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65 points dennisy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source

Each day I (and I assume most knowledge workers, devs, creatives) read many articles, papers, code snippets, AI responses, discord messages etc.

At the end of the day some of this information is most likely lodged in your brain and the digital version can be discarded. However some of it should be retained manually in some system - or at least I feel it should.

What approaches do people use to consolidate and store this information to allow all tabs etc to be closed for the next work day?

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ssivark ◴[] No.43976662[source]
Currently I use Obsidian to make note of a few key things, but what I'm more excited about is that the way tech is evolving is going to allow us much more expansive solutions for personal knowledge-bases. Eg: See what Perkeep tried to do.

Here's an idea: We should be able to record the full experience stream (or just the laptop screen, let's say) for a person -- digitize it suitably (eg. pull out all the text, or tokenize it with a VLM, etc), attach some metadata, and have the whole database ready for a person to query / play with, using powerful LLMs.

To the extent that you can store everything and perform effective recall/search, it obviates the need to carefully "pre-process" bits by noting them down in the right file, tagging them appropriately, adding metadata, etc. All of which should make for a much nicer UX.

Given the Jevons' paradox though -- I wouldn't be surprised if our experience stream becomes so dense/rich that storing everything and querying from it eventually becomes prohibitively expensive. We would then have to construct pre-processing rules to prune the stream, and amortize the cost of certain deductions by performing them at data ingestion time instead of repeating it for each query. It's all just the basic principles of system design at the end of the day, and how systems need to be rearranged as various component capabilities (and user needs) scale.

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1. dennisy ◴[] No.43976934[source]
I get why this may seem attractive, but my view is that we need the manual step there as a way to force our brains to remember things.

What you suggest is a nice UC for sure, but not sure it will make any of us smarter in the long run.