supersrdjan

It worked great when I switched from yabai some time ago but now it seems to be constantly losing windows and I have to keep resetting it :S

Read it a while ago, one lasting impact it had on me is I became a devotee of the bic tri-color pen :)

Now, onto the next frontier: handwriting recognition for shorthand. Let's start from Orthic :)

I agree that those are impressive skills that are becoming rare and make us compare unfavorably to old schoolers. But I am also impressed by trackers who can follow a trail in the bush by observing clues invisible to ordinary people. All kinds of skills fell into disuse when the problems they solved lost importance.

But we will never run out of problems to solve and new problems will call for new competencies.

I wonder what are some of these new competencies. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Can you?

Can’t you say the same about the printing press?

Socrates thought that writing contributed to brain rot.

If I AI rots my brain than so did Google before it, and printed encyclopedias before that. In reality, the fact I can get my questions answered quickly only makes me think of more and more questions to ask, more things to wonder about, more problems to ponder.

Cool idea!

It reminds me of this maxim:

In each sentence, a fact and a feeling.

The idea is from this book:

Writing Non-Fiction by Walter S. Campbell (1949)

I found out about this book from the recommended reading section at the end of one of Ogilvy’s books (Ogilvy is a famous advertising man from the Mad Man era).

Indeed. When you have superior skill, inferior tooling can be a constraint. But a superior tool will not compensate for inferior skill.

Iphone, yes. I keep the file on dropbox so that is what keeps it synced.

Shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/a8a0076cc03f4e699d8ca34bd3d...

It’s an iphone shortcut. Here it is: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/a8a0076cc03f4e699d8ca34bd3d...

I keep the inbox.org on dropbox, that keeps it synced.

The shortcut is called “longdictate” because previously I had a version that didnt require me to press stop after finishing my thought. Instead it was set to stop recording when I stopped talking. But it misfired too frequently, cutting me off, so I added the button.

I imagine there must be something similar to iphone shortcuts on Android?

The most seamless capture-from-anywhere workflow I struck upon is to have a shortcut on my phone's home screen. When tapped, it takes my dictation, transcribes it, and saves it to an inbox.org file with an org-syntax timestamp, synced to my main computer.

Basically the notes have the same format that org-mode uses to save notes placed in the logbook. But you can also make them as individual TODO headings or whatever. It's all plain text anyway.

I try to empty the inbox.org every morning, I typically have 20-30 entries to go through. Some things matter and are revised and refiled appropriately. The rest gets dumped into a chronological log file for just in case.

edit: btw, it would be cool if I also made a version that would append the content of the phone's clipboard to the transcription, so that I can also catch links and/or bits of text. Or maybe even multimedia, thought I am not sure how I would accomplish that.

True! I don't use capture templates. Tags make sense too.

The issue I'm having is that the daily file is sometimes a running log of notes I jotted down, other times a structured journal entry written the next morning. I wish I could separate the two so that I could export all my proper journal entry into a pdf.

My stack is org mode plus the Denote package which has a nifty journaling feature. Each day has its own file. The date is in the file name, but more useful to me, the file name also includes a signature that looks like this today:

2025q4w40thu

I find that the week number and day of the week is a more meaningful coordinate than the date itself to orient myself when browsing through the files.

I often use timers and alarms either on my casio or on my laptop as reminders for this or that. I routinely get so carried away by whatever I'm doing that I don't notice when the sound alert plays. Sometimes, when I realize later on that the bell already went off, I can recall hearing it earlier, as if it were a faint memory from a half-forgotten dream.

I also switch between my macbook keyboard and my external ortholinear keyboard. In my case, getting used to the ortholinear actually improved my typing on the macbook keyboard, as it taught me to use my pinky finger more, and also fixed some other bad habits of reaching across with the wrong finger to type certain keys. But I have an ordinary rectangular ortholinear, not a moonlander-type layout.

Living in the northern hemisphere, it bugs me that standard north-up, west-left maps don't match up with the sun and with our clocks. It's neat that both clock hands and the sun are "up" at noon. It would be even neater if that upward direction corresponded to south, since that's where the sun actually is at midday. With south-at-top, east-to-the-left, maps would sync with both our clocks and the sun's daily arc. But then we would lose the west-left rhyme.

I spent my 20s searching for the perfect todo solution but my search ended when I discovered org-mode. It's not that I'm the most productive person you'll meet, it's just that there's nothing further to look for. Should I decide to be my productive self for a while, I know org-mode will support me and not stand in my way :)

Oh, and I love the Denote package.

Denote, the org-mode package, takes the cake for me.

(From Protesilaos, whose introduction to emacs was also on the front page at the time of writing this comment)

It’s already decaying, tiles coming loose, glues coming undone, grime building up. And yeah, up close everything looks cheap, like it was built to be a temporary movie set.

(Talking strictly about the neoclassical stuff.)

What do you mean cover?

Nono, I specifically mentioned no willpower required. Like in your example of available actions, I also have zero desire to jump out of the window, so don’t have to expend any willpower to resist it. Similarly, on my good days, I don’t feel attracted to my phone. What do you say about that?

Do you ever get periods of time where you're just not interested in your phone? Periods of time when you don't even feel the compulsion to unlock your phone and scroll, so there's no real willpower required to abstain from it?

That's the state of mind I want to be at. I don't want to have to lock away the phone from myself or unplug my router.

I do get those streaks of no doom scrolling from time to time, perhaps for a few weeks at a time, but, for now, I keep reverting back to my old compulsions. But I will keep working on it :)

Aren't in this case they saying that their experiment might have been the wrong one, and that next time they have to do a different kind of test that takes a longer time span into consideration? They acknowledge the result that no changes in cognitive abilities take place within 21 days, and then from there make the next conjecture that such changes might happen later, which would require a different kind of test?

Makes sense. That said, fidgeting and moving around is spontaneous when on the floor, you don’t have to be reminded to do it. Also, no chair is cheaper than an expensive chair.

It appears that the problem is not in sitting too much, but rather in sitting in chairs specifically. Apparently, hunter-gatherer people also spend about 10 hours a day sitting. But they sit on the ground. Or kneel or squat. And they don't have the issues we get from sitting too much:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1911868117

So... the end-game of ergonomic chairs might be no chair at all.

The introduction to the article denies its main point:

If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it.

It’s a logical error. It’s like saying: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look foolish, therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks foolish. Clearly there are other ways to look foolish.

So even if writing always clarified thought, it’s wrong to infer it’s impossible to have clear thoughts without writing.

But since the writer here committed this mistake, he demonstrated that writing does not always result in clear thought.

Incidentally, I wrote this comment to clarify my thoughts .

Yay for shorthand. I learned Orthic. Taking notes with pen and paper is now more convenient than taping them into a phone: speed about the same, but you only need one hand, and it's more comfortable.

As a complement, I would also suggest this thoughtful article with a broader perspective, explaining the proper place of SRS in learning to code to a professional level:

https://experimentallearning.substack.com/p/functions-descri...

I see. Well then, my initial gut reaction was unwarranted, thanks for making me realize it.