Linus Lee

I'd argue that this concept for media is most commonly known as "playlists" and unfortunately only used within data silos, e.g. a playlist of YouTube videos, a Spotify playlist, a TV season of episodes, a series of episodes, a trilogy, etc. (Yes, I'd argue that your music library of mp3 files is also kind of a silo, although portable) Heck, even a slideshow is arguably a playlist.

I agree that putting a playlist-like concept into, say, the filesystem would be an extremely interesting idea but I think a big danger is running into the same problem as hardlinks and symlinks. This problem is that if a file is "present" in multiple places (or playlists) deleting/modifying/moving it can have unforeseen consequences and it's hard to reason about (and if you copy the file now you get to invent a way to track different versions too!). I think this is also holding tagging filesystems back.

I'm currently writing a non-hierarchical FUSE filesystem and have been thinking about this list-directory concept but I'm still not completely sure how it would work, especially since I need to remain backwards compatible with the POSIX interfaces. Will probably have to just try it out (xattrs to the rescue?) and see what sticks I suppose...

A linkdump of interesting somewhat related stuff:

- https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/knowledge-structures

- https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/all-you-need-is-links

- https://thesephist.com/posts/search-vs-nav/

-…

Has anyone done a (hopefully) systematic survey of the processes and software people use to store their stuff, sort of like a usesthis.com but just for storing assets, and how well that's worked over time? My guess is the successful strategies would look a lot like Brajeshwar's comment, a thoughtful plan that uses simple software and formats, some planning for the future, and, probably critically, regularly doing "digital chores".

There've been some efforts in the past to store everything and make it searchable, like the ancient Chandler project, and the possibly still alive Parkeep, none that have been more widely adopted than a strategy of put everything in Gmail, Dropbox, etc, and hope for the best, which is what I do, minus the regular diligence that people like Brajeshwar have.

Making and using anything more complex looks like it turns into a (very cool looking!) hobby in itself, like these:

https://thesephist.com/posts/monocle/

https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehouses/

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/

And yeah, the latter two also include storing and searching more than say email and photos, but maybe shows one's tendency to want to store and search everything.

Hi :)

I just pushed this (very) small project. It's a note taking cli python program, which will works (at least) on python 2.4, 2.7 and 3.9.

It's heavily inspired by inc[0], that I discovered in this post[1] (that was posted to hn a few months ago[2], thanks hn :)).

The goal here is to store knowledge using simple txt files. If you provide a name to the cli, the txt will be saved under "name.txt", and if you keep it blank, it will save a file named after today's date (%Y-%m-%d.txt). You can search for content, and it will be sorted by last accessed first. The "date in the name" thing is cool (from my pov) because I may remember a concept or something by it's date.

I also spent way too much time writing the help.

[0]: https://github.com/thesephist/inc

[1]: https://thesephist.com/posts/inc/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27667538

Hey HN! Fun to see this project from my college years on HN again. To clear my name, I have actually written other languages that are arguably more useful, like Oak [0] which I used to build a bunch of personal software infrastructure [1] including my current daily-driver apps for notes, longform writing, a Twitter client, a personal search engine, and a few other knickknacks.

I find building little toy interpreters and programming languages fantastically fulfilling, creatively energizing, and a really fun way to learn how such a common element of our work that's often a black box functions inside. I've written before about how to get started [2] with these kinds of little toy programming language projects if you're curious to dive in.

[0] https://oaklang.org/

[1] https://github.com/topics/oaklang

[2] https://thesephist.com/posts/pl/

see also “Notational Intelligence” https://thesephist.com/posts/notation/

“The value of notation lies in how it enables us to work with new abstractions. With more powerful notation, we can work with ideas that would have been too complex or unwieldy without it. Equipped with better notation, we might think of solutions or hypotheses that would have been previously unthinkable. Without Arabic numerals, we don’t have long division. Without chess notation, the best strategies and openings may not have been played. Without a notation for juggling patterns called Siteswap, many new juggling patterns wouldn’t have been invented. I think notation should be judged by its ability to contribute to and represent previously unthinkable, un-expressible thoughts.”

This is pretty much the whole point of programming languages imo

Some of the other sibling comments touch on this, but I’ve had more success inverting the paradigm as thesephist notes in “Build tools
around workflows, not workflows around tools”[1], which is worth a read even if it’s not directly related to goal setting (although I’d argue goal setting is certainly part of a workflow)

I’ve tried so many different types of productivity systems over the years, but the ones have stuck for me are the ones that don’t overly prescribe how they’re supposed to be used and give you some implementation leeway.

[1] https://thesephist.com/posts/tools/