Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)I read it just after it came out, but Jared Diamond’s book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? has some good material on this topic as well. His work is more toward topics like restorative justice and judicial topics as well as cultural and social pieces we cou…
Steve Yegge recently wrote about how “[b]ackwards compatibility keeps systems alive and relevant for decades” and mentions Emacs as a prime example.
He also has a great tl;dr of Emacs:
GNU Emacs […] is a sort of hybrid between Windows Notepad, a monolithic-kernel operating system, and the International Space Station. It’s a bit tricky to explain, but in a nutshell, Emacs is a platform written in 1976 (yes, almost half a century ago) for writing software to make you more productive, masquerading as a text editor.
BSAG recently wrote about how easy it is to customise Emacs for your own needs:
One of the delightful and surprising things about Emacs, as you get to know it better, is the depth of customisation which is available. Emacs can be a completely different editor for different people and for different purposes. Being able to tweak things on the fly and try them out before you commit to them, or even as a temporary fix to solve the particular problem you have right now, is empowering.
Emacs is not perfect, and the barrier to entry is for sure a problem (there’s an epic thread on the org-roam Discourse discussing that). But it’s got some amazing qualities.
I guess that article is more focused on how and why to not break links to things that you want to stay available, which is fair enough.
But I’m thinking more of things that you may wish to not be permanent. It’s not really my desire and I feel not my responsibility to make my past thoughts permanently accessible by anyone else. If I want to change them and forget them, I should be able to. I suppose you could keep the URI in place, but let people know that you’ve pulled that bit of info out of the public sphere.
Why share it at all online then? Many reasons. For learning, evolving dialogue and discussion, finding people with similar ideas. But not per se as a permanent record.
Seen via Jacky – the anti-capitalist software license.
Seems very similar to the Peer Production License.
Both examples of copyfarleft.
(My blog is WordPress but is not SemPress, it’s my own theme – https://gitlab.com/ngm/doublescores)
One nice way to get comments on a static site is webmentions – https://indieweb.org/Webmention
Ton wrote recently about how his note-taking system is helping him formulate new ideas and create articles. It gave me pause to reflect on my own note-taking system, and I realised it hasn’t as of yet led to me writing any articles.
First reflection: I’m not actually too bothered by that, right now. It is not really currently a firm goal of mine to write articles. I don’t have a thesis that I have a burning desire to push, and I don’t have a target of writing for the sake of it, either. So that is most likely the biggest reason. (That said, why am I taking notes if I don’t plan to do anything with them…?) An action point: reflect if regular article writing is a goal.
There’s some practical things I could do, if I did want to write more long-form.
I’m currently falling in to the collector’s fallacy a little bit, I think. Perhaps just thinking about my wiki as a commonplace book, as I sort of do, points me in that direction.
A tiny adjustment I have started to make, is the naming of my notes. Prefer note titles with complete phrases to sharpen claims. I’ve noticed that this does make me think more about notions, as Ton called them, not just copied notes.
I could also try to aim for a more formal knowledge cycle (research, read, take note, write). I kind of do this anyway, but it’s a little ad-hoc.
Lastly, I’d like to revisit “blogchains“. I think I’m more motivated to write something more considered and longer when in response to reading something from a friend. It would be fun to start some open chains.
Both those effects, new things rising because of writing about existing ones, and spending time thinking to be able to create, are most welcome ones.
Great to hear! It’s nice to hear about your note notion-taking system leading to a long-form post. I haven’t written a very long post from my notes yet – I think I’ll have a reflect as to why that is.