck is something I've been feeling for a while now. Perhaps unjustifiably, but nevertheless her book's d…

Basically this piece starts to unpack for me my ideas of what millions of Hubs networked together and processed by AI would offer the world in terms of content discovery:With "tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise ... people are aggregating content ... reviving the curated web. But at the moment these are mostly solo affairs... fragmented…

Covers "a new class of apps called “Integrated Thinking Environments (ITEs)”... [and] NOTE framework, used to describe the specific feature sets ITEs provide... examples and some future directions".The term ITE riffs off "Integrated Development Environments... provide developers a comprehensive set of tools ... a kind of augmented c…

Really good but short piece on how most "Note-taking apps have ways they want you to work, a grain you should follow. Except Obsidian... an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for text files ... [not] a note-taking app... an integrated thinking environment. ".Hence you have to set it up to support the way you want to work, rather …

An overview of three protocols - ActivityPub, Scuttlebutt and Dat - and their complementary roles in helping redistribute power from "large centralized corporate interests and back into the hands of individual people and small groups... No one protocol [is enough] ... each protocol has its strengths and weaknesses". We need "develo…

Pretty good explanation of ActivityPub from Darius Kazemi: "ActivityPub describes ways for social network sites to talk to each other... [from] sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat... [to] New York Times ... Spotify. Basically any site where individual "users" create content and other people can subscribe to it could be A…

A "How I use it" from Ivo. "Roam changed the game [by] ... treating the data as a graph ... [and] allowing blocks to quickly be nested, referred to, embedded, created from a piece of text in a block, appear in the sidebar, being searched and queried".Ivo developed a way of ontologising his Roam graph: "In the context of a…

"the underlying problem is stubbornly intractable"Great piece, although I'm unsure that "a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic", it is true that:productivity geeks exist, develop their system and then try to sell it.speaking from experience, it is really, r…

"it's a start... Musk argued that disclosing what amplifies or downranks tweets would reduce the risk of “behind the scenes manipulation.” [but] algorithms alone offer limited insights" because it's not just an algorithm that defines what you see: it's a huge dataset - "content that enters the platform, each user’s p…

To everyone who's ever asked "what's that poster to your left of your desk?", I bring you UsefulCharts' Timeline of World History, which came embedded in their eponymous book, received last Christmas."covering 3300 BCE - present... displays all the major empires, kingdoms, and civilizations throughout history in a sid…

Like most guides, this one wrongly includes 'blogs' in web1.0, with "people creating and posting their own content" happening later, in an era dominated by big companies. It's as if bloggers weren't posting content before 2005.“the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens... including decentr…

"NFT stands for nonfungible token. But what does it actually mean? an uncopyable digital asset linked to a JPEG, which can be used to mark that particular copy of the JPEG as the “real” one... like the certificate of authenticity you might get if you bought an expensive sculpture. community or pfp (profile picture) NFTs... a series of uniqu…

"for nearly a decade... my own views have whipsawed between extreme skepticism and cautious optimism. These days... a crypto moderate... much of the crypto market consists of overvalued, overhyped and possibly fraudulent assets ... [but] it isn’t all a cynical money-grab, and that there are things of actual substance being built" Most …

the vast majority of defi apps rely heavily on oracles, middleware entities that connect smart contracts to resources outside of their native blockchains. Without oracles, blockchains are like computers without internet access... Often referred to as hybrid smart contracts ... [oracles enable] smart contracts that can react to real-world events a…

A video presentation "based on David Hyerle's book Visual Tools for Transforming Information into Knowledge". Some key points:written notes and verbal information present knowledge linearlymismatch with our brain, which must convert this linear stream into a mental map - major effort. images are fast to convey, but low on detail mix…

Video demonstration of using infranodus to visualize your thinking tool notes and explore connections between them, (hopefully) getting "a good overview of someone else's or of your own ideas, identify the potentially new interesting ideas... compare different notes to one another".I first came across these ideas in an earlier infra…

An overview by Coda, with 20 more resources, on Coda & Notion, which both take "a modular approach to digital documentation. You can do traditional docs ... but you never have to leave the tool to build more complex workflows and processes".

Interesting colection of notes from Andy Matuschak:Peripheral vision: "My physical workspace is full of subtle cues... together give me a kind of “peripheral vision”: when I’m doing one thing, it’s easy for me to fluidly notice other nearby things... Software systems, by contrast, often lack this kind of peripheral vision.". I started he…