@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [The world map that reboots your brain](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/ko15s9xhq36m1nij7lhnrew) > In truth we really need to regularly revise and redesign all the tools we use. All tools simplify, which makes them vehicles for potential harm when the risks of oversimplification are not talked about, or worst-case: forgotten. The author uses the example of a world map based on the Mercator projection[^1] to show how tools useful in one context can be wildly misleading in another. In this case, while the Mercator projection was a useful tool to navigate by sea because it preserved directionality, it is terrible for conveying the actual size of land masses especially as they get further away from the equator. This serves as a good reminder of why it's important to understand the tools we use to understand the world around us. All such tools, by necessity, are simplifications of the world - this isn't an issue by itself but it becomes one if we forget that [the map is not the territory](https://fs.blog/map-and-territory). What tools do you use on a regular basis (besides Dendron of course) and what tradeoffs are they making in the way that they present information? [^1]: The Mercator projection is a technique for mapping out a three dimensional globe on a two dimensional surface - a consequence is that the further a land mass is from the equator, the larger it will appear to be

@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [【x】it! – A plain-text file format for todos and check lists](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/eebhaonb2u973sg8505l8rt) > Todos and checklists are perhaps the most common entry point for busy people doing their first foray into knowledge management. This is because they exist to answer the very immediate problem of "what do I do today"? The format introduced by

[x]it!

is simple and command line friendly (AKA amenable to

grep/sort/awk

). Some features that stood out to me: - tags that can have values

[ ] do the thing #tag=values

- tasks that can span multiple lines

[ ] this is a task 
      that spans multiple lines

- syntax for due dates

[ ] this task is due -> 2022-09-01

Plaintext todos do seem to be the sort of thing that is under constant re-invention, see [todo.txt formats](https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt), [taskpaper](https://guide.taskpaper.com/why-taskpaper/), and [Taskwarrior - Command Line Syntax](https://taskwarrior.org/docs/syntax/) just to name a few. This is probably because organizing tasks is like organizing knowledge - something highly personal to the person doing it. This is also why task management tools span an enormous range in complexity - from the minimalist

todo.txt

to extravagant feature buffets that is [jira](https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira). At the end of the day, the best system is going to be the one that you can stick to. What is your system for todos?

@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [The Latency/Throughput Tradeoff: Why Fast Services Are Slow And Vice Versa](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/1befymhb4uqo356c2ahqyqd) > Go ahead. Tell me DevOps and SRE aren’t the same thing. I dare you. Ask a software engineer their thoughts on the optimal solution to any given problem and you'll usually get some version of "it depends". This is because engineering is all about tradeoffs - what separates good from great is knowing what tradeoffs to make in what context. This article talks about the tradeoffs when engineering a system for low latency vs high throughput and that a system made for one will be, by design, worse off for the other. There are some parallels here to tools of thought as well. A tool that is made for live collaboration (eg. gdoc) might not be a good durable store of knowledge (eg. version-control). A tool that is optimized for tabular data (eg. excel) might not lend itself well to free-form writing (eg. plaintext notes). What tradeoffs are acceptable depends on your personal context. What kind of ends are you optimizing for in your tools and what tradeoffs are you making?

@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [Why UML "Really" Died](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/1cvn4gny275sizv2gfemqby) For people that care about the topic, the death of [UML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language) has long been talked about, either with great fanfare or remorse depending on what side of the debate you were on. > The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental, modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. > > [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language) UML promised to do for software what blueprints did for architecture - provide a high-level spec to help understand and produce code. But it never delivered on that promise. The author argues that this was due to the complexity of the spec and the need to be interoperable with legacy vendors. This made UML both too complicated but also too loosely defined to work well as a standard. ![XKCD Standards]() > Source: [XKCD](https://m.xkcd.com/927/) For better or worst, standards are a classic example of the [worse is better](https://kevinslin.com/notes/292xk5tzw6tv3d5m0zjag6n) approach to design. Specifically, I find that simplicity will consistently beat out all other design criteria. JSON vs XML, Javascript vs "any other programming language", Markdown vs AscciDoc" - the standard that ends up being adopted is the one that humans can reason about. Some parting thoughts: - as we continue to make advancements in software, will we continue to be able to design "simple" abstractions to work with them? - is there some limit to this process where we require complicated abstractions due to the [essential complexity](https://kevinslin.com/notes/8uj8lghm55063630jp6zxta) of the problem? (eg. )

@here #892453144632627200 happening now in voice channel. come hang out with the dendron team (tea not required)

@kevins8 Unfortunately I was not able to get your response about platform, will I have to use Vs code for now?

@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [Have I reached the Douglas Adams Inflection point (or is modern tech just a bit rubbish)?](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/qu5nvofm6lm1i48oa67ydy1) > The Douglas Adams Inflection Point > > 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. > 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. > 3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. > > Source: [The Salmon of Doubt](https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Salmon_of_Doubt/xU3m_s5O7yMC?hl=en&gbpv=0), Douglas Adams The author questions whether he has crossed the last part of the Douglas Adams Inflection Point. He mentions technologies like blockchain and the metaverse as examples of hyped up tech that don't have a clear purpose and also fail to live up to expectations. While I'm approaching the inflection point, I'm still optimistic about tech and its potential. Revolutionary technology looks less like flying cars and more like 140 characters of text. The future is notoriously hard to predict and so people try to build it using the means available to them. And while most endeavors will fail, within each failed attempt is a building block for a future attempt that gets to start off a little better off than what has come before. If anything, technological progress should feel like going against the natural order of things as this is an indicator that we are making discrete units of progress, expanding the boundaries of what is natural. Maybe the Douglas Adams Inflection Point is an indicator that we are still on track.

@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [How I’m a Productive Programmer With a Memory of a Fruit Fly](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/0pl15rzafjiifi0fsr00gct) > Having all API docs one key press away is profoundly empowering. The author talks about the transformative experience of using a native API Documentation browser when doing development work. While it's true that documentation is accessible from the web, the experience of keeping a dozen tabs open at all times in order to reference them is jarring and has a high overhead. The application the author highlights is Dash, a native mac app that allows users to pull up docs in a single keystroke and find the relevant docs in seconds. On the surface, this does not seem that different from searching on google, but the difference of a single keystroke (vs searching and clicking) and single digit seconds to find the results (vs multi digit seconds) is the difference between overwhelming to empowering. In chemistry, activation energy is defined as > the minimum quantity of energy which the reacting species must possess in order to undergo a specified reaction > > Source: [Oxford Languages](https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/) The quantity matters - the difference between the reaction taking place and not can be a single milliliter of solvent. There is a similar analogy to be made for knowledge management and accessing information that is on the internet vs accessing something that you have available locally.

@here #892453144632627200 happening now in voice channel. come hang out with the dendron team (tea not required)

@here in ~30 minutes, Bob Doto will be giving a Greenhouse talk on Zettlekasten 101 in the teatime voice channel, covering the basic concepts and methods of zettlekasten and all you need to get started with using one. If you have any interest in zettlekasten and/or PKM for writing and publishing, this talk is for you!

@here Dendron Office Hours happening now in voice channel.

@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [Learn Exponentially](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/dakdzzjb9lq0l6tf6h3ij0v) > Your long-term ability is determined by how fast you learn. Learn slow and you won’t reach your potential. Learn fast and you might. Learn exponentially and you’ll achieve more than anyone thought you could. This is a blog post about spaced repetition and using it to "learn exponentially" - the primary argument being that spaced repetition is far more effective at learning facts and can unlock "exponential learning". My thoughts: spaced repetition is great for memorizing facts but I don't believe it is a sustainable way of "learning exponentially". 1. Learning is more than just memorization. It is understanding the relationships between concepts in a given domain and being able to apply that understanding to novel situations. Spaced repetition is mostly about memorization. This is great for college exams but unless you make meaningful associations with the underlying information, it does not promote "learning". 2. "Your Mind is for having ideas, not holding them" - quote by [David Allen](https://earnworthy.com/david-allen-quote/), creator of GTD. Or put another way - your brain is volatile meat with lossy storage. When you rely on it to hold facts, it incurs a great amount of overhead. You can use techniques like spaced repetition to store information more durably but these only get you so far. You run into limits - either the hours in the day that you can spend on spaced repetition or your brain's limit of storing facts. Instead of memorizing facts, it's more important to have a mental model for how things within a domain are related to each other. This provides a framework to not just understand facts but also a foundation to derive new facts and understand new domains. If you're already spending the effort indexing knowledge using spaced repetition, why not go all the way and index that knowledge externally in a knowledge base? This gives you infinite memory and the ability to associate ideas in any way whatsoever.

@here teatime is in session for the next hour. for new folks - tea time is a casual chat where anyone can hop in or out and discuss dendron or non-dendron related things 🍵 🌱

looks like joining through work's VPN isn't working nicely. Maybe next time

ah - yeah, those can cause hurdles. all good

@here New User Tuesdays happening now in voice channel.

do we have teatime today

ah no its thursday

👍

I was really confused because it's clearly Tuesday today... lol (I get it now...)

@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [Writing system software: code comments](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/dvtktjb7bw0t472hmszosdt) > Comments are rubber duck debugging on steroids, except you are not talking with a rubber duck, but with the future reader of the code, which is more intimidating than a rubber duck, and can use Twitter. The author talks about the benefits of code comments and breaks down comments into the following 9 categories (with the last three being undesirable) - Function comments: describing the function - Design comments: describing the overall design - Why comments: explain why something was done - Teacher comments: explaining a related concept that is not related to the code - Checklist comments: a reminder to do a set of actions when modifying certain pieces of code - Guide comments: a summary of code logic - Trivial comments: a comment that takes as much effort to read as the code itself - Debt comments: TODOS/FIXME kind of comments - Backup comments: comments made to have a checkpoint to revert to if new code does not work Comments are like an actor breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience. They help summarize the visible logic and communicate the invisible components. It's interesting that comments are prevalent in code but not in other texts. Presumably, this was not a feasible option when the text was printed on paper but with e-books and digital text, there is no technical reason why this couldn't be done. Imagine inline comments in Shakespeare or poetry. What might that look like?

oh yah baby

teatime day

@here teatime is now in session. join us in the #892453144632627200 channel for ad hoc conversation 🙂

@here Greenhouse happening now. listen to @rlh1994 talk about importing 10k tables into Dendron 🌲

@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [MDN converted to Markdown](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/nw88q4mx0vuhp67fto0wg2u) > In 2021, the Open Web Docs team, with help from Mozilla, the W3C, and the wider web docs community, converted the authoring format for MDN Web Docs - all 11,000 pages of it - from HTML to Markdown. There's some irony that the central documentation portal for web standards went through a conversion of porting from said web standards (aka HTML) to markdown. It also makes sense. While HTML is the markup language of the web, it is not a language that is human friendly. That spot belongs to markdown. Love or hate it, markdown occupies the same spot in culture as javascript and JSON - a universally adopted standard that has achieved escape velocity and is now pushed forward by its own momentum. A general truth that seems obvious but is often overlooked - for something to have mass appeal, it needs to be easy to use. Its not about re-inventing the wheel but meeting people where they are. ## Related - [community.events.reading-series.2022.04.26](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/79kiqpj2l2ciys839jhr2m7)

@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [Less is exponentially more](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/ckr6j06tjf9e4txq7oblar1) One of the authors of the

go

language talks about its origins and why a language that was designed by C++ programmers to replace C++ programmers does not actually attract C++ programmers. > The answer can be summarized like this: Do you think less is more, or less is less? For the go authors, less is more. By removing various power features of C++ that were also overly complicated, it made the go language both easier to use and ultimately more capable as a consequence. An irony is that the author explicitly talks about composition over inheritance as the tradeoff that

go

made to simplify the language. This is the exact opposite tradeoff that we made at Dendron, favoring inheritance (aka hierarchies) over composition (aka tags). Even if the technical details took opposite turns, we made the decision to focus on hierarchies precisely because it would simplify the retrieval process. Tags made it possible for any note to be categorized as anything. Having a canonical hierarchy limited people to having one canonical place for a note but its precisely this limitation that makes Dendron scale for large knowledge bases.

@User 🔖 This week's entry in the [Dendron Reading Series](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/oPAmN7EszcykwLCByobb3). [Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/uvhu8u8saz1ywyvdiwxa75v) [Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33855416) A post on HN that drew over 300 comments. My[^*] response: > As a long-time user of Stack Overflow, I've noticed a significant increase in the number of answers from ChatGPT appearing on the site. While it's impressive that the AI is able to provide answers to some of the more complex technical questions on the site, it's concerning that these answers are often given without context or understanding of the underlying problem. > In some cases, the answers provided by ChatGPT are completely incorrect or even dangerous, and can lead inexperienced developers down a perilous path. This not only undermines the value of the site as a reliable source of information, but it can also put the users of the code provided by these answers at risk. > I think it's important for the moderators of Stack Overflow to take steps to address this issue, whether that means limiting the number of answers provided by AI or implementing measures to ensure that they are properly vetted before being posted. Otherwise, the integrity and usefulness of the site could be seriously compromised. In case you didn't click on the asterisk, the response above is generated by [ChatGTP](https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt). While verbose, the responses by GPT are becoming uncanny. In the age of digital media, content has always been abundant but now that AI can generate it at will, it is now infinite. Consequently, this means that the role of curation is going to be even more important - knowledge management will be less about having access to information vs being able to filter high-quality information from everything else. It's interesting to note that the internet started off with curation (eg. yahoo). Because this didn't scale with the number of websites that were brought online, google came to dominate with search. Now that the capability of generating human-like content is available with AI, I wonder if the pendulum will swing back to curation (at least until search algorithms can filter through AI-generated content) [^*]: This was generated by ChatGPT with the following prompt

Write a comment about "Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT. What are the repercussions of this?" in the style of Hacker News user kevinslin

"A general truth that seems obvious but is often overlooked - for something to have mass appeal, it needs to be easy to use. Its not about re-inventing the wheel but meeting people where they are. " TOO true - thinking how "e-mail" evolved into "email" evolved through "chat" into "collaboration" into "slack overload" and "stack overflow" and "slack canvas" and "workspaces" & "canvases" LOVE how the mass adoption flows when meeting people "where they are"

I thought Stack Overflow

temporarily

blocked the ChatGPT responses - people have ti inject themselves in the process? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned