I've used my own hand-rolled artisanal notetaking system for most of my work, for almost a decade. Here's a few takeaways. (If you're a notetaking veteran, my guess is that the most interesting section for you would be " 6. Contexts ". 1. Background Like many, I've always been interested in "tools for thinking". I read Lion Kimbro's " How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think ", mourned for the Xanadu that I never knew, dabbled with nvALT and Roam and such. I've also made some tools for thinking parathesizers of various kinds. To me, the ambition and the potential is large; but in practice, we mostly get just a tweaked file system . This is understandable: actually supporting real thinking is a different and probably much more difficult project, which would involve iteratively interviewing thinking itself about what it would need to progress better . I had some of these hopes with my notetaking system, so there was...

My old project, called radix , is still the best cognate-forest grower in the world, but unfortunately it's nowhere near good enough. It uses wiktionary entries to tell you what words are related to what other words through etymological descent. This is a very-quickly-written better-than-nothing partial state-share about the project, in case anyone's interested in solving the problem of cognate-forest-growing. 1. Takeaways Use abstract regexes to infer links between words via patterns in wiktionary-ese. Prune the display trees aggressively when feasible without eliding too many interesting cognates. Merge redundant subtrees. When printing actual results, don't store and retrieve a root word's full set of descendants. Instead, store several copies restricted to just the descendants needed to display for one specific language. Precompute the full global transitive closure once, in one big go, before serving many results over time. Use subuniverses to do rapid end-t...

[The year is 2031. Unscoped AI development has been frozen at 2029 levels by an international treaty. The growing awareness of the abstract general problem of the abject state of group rationality spurs the creation of a new kind of forum—by, of, and for forum powerusers—aimed at hot-swapping collective sensemaking structures until a good one is developed.] 0722 on the West Coast, I log in. First, I check updates on my posts. Most of them don't warrant interaction from me. Diya Agarwal (real name, verified, like almost everyone on the site) critiqued a critique of a critique of a paragraph in my post. It's a solid critique. I complete-agree-vote the whole critique, and I weak-signal-boost-vote the sentence that contains the main minor insight to anyone who viewed the relevant paragraph in the OP. This only takes a few keystrokes and a few quick glances, because this was one of the top actions suggested by the Lilim that guessed what reactions I might want to give (and the UI...