NotesA collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React. Opensource alternative to Notion or Outline. Unfurl
NotesUndoubtedly, the sloppification of the internet will likely get worse over the next few years. And as such, the returns to curating quality sources of content will only increase. My advice? Use an RSS feed reader, read Twitter lists instead of feeds, and find spaces where real discussion still happens (e.g. LessWrong and Lobsters still both seem slop-free).Unfurl
NotesTechnology is the active human interface with the material world. ... We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe...Unfurl
NotesFor two days, I have been obsessively poring over these documents and photos, reveling in the memories. I have a new window into my thoughts, emotions, tragedies and triumphs from lost decades. Long-dead friends and lovers whisper in my ears from within my own words. FeedUnfurl
NotesThe current state-of-the-art Gemini model can fit roughly 1.5 million words in its context. That’s enough for me to upload the full text of all fourteen of my books, plus every article, blog post, or interview I’ve ever published—and the entirety of my collection of research notes that I’ve compiled over the years. The Gemini team has announced plans for a model that could hold more than 7 million words in its short-term memory. That’s enough to fit everything I’ve ever written, plus the hundred books and articles that most profoundly shaped my thinking over the years. An advanced model capable of holding in focus all that information would have a profound familiarity with all the words and ideas that have shaped my personal mindset. Certainly its ability to provide accurate and properly-cited answers to questions about my worldview (or my intellectual worldview, at least) would exceed that of any other human. In some ways it would exceed my own knowledge, thanks to its ability to instantly recall facts from books I read twenty years ago, or make new associations between ideas that I have long since forgotten. It would lack any information about my personal or emotional history—though I suppose if I had maintained a private journal over the past decades it would be able to approximate that part of my mindset as well. But as reconstruction of my intellectual grounding, it would be unrivaled. If that is not considered material progress in AI, there is something wrong with our metrics.Unfurl
NotesA zibaldone (plural zibaldoni) is an Italian vernacular commonplace book or notebook containing a wide variety of vernacular texts, copied into a small or medium-format paper codex[1] by citizens in late-medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states. Unfurl
NotesIf, as Marx argued, capital is dead labor, then the products of large language models might best be understood as dead speech. Just as factory workers produce, with their “living labor,” machines and other forms of physical capital that are then used, as “dead labor,” to produce more physical commodities, so human expressions of thought and creativity—“living speech” in the forms of writing, art, photography, and music—become raw materials used to produce “dead speech” in those same forms. LLMs, to continue with Marx’s horror-story metaphor, feed “vampire-like” on human culture. Without our words and pictures and songs, they would cease to function. They would become as silent as a corpse in a casket.FeedUnfurl
NotesTarot isn’t just for divination—it’s also a great way to connect to your creativity. Discover how tarot can help you stay inspired and make your best work with this practical guidebook.
NotesThis is the BYOK, billed as a ‘distraction-free’ writing device for those who need pure focus in order to channel their productivity as effectively as possible. The procrastinating writer oftens torments themselves with the idea that there’s a simple and effective solution to their woes, usually one that involves buying something – the perfect notebook or pen – or some studious or trivial ritual that helps get the words flowing. It’s an approach that does little more than perpetuate the procrastination and kick the idea of getting something done even further down the road.FeedUnfurl
NotesDesigned for those who take their writing seriously, BYOK eliminates distractions, so that you can fully immerse yourself in your creative process—for a seamless and fully focused writing experience.
And best of all: you get to use your own keyboard.
NotesIn this video, we give you an in-depth look into one of our prototypes to help you better understand the BYOK as well as highlight some key benefits of the device when compared to other writing tools.EmbedUnfurl
NotesWe're a writing focused subreddit welcoming all media exhibiting the awesome potential of humanity, known as HFY or "Humanity, Fuck Yeah!" We welcome sci-fi, fantasy, and all other stories with a focus on humans being awesome!Unfurl
NotesDot grid!
Highlight:Make lists, plan your next book, study for a test, design an app—you get the idea. Endless potential.
Plan your next book, study for a test, design an app—you get the idea. Endless potential.Unfurl
NotesBut in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.Unfurl
NotesIt’s possible that, in the future, we will build an A.I. that is capable of writing good prose based on nothing but its own experience of the world. The day we achieve that will be momentous indeed—but that day lies far beyond our prediction horizon. In the meantime, it’s reasonable to ask, What use is there in having something that rephrases the Web?FeedUnfurl
NotesNobody wants to read your shit.
Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.
It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesWhile watching this Back To The Future (1985) Retrospective (exact timestamp) today I noticed what appears to be an XE with an Indus disk drive being used by Bob Gale, co writer for the movie.Unfurl
NotesOnce up on a time, before my writing brain had been *entirely* swallowed up by Twitter. One of the most productive daily public writing tools I used was the OPML Editor and a daily outline always open on my desktop ready to receive thoughts. Kind of like Twitter, I guess, except it was a *thing* that I added to over the course of the day. I could edit it, publish it whenever, not publish it until I had my words straight.
This is one of the best short things I wrote with it - meditations on my Dad after his passing.Unfurl
NotesI'm a Hugo Award-winning science-fiction writer, and I've been using WordStar since 1983, writing all 23 of my novels with it. If you still have questions about getting WordStar to run under Windows after reading the notes below (updated in 2015), please eUnfurl
NotesIn 1984, the personal-computer industry was still small enough to be captured, with reasonable fidelity, in a one-volume publication, the Whole Earth Software Catalog. It told the curious what was up: “On an unlovely flat artifact called a disk may be hidden the concentrated intelligence of thousands of hours of design.” And filed under “Organizing” was one review of particular note, describing a program called ThinkTank, created by a man named Dave Winer.Unfurl
NotesWritemonkey is a Windows zenware* writing application with an extremely stripped down user interface, leaving you alone with your thoughts and your words. It is light, fast and free. With an array of innovative tools under the hood and full Markdown* support, it helps you write better.FeedUnfurl
NotesProse provides a beautifully simple content authoring environment for CMS-free websites. It's a web-based interface for managing content on GitHub. Use it to create, edit, and delete files, and save your changes directly to GitHub. Host your website on GitHub Pages for free, or set up your own GitHub webhook server.Unfurl
NotesSingle source publishing, also known as single sourcing, allows the same content to be used in different documents (deliverables) or in various formats. The labour-intensive and expensive work of editing need only be carried out once, on one document. Further transformations are carried out mechanistically, by automated tools. You may also add new output formats in the future, as your organization's needs change.FeedUnfurl
NotesLook, I realize that we live in a TL;DR culture. I lived through 8 years of a non-reading president along with everyone else. I know that the brogrammers out there are constantly getting texts from their buddies to plan the weekend's broactivities, trying to decide in whose mancave they'll be setting up their lan party, and are thoroughly distracted in between futzing with their smart phones and writing a few lines of code per day by cutting and pasting it from stackoverflow. But it's really not ok to act functionally illiterate when you're not actually illiterate, when an advanced society that once put a man on the moon worked so hard to educate you.FeedUnfurl
NotesIt isn’t fair: you spend a few hours on creating your most marvellous blog post ever, the one and only that will surely enlist you in the Hall of Famous Bloggers, but then you click Publish or Preview and all you see is an empty post. Totally panicked you click “Edit” (never do that!) on that empty post only to find yourself in an editing screen that’s, well, empty (!!). Before you try to commit suicide, I hope you do a bit of googling and find yourself here or on one of the many other helpful / not so helpful posts on the subject.Unfurl
NotesTo the point of Jeff’s post, I would absolutely not write a technical book again. It’s a tedious process and unless you LOVE writing and are really good at it (like Nicholas Zakas or Dave Flanagan) then I suggest that you stick with the medium that is truly successful: Writing long-form articles/blog posts and possibly spinning them off into purchasable ebooks. (As an example, I’d point to Juriy Zaytsev and Peter-Paul Koch both of whom could get any JavaScript position in the world purely based upon the quality of their articles and sites, without ever having written a book.)FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesWriting appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter catching your its and it’s issues or reminding you of the rules regarding that or which. Here’s the rub: there is a compiler and it’s fucking brutal. It’s your readers. Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back - failure is a lonely silence. Python is looking pretty sweet now, right?FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesI'm making something that uses Markdown, and there's currently no great universal symbol for identifying Markdown support. So I created one. FeedUnfurl
NotesIn this world there wouldn’t be any ebook developers any more than you have .doc developers.
The fact that we have an industry of people whose job description is close to indistinguishable from ‘fixes office documents by hand in a hex editor’ is insane.FeedUnfurl
NotesPick your favorite editor: Marked's flexible Markdown preview will show you the final output of your document as you work, and its writing tools make your life easier from concept to publish. Unfurl
NotesUnder the new PayPal policy, Mark Corker of Smashwords told all the Smashwords authors they would also have to remove paranormal romance that included shape-shifters - if the shape-shifters were to have sex in their non-human forms.FeedUnfurl
Notesthe only way for the compound to be more soluble than it already was would be if it dissolved before it came in contact with the water. He decided this would be a good basis for another short story, and then realized this represented the perfect way to deal with his concerns about scientific writingUnfurl
NotesPlayfic is a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka "text adventures") entirely from your browser, using a "natural language"-inspired language called Inform 7.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesCertainly we wouldn't want to listen to their other suggestions, which would see us broaden the definition of "fair use" and, horrifically, reduce copyright terms back to merely a lifetime or even less. Not only would such an act deprive our great-great-grandchildren of their birthright, but it would surely choke off creativity to the dark ages of the 18th and 19th centuries, a desperately lean time for art in which we had to make do with mere scribblers such as Wordsworth, Swift, Richardson, Defoe, Austen, Bronte, Hardy, Dickens, and Keats.Unfurl
NotesOne week, George came in and typed up his piece, dropped it at the editor's desk, and went off into the night. The editor looked at the copy and it was utter gibberish. Lots of consonants. Remembering that George was a touch-typist, the editor took the piece, put his hands on the keyboard, but moved them one key to the side. The piece was perfect, except George had started one key overUnfurl
NotesWhat does the future hold?
It is a good question. I have actually been thinking a lot about that lately and wondering how to reinvent the art form that I embraced over a decade ago. I don’t really have an answer, except that it is somewhere in the past and in the reasons why I fell in love with blogging.Unfurl
NotesBefore I tell you this story, I should introduce Rachael Webster. The trouble is, I’m not sure how to do that. Was she a friend of mine? Sure. A great friend. We spent nine months together as tight as Siamese twins. But she wasn’t family, and I never really met her in person. I could say she didn’t exist, but that’s a copout: she obviously existed, and had a life, and friends, and a career, at least until her budget ran out and I had to write her out of this world.Unfurl
AI Slop, Suspicion, and Writing Back | Ben Congdon
Ursula K. Le Guin — Ursula on Writing: A Rant about "Techonolgy"
Found Decades Later
You Exist In The Long Context
Don't call it a Substack. - Anil Dash
Zibaldone - Wikipedia
Named Blogs - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Dead Labor, Dead Speech - by Nicholas Carr
BYOK is a simple new writing tool designed to help perpetual procrastinators | Wallpaper
BYOK - A Deep Dive Into Our Distraction-Free Writing Tool - YouTube
Strategist Index Cards
ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. | America Magazine
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web | The New Yorker
Tarot-Based Situation Generator ~ Clarity Flowers
novelWriter – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
Back To The Future written on Atari 8bit!? - Atari 8-Bit Computers - AtariAge Forums
Science Fiction Writer Robert J. Sawyer: WordStar Under Windows
The Builder’s High – Rands in Repose
WriteMonkey - Home
Single source publishing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
WordPress › Support » Share a Draft
Broken by Design: MongoDB Fault Tolerance :: Hacking, Distributed
John Resig - Secret Omens: Book Update
Rands In Repose: Please Learn to Write
The Markdown Mark by Dustin Curtis
Self-publish your in-progress book for great royalties on Leanpub
The end of ebook development – Baldur Bjarnason
Marked - smart tools for smart writers
PayPal Strong-Arms Indie Ebook Publishers Over Erotic Content | ZDNet
Introducing Playfic - Waxy.org
The Two-Fisted, One-Eyed Misadventures Of Sportswriting's Last Badass