CiceroCiceronis

No, will check it out, thanks!

Cahier looks like exactly what I’ve been hoping for for a long time. People have been taking “knowledge management” seriously for a few years now and we have a number of great tools like Obsidian, Zotero, Anki, and their brethren. But there’s still no real good solution to properly highlight and annotate documents, then link those outside their originating document into the broader context of one’s notes. Instead you end up with multiple silos—a Zotero full of papers, an Obsidian full of notes etc. This strikes me as a definite step in the right direction—thinking about knowledge management as an integrated process, with a workflow right through from reading, to taking notes, to organising those notes, to actively employing them to generate new insights and effectively write.

(I guess my only concern is around potentially reinventing the wheel when it comes to some of these areas. E.g. do you plan to integrate every feature from Zotero, like the web-integrated grabber? That sounds like a prodigious amount of work, but without it it’s hard to fully supplant Zotero as a reference management solution. I’m curious as to your roadmap for this and what you see as the ultimate feature set and user workflow.)

I feel there will always be a difficult interplay between public and private. Public sites encourage wide sharing and dissemination, at the expense of curation and longevity. Private sites (whether peer-to-peer or scene) can impose top-down strictures to encourage uploading and retention and a certain quality standard, at the cost of widespread availability.

But these synergise—we all know that scene and P2P film releases percolate from private sites to public ones, for instance. Torrents may die in the public sphere before being reseeded from an obscure, yet shielded and resilient, private archive (I have done this). The economies of private sites encourage the contribution of new content, which after a requisite delay is disseminated outwards to the public sphere. Light is the left hand of darkness, darkness the right hand of light. (The same model applies among private sites too as content is cross-uploaded, building resilience in the shadow archive. When one private or public site shuts down, that content doesn’t all have to disappear.)

I would actually argue that where public materials are less available, it’s less because of the private sites (which will always exist) being private and more because there are no public sites for that media type to be mirrored to. Think Libgen, which absorbs almost all contributions to private book sites eventually. Music enjoyers aren’t so lucky usually, which I think is because of the language gap between the major public music site that you mentioned and private music sites which are predominantly English-language.

You can check out Butterick's online book on typography.

Having been reading The Names recently, DeLillo is certainly brilliant. For an author often grouped in with the American “maximalist” authors mentioned by sibling commenters like Pynchon and Gaddis, I have appreciated DD perhaps even more for his subtle and sensitive dialogue and exploration of interpersonal interaction. The lead and his ex-partner in The Names have that sense of tired accustomedness to their relationship which is hard to neatly encapsulate.

Both the introduction and the “Status” chapter of Keith Johnstone’s Impro book will interest you greatly.

I'm a medical student and one of my main takeaways from spending time in clinical environments is that a lot of doctors and other staff seem to either not realise or not care about how much time is wasted due to slow, inefficient processes and technology. I was wondering to myself about what it might take to train a model to recognise medical jargon to help doctors rapidly transcribe audio recordings of their consults/spoken recounts of their notes. Not surprised that somebody is looking to make a commercial product of it, there's definitely space for it.

In the US context, it seems likely that the ruling in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp would preclude any copyright in such cases.

This is really brilliant to see, and I've been surprised for quite a long time that nothing similar exists. I think it's a real shame that few people with interest in memes have interest in building solutions like this that help us engage with them.

People in the 21st century know a lot about the mistakes of the past century that led to much popular culture of the time being lost (especially terminally online people who've watched lots of Youtube documentaries about lost Dr. Who episodes and so on), so it surprises me how little we try and avoid those same mistakes with today's ephemeral pop culture in the form of memes. People like yourself who want to help make the internet's huge corpus of memes tractable are part of the solution in terms of meme archival and cultural memory.

(There's a good meme metadiscussion group on Discord, "The Philosopher's Meme," which you might be interested in joining. People there would be very keen to discuss what you've made.)

I seem to recall someone mentioning it as "coming eventually." Hopefully that proves to be true.

Zotero is great, but the current versions don't actually support web annotation. That's a shame not only because web annotation is useful, but because given its excellent support for PDF annotation, it feels like it could become a one-stop shop for annotation/organisation of documents of all kinds, something which I've been looking for in vain for some time.