I'm interested in note-taking / improving the way we learn for the following reasons:
- Having a trace of what I've learned that I can go back to. I consume loads of content (books, articles, etc...) and want to be able to use their insights in my future discoveries and general creative process. Being able to go through my ideas in my notes helps with this.
- that point links back to the idea of optimizing for discovery. I find that I can find much better ideas when I have a nuanced perspective and can oppose different content, so having an organized knowledge base allows me to link and discover new hierarchies in my thinking to enhance it. It's also why I'm building tools to automate connections between notes with AI, and it's why my knowledge base is heavily integrated with content I consume online, for example this post that I can now search in my knowledge.
- I think there's untapped value in sharing notes and tidbits of knowledge with other people. Blog posts take more time and have different aims than notes, but notes are also valuable / can be useful for others. My public wiki is at https://knowledge.uzpg.me
Cool! I really think this could be huge. Finding connections between ideas is basically the genesis of innovation. Would be very interested to see/learn about your approach.
Exhalation and Stories of your life and others by Ted Chaing. These collections of short scifi stories are stunning, and particularly the stories Exhalation and Story of your Life. They combine detailed technical descriptions of the science fiction aspects with raw emotional beauty. The movie Arrival is based on Story of your life.
La Peau de Chagrin (The Wild Ass's Skin) - Balzac. Beautifully written novel about desire and health, with verbose descriptions that I personally loved. Some nice quotes here [0]
Ubik by Philip K. Dick - Pretty mindbending and interesting twist on the whole "(distorted) perception of reality (what even is reality?)" theme. (9/10) [scifi]
I do this too using my remarkable (reader tablet )and then scripts that export highlights / notes which I then index for as plaintext - it makes this process much more seamless.
I use https://github.com/lucasrla/remarks, which OCRs (text recognition) your highlights to extract what exactly was highlighted, and also outputs screenshots of all pages on which I wrote notes.
This way I can go through my annotations sequentially, save highlights / their main ideas, and reformulate my notes into plaintext a bit more clearly.
This is just subjective, but I use it to read many books and enjoy it. I can scribble / highlight / notetake very easily and find the whole experience quite convenient.
Oh, I was just reading reviews (probably on reddit?), and that seemed to be a consistent opinion. It looks like a really cool device, but I've heard it's a little one-dimensional.
Edit: Looks like your link to the sibling comment is for extracting annotations from pdf. Are most of the books you're reading on remarkable in pdf format instead of epub?
I think a lot of this is true not only for books, but also for articles.
I've started trying to be more selective with the online content I choose to spend my time on, and then conserve takeaways from the articles I read (like this one).
Of course sometimes you just want entertainment, in which case this isn't worthwile.
This is cool! Similar to one of the goals I'm trying to accomplish with Archivy (https://archivy.github.io) with the broader goal of not just storing your digital presence but also acting as a personal knowledge base.
- Having a trace of what I've learned that I can go back to. I consume loads of content (books, articles, etc...) and want to be able to use their insights in my future discoveries and general creative process. Being able to go through my ideas in my notes helps with this.
- that point links back to the idea of optimizing for discovery. I find that I can find much better ideas when I have a nuanced perspective and can oppose different content, so having an organized knowledge base allows me to link and discover new hierarchies in my thinking to enhance it. It's also why I'm building tools to automate connections between notes with AI, and it's why my knowledge base is heavily integrated with content I consume online, for example this post that I can now search in my knowledge.
- I think there's untapped value in sharing notes and tidbits of knowledge with other people. Blog posts take more time and have different aims than notes, but notes are also valuable / can be useful for others. My public wiki is at https://knowledge.uzpg.me
- having a time-logged track of what I've been learning: I like tracking my goals / progression (for eg yearly reviews https://www.uzpg.me/general/2022/01/01/a-year-in-review-v2.h...) and going through my knowledge base helps with this