Andy Matuschak

I use the term “active” pretty loosely but: Andy is great https://notes.andymatuschak.org Sinclair is very interesting for applying functional programming to JavaScript/Typescript https://jrsinclair.com/web-development/

Sparkle is amazing. For years and years, I thought it was actually part of the OS, as almost every app I had used it. That's how ubiquitous it is on the Mac! Edit: Very interesting! The guy behind Sparkle (Andy Matuschak) is actually an Apple employee, working on UIKit! http://andymatuschak.org/ > By day, I work on UIKit to help other people make things.

I've been investing in taking notes to enable better understanding of the material. I tend to follow Andy Matuchak's philosophy on note taking (https://notes.andymatuschak.org). But, I've only really started taking notes, so grain of salt about this. Some thoughts and responses to what you've said: 1. I try to make sure anything I enter into my notes are intended to last, filtering/processing is a key step to that. This often means I won't enter notes unless they can contribute to my understanding of some lasting higher level concept. For example, I don't have any notes on tech library X, Y, Z. But I do have notes on concepts, like "Required accidental complexity should be avoided or separated" and if a library Z has a unique way of doing so, I may incorporate my understanding of the strategy to further my understanding of the concept. 2. My goal is less to simply collect links/articles, it's to process and assimilate. I write everything in my own words to clarify my understanding. I link it to other topics in my notes to help build stronger associations, which helps me ground and recall the knowledge. I'm also exploring whether I want to put some spaced repetition in with my notes to help keep pieces of information fresh. 3. I treat my notes as separate from my todo lists. The extra bit that these tools give you is the linking and clustering of information. I find the associations useful for encouraging identification/contextualization of where that knowledge sits in my…

> This article is my response to Andy Matuschak’s article Why books don’t work (https://andymatuschak.org/books/). If you haven’t please read it first. However, if you want you can read this article now. I believe the following content should still make sense.

Haha, I'm actually working on that too! Currently experimenting with a graph based editor. Also, you might like The Fieldstone Method (Weinberg). PS. Andy Matuschak's notes: http://notes.andymatuschak.org have some good tips on a similar subject. (My "digital garden" is more of a choose your own adventure book, I'm not married to a single methodology, but I appreciate much of their work)

FTA: Another widespread source of influence was IBM Common User Access from 1987, which among other things introduced […] the ellipsis ("...") to indicate menu choices that opened a dialog window. I think that the Mac, possibly even the Lisa had that before the CUA. https://andymatuschak.org/files/papers/Apple%20Human%20Interface%20Gui… page 23: “A dialog box appears whenever the user chooses a menu item that is followed, in the menus itself, by an ellipsis (…)”

I very highly recommend a blog post by this same author: [How to write good prompts](https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/). This post made spaced repetition click for me.

Those two links are fantastic. In addition to those two I’d add: http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

This reminds me of Andy Matuschak's notes website [0]. I dig this view for much better understanding. [0]: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/

Great idea. I also see inspiration from Andy Matuschak's notes [0], of which I'm a bit fan [0] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zB74H9CuWrosEuqve7jZyCo?stackedNotes=z…

Agree, its painful to browse and read. Feels almost intentionally obtuse. They'd be much better off with the stacked pages style of Andy M [1] and obsidian publish [2] [1] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/ [2] https://obsidian.md/publish

I think everyone working in this space (i.e spaced repetition learning, tools for thought etc) should read Andy Matuschak (https://andymatuschak.org/). There is a lot to learn from his work.

Writing effective cards is more of an art than a science, I've found—and seems to work best when you're the one writing the cards for yourself. A good resource for those interested in learning the craft is "How to write good prompts" by Andy Matuschak: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ However, he's also shown that cards can be written for a general audience with careful thought, see his & Michael Nielsen's work on http://quantum.country. I'll be curious to see how python.cards goes!

Definitely a biased opinion, but I don't mind my collection of notes. As a sample: https://simple.industries/notes/counting.html I've been slowly hacking at a system that lets me jot things down with markdown and latex in Obsidian, then render in a mostly clean and lightweight form. The build pipeline is just a bash script and pandoc to keep tooling as thin as possible too. I hope to have time to expose the underlying graph in yet to be defined way, but have neither the time or amount of content to warrant that yet. A source of inspiration and admiration for that is definitely https://notes.andymatuschak.org/.

A small tweak would be to use a background color on the render-container similar to Andy Matuschak's site — or a border/shadow on the side of each pane https://notes.andymatuschak.org Edit: Deploying a change to Publish sites that should make the scroll area clearer :)

1. Have you read Andy Matuschak's guide to prompt writing? Your post reminded me of it. https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ 2. Do you have any sort of guide or principles for note-taking? I'm always debating whether or not it's worth taking notes, and when I do take notes I'm debating what the best way to do it is. (Hierarchal/bulleted information like in your post, or summarizing things in paragraphs, or what) A lot of times it's unclear to me what information is worth writing and it frustrates me.

You may be interested in Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen's work on mnemonic media. - https://andymatuschak.org/ - https://withorbit.com/ - https://numinous.productions/ttft/

Creating your own deck is the way to go. Other people's decks never quite clicked for me the same way a self made deck does. A huge part of it is going through the material and identifying the pieces of knowledge that you actually want/need to retain. Andy Matushchak's prompt guide [0] linked below is amazing. Supermemo's 20 rules for formulating knowledge [1] is great too, Wozniak is the one that invented SRS. [0] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ [1] https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulating-knowledg…

One of his references seems to have gone under and I want to point it out because I want other people to also suffer from reading every single linked note, all of which are great sources for ideas: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z36iMKLe4CDAXdtLSJD4Z6qPPFUS8ZXymUk3i Sorry.

I've integrated spaced repetition quite effectively into my daily life and I've found that it's incredibly important to learn how to write good prompts. The naive approach definitely leads to rote learning of factual trivia, but proper prompts can definitely foster curiosity and understanding. In fact it's often times the process of creating new prompts that reveal a gap in my understanding. This Article from Andy Matuschak is a very thorough introduction to the art of prompt writing: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ Of course it doesn't mean that practical experience is obsolete, quite the opposite. But spaced repetition works great in conjunction with practice. I'd go so far that it's more effective to do both, than just practical experience.

Andy Matuschak's thinking / independent research work here is very relevant: - https://andymatuschak.org/ - https://www.patreon.com/posts/71081197 - Literally a related quantum computing / physics example (with Michael Nielsen): https://quantum.country/

There's more of Andy's (and Michael's) work at https://andymatuschak.org/ . Looks very interesting!

You can't see mine, they're private. But, you can check out nikitavoloboev's excellent public notes at https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge Or maybe Andy M's at https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes And while you're digging, be sure to check out Derek's Sivers post: https://sive.rs/plaintext

Not parent but here's some, downloadable from the built-in plugin store: - Advanced Tables: for automatic formatting and table operations of markdown tables - Dynamic Table of Contents: allows you to include a codeblock that automatically renders a table of contents from headers of some level - Natural language dates: insert dates in your preferred format using language like 'next Friday' or 'first Monday of June' - Quick latex for Obsidian: autoformat and autocomplete common latex commands (e.g. 'a/b' becomes '\frac {b} {a}' - Tag Wrangler: rename, merge, toggle and search tags easily - Sliding Panes: changes notes to panes that can be stacked similar to the ui of Andy Matushchak's notes [0] (check it out, it's rather neat) [0] https://notes.andymatuschak.org

EDIT: Paste this hacky snippet into your browser's console to save all of the links into your clipboard: (() => { let result = [...document.querySelectorAll('td a')] .map((link) => link && !link.href.includes('ycombinator') && !link.href.includes('javascript:void') ? link.href : '' ) .filter(Boolean); result = [...new Set(result)]; result.sort(); copy(result.join('\n\n')); })(); Just to help, here's a compiled-list of all of the links shared here so…

Great work, thank you. Have you considered Obsidian, and Obsidian publish, as a medium? Take a look at Andy Matuschak's site as one example, there are many variants out there too https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

> you have to create things worth writing about Sure, but how about you intertwine the process of creating things and writing about them? I don't remember the exact reference but I remember reading an article by someone who uses something like a Zettelkasten to write down his thoughts and insights in small digestable pieces and then creates an outline for an article / a book once a pattern of thought emerges and he feels ready. I really liked this approach as you don't need to filter yourself in your daily writing practice – no one will read your notes, so it's okay if they're not perfect or relevant to millions of people or whatever. EDIT: Found the reference! It wasn't Zettelkasten but Evergreen note-taking (though the author does reference Zettelkasten): https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3PBVkZ2SvsAgFXkjHsycBeyS6Cw1QXf7kcD8

From personal experience, highly recommend this methodology. Note taking was always short-term helpful for me, but I found a step change in retention, etc.. by reliably reviewing new knowledge via spaced repetition. Another good article about notes as flashcards: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ (written by a collaborator of your linked article). Also, agree re. Roam!

There's basically just two things you need to know: 1. Keep your notes short. I do 10 sentences max. 2. Link them as much as possible. Find a program that does that (Obsidian, Roam, Foam, etc). It truly is a wonderful feeling when you do those two things many, many times. Instead of a YouTube rabbit hole, I can fall down a rabbit hole of my own thoughts just by clicking on a random note, following the links, and re-discovering some of my thoughts from months or years ago. Unique IDs are easy. For example, Unix timestamp or just YYYYMMDDHHMMSS. Here's a commonly shared public database to get you hooked: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

From the description, this is more about personal wikis or notebooks. Individual pages may get edited again and again, and nothing is necessarily in a "polished for publication" state. In exploring new notebook apps -- like Notion, which allows you to publish pages and subpages -- I've found numerous examples of people having basically their own notebooks open on the web, such as https://notes.andymatuschak.org/