Google's new experimental product, Project Tailwind, is based on a "source-grounded AI ... allows you to define a set of documents as trusted sources ... a kind of ground truth ... craft a ... LLM that is not an all-knowing oracle or your new virtual buddy, but something closer to an efficient research assistant...This is exactly why I c…

A pilot project to help bootstrap decentralised collective intelligence

The last of my 1/1/2023 bundle of 5 posts introduces a first pilot project into exploring and demonstrating decentralised solutions to collective intelligence.The knowledge domain is Tools for Thought (TfTs), so the end result will be a map of the TfT landscape, which "is forbidding to newcomers, with software still aimed at early adopters, a…

The longest of my 1/1/2023 bundle of 5 posts asks "What would a Tool4Thought designed to support decentralised collective intelligence look like?"While it explores some of the key features I'd like myhub.ai to offer, it also recognises that creating decentralised collective intelligence will require multiple, interoperable software,…

The "executive summary" of my 5-part bundle of 1/1/2023, which "provide a snapshot of my current thinking into how a decentralised collective intelligence ecosystem could be bootstrapped into existence."

Good example of a digital garden: "This is my space for Notes, saving and highlighting Articles. It's a [[Second Brain]] or personal wiki" built using loqseq.

Proof that one of the myhub revenue streams exists: "pay once, and you get lifetime access to my growing list of notes from the books I’m reading. If you went out and bought all of these books, you’d pay around $3,000. If you then spent the 3-6 hours reading each book, and 1-2 hours taking notes on them, it’d take you anywhere from 800 – 1,60…

Articulates exactly my problem with most Tools4Thought, hence the "super simple Thinking Tool" I want at the heart of myhub's CMS."Perhaps something as simple as having the word ‘Tool’ first causes us to focus on the tool more than the thinking... to confuse thought as an object rather than thought as a process... [causing us t…

Betaworx announcing "nine companies we selected and invested in for our THINKCamp accelerator program ... new technologies ranging from large language models and generative AI to graph databases and high-fidelity spatial user interfaces — to create tools for for how we may think."All probably worth checking out, ranging from Gordon Brand…

After covering the "bullet train" trip (hubbed elsewhere), this provides a detailed elucidation of all the issues you need to address on "The road from Roam ... to Obsidian.md" by summarising and linking to dozens of other posts, threads etc., creating "one place to look and minimize the pain of flipping through numerous p…

A research project which aims "to find data structures and interfaces that support synthesis and innovation in a decentralized discourse graph".Appropriately enough, it's presented as a hypertext notebook, built using Quartz, so "click on what is interesting... hypertext notebooks are designed for exploratory browsing. In a lin…

More or less exactly what I described in my PKG Chapter, although that includes AI and it's not clear that orbit does. "As you read, Orbit occasionally prompts you with quick questions to reinforce the ideas ... after a few days, Orbit will send you an email ... If you still remember an answer, you’ll next see it two weeks later. Then a …

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…

"we'll be exploring new advancements in the space ... taking tours of new projects, learning about knowledge graphs as public resources, discussing recent advancements in AI and ML in understanding semantic meaning of ideas... how we use these tools ourselves."I joined a small posse of people organised byJerry Michalski to scribe th…

I've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). My chapter will encompass each user’s PKG, the Social Knowledge Graph created by networking them together via the Fediverse, Solid hosting, AI writing tools and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.This post provides a first draft of its Introducti…

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 …

"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…

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…

Interesting, meandering analysis of different tools for thought.Craft "lacked databases - a key feature for any Notion user... [and is] limited to the Apple ecosystem", but they prioritised foundations first, features later: "a lot of work in exchange for small visibility - and users often don’t notice this until the point they (des…

Deep dive comparison between Roam Research (valuation: $200m) & Obsidian (Product Hunt Golden Kitty award, Productivity category). Criteria used & results:User Interface (Roam Research, only because Obsidian's learning curve is steeper)Graph View (Obsidian by far) Backlinks (Roam Research: better placement of mentions, better block mg…

Introductory Adjacent Possible essay on "building the most effective creative workflow", starting with a good definition of "“tools for thought”: using the computer not just to compose your thoughts... but instead as a tool for having more interesting thoughts in the first place... software that helps you generate ideas, remix them …

Andy Matuschak's daily routine and content strategy appear similar, but much more complex, than my own. It starts with something we share: "When my days don’t go well, it’s often because something derailed me in the morning, and I never really got back on track", and manages his day so that he spends the first two hours of the day f…

Andy Matuschak's working notes "are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment... But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment ... [see] Work with the garage door up... Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience)... there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some start…