82 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage. “Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street. But Holmes shook his head gravely. “Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.” “Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?” “They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.” “You horrify me!” “But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.
  2. Feb 2024
    1. two small flaws in the Dictionary’s compilation process

      It is incredibly difficult to plan in advance what to collect for any zettelkasten, even when its scope is tightly defined, like it would have been for the Oxford English Dictionary.

  3. Jan 2024
    1. what kind of character type might he fit?

      Krishna is the incarnation of Vishnu. He's supposed to be the embodiment of a godlike character and hold many powerful qualities. He has many different character types he portrays in this story and is extremely accomplished. He urges the reader in a way to think about reincarnation which is obviously a big part of his character. "The place of the infinite spirit" (line 851) Krishna fits a representation of love, duty, honor and self control. Learning what type of character type Krishna is this early on is important to keep in mind as the story is read. If the reader doesn't understand the true depth of his character the story may not be as powerful. He shows many attributes of a fully developed character that knows the true power of who they are. In HIndu culture, a character like Krishna is all powerful but also shows a variety of character traits that make him a very admirable character.

  4. Dec 2023
    1. Threads vs. processes

      Multiple threads let you run code in parallel, potentially on multiple CPUs. On Python, however, the global interpreter lock makes this parallelism harder to achieve.

      Multiple processes also let you run code in parallel—so what’s the difference between threads and processes?

      All the threads inside a single process share the same memory address space. If thread 1 in a process stores some memory at address 0x7f0cd1a88810, thread 2 can access the same memory at the same address. That means passing objects between threads is cheap: you just need to get the pointer to the memory address from one thread to the other. A memory address is 8 bytes: this is not a lot of data to move around.

      In contrast, processes do not share the same memory space. There are some shared memory facilities provided by the operating system, typically, and we’ll get to that later. But by default, no memory is shared. That means you can’t just share the address of your data across processes: you have to copy the data.

  5. Oct 2023
    1. Those who prefer research methods to be buried may find Ogilvie’s habit of making explicit her archival travails frustrating, but it’s fascinating watching her track the contributors down.

      Link to the hidden process discussed by Keith Thomas:

      Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.

    1. Are links still better than search in the age of semantic search? .t3_175a6tr._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionHi, I am a beginner Zettelkasten practitioner and also a software engineer, and I just read "Why You Should Set Links Manually and Not Rely on Search Alone" https://zettelkasten.de/posts/search-alone-is-not-enough/.Search capabilities have improved drastically since 2015 though. We can use text embeddings to find the most relevant other Zettels for any particular Zettel (see https://www.deepset.ai/blog/the-beginners-guide-to-text-embeddings)For example, even if you don't use the same keywords in your writing today as you did a year ago, you'll still find the relevant notes with semantic search, because semantic search handles synonyms with a breeze.Does this mean that with modern search tools, we can spend less time building "infrastructure" links, and rely more on (improved) search?Or am I wrong in my analysis here, does the advance in technology not matter?

      reply to u/dotinvoke at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/175a6tr/are_links_still_better_than_search_in_the_age_of/

      The value in the process is making a ratchet of ideas which is highly customized to building your own lines of thought or "associative trails" if you prefer Vannevar Bush's framing.

      If your idea worked, then one could "simply" rely on Google's database and a variety of associated tools to act as your zettelkasten—Bob's your uncle and you're done! In practice, you'll find that this doesn't work well. You can experiment, but I think you'll find that your own limited choices of links will work far better than the infinite number of adjacent possible links that a digital system may create on your behalf. If you're already fighting information overload, you don't want to add link overload to your list of problems.

      Put in a different light, it can be interesting to randomly flip a coin and go left on heads and right on tails to see where you might end up, particularly if you're unsure. But if you actively make your own choices, you're more likely to be happier with what you see along the way and where you end up.

  6. Jul 2023
    1. Success is about delaying gratification and building momentum. Be okay with a big goal taking time. Just work towards it, focus on the process, rather than the goal.

      Persistence and perseverance as well.

      Perfection is a big limiter. Don't obsess with finding the perfect path before starting. Build the map while going. Of course, starting with a rough idea or sketch for a map is always good.

  7. Jan 2023
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYj1jneBUQo

      Forrest Perry shows part of his note taking and idea development process in his hybrid digital-analog zettelkasten practice. He's read a book and written down some brief fleeting notes on an index card. He then chooses a few key ideas he wants to expand upon, finds the physical index card he's going to link his new idea to, then reviews the relevant portion of the book and writes a draft of a card in his notebook. Once satisfied with it, he transfers his draft from his notebook into Obsidian (ostensibly for search and as a digital back up) where he may also be refining the note further. Finally he writes a final draft of his "permanent" (my framing, not his) note on a physical index card, numbers it with respect to his earlier card, and then (presumably) installs it into his card collection.

      In comparison to my own practice, it seems like he's spending a lot of time after-the-fact in reviewing over the original material to write and rewrite an awful lot of material for what seems (at least to me—and perhaps some of it is as a result of lack of interest in the proximal topic), not much substance. For things like this that I've got more direct interest in, I'll usually have a more direct (written) conversation with the text and work out more of the details while reading directly. This saves me from re-contextualizing the author's original words and arguments while I'm making my arguments and writing against the substrate of the author's thoughts. Putting this work in up front is often more productive at least for areas of direct interest. I would suspect that in Perry's case, he was generally interested in the book, but it doesn't impinge on his immediate areas of research and he only got three or four solid ideas out of it as opposed to a dozen or so.

      The level of one's conversation with the text will obviously depend on their interest and goals, a topic which is relatively well laid out by Adler & Van Doren (1940).

  8. Dec 2022
    1. At its most tame, Ancient Apocalypse simply reinforces a deeply conservative understanding of human history. Conservative, yes, because despite Hancock’s claim to challenge every orthodoxy going, his ideas—like those of Ignatius Loyola Donnelly, Erich von Däniken, and other so-called “pseudo-archaeologists”—rest on a baseline assumption that technology should always be advancing in linear fashion, from primitive simplicity to modern complexity.

      There is a broad, conservative baseline assumption within much of archaeology that technology always proceeds in a linear fashion from primitive simplicity to modern complexity.

      Archaeologists and historians need to watch carefully for this cognitive bias.

  9. Nov 2022
    1. Contents 1 Overview 2 Reasons for failure 2.1 Overconfidence and complacency 2.1.1 Natural tendency 2.1.2 The illusion of control 2.1.3 Anchoring 2.1.4 Competitor neglect 2.1.5 Organisational pressure 2.1.6 Machiavelli factor 2.2 Dogma, ritual and specialisation 2.2.1 Frames become blinders 2.2.2 Processes become routines 2.2.3 Resources become millstones 2.2.4 Relationships become shackles 2.2.5 Values becomes dogmas 3 The paradox of information systems 3.1 The irrationality of rationality 3.2 How computers can be destructive 3.3 Recommendations for practice 4 Case studies 4.1 Fresh & Easy 4.2 Firestone Tire and Rubber Company 4.3 Laura Ashley 4.4 Xerox 5 See also 6 References

      Wiki table of contents of the Icarus paradox

    1. Inevitably, I read and highlight more articles than I have time to fully process in Obsidian. There are currently 483 files in the Readwise/Articles folder and 527 files marked as needing to be processed. I have, depending on how you count, between 3 and 5 jobs right now. I am not going to neatly format all of those files. I am going to focus on the important ones, when I have time.

      I suspect that this example of Eleanor Konik's is incredibly common among note takers. They may have vast repositories of collected material which they can reference or use, but typically don't.

      In digital contexts it's probably much more common that one will have a larger commonplace book-style collection of notes (either in folders or with tags), and a smaller subsection of more highly processed notes (a la Luhmann's practice perhaps) which are more tightly worked and interlinked.

      To a great extent this mirrors much of my own practice as well.

    1. Unfortunately most init systems don't do this correctly within Docker since they're built for hardware shutdowns instead. This causes processes to be hard killed with SIGKILL, which doesn't give them a chance to correctly deinitialize things.
    2. According to the Unix process model, the init process -- PID 1 -- inherits all orphaned child processes and must reap them. Most Docker containers do not have an init process that does this correctly. As a result, their containers become filled with zombie processes over time.
    1. When a process loses its parent, init becomes its new parent. init periodically executes the wait system call to reap any zombies with init as parent.
    2. Zombie processes should not be confused with orphan processes: an orphan process is a process that is still executing, but whose parent has died. When the parent dies, the orphaned child process is adopted by init (process ID 1). When orphan processes die, they do not remain as zombie processes; instead, they are waited on by init.
    3. The result is that a process that is both a zombie and an orphan will be reaped automatically.
    4. The term zombie process derives from the common definition of zombie — an undead person. In the term's metaphor, the child process has "died" but has not yet been "reaped". Also, unlike normal processes, the kill command has no effect on a zombie process.
    5. This occurs for the child processes, where the entry is still needed to allow the parent process to read its child's exit status: once the exit status is read via the wait system call, the zombie's entry is removed from the process table and it is said to be "reaped".
    1. When a zombie is created (i.e. which happens when its parent exits, and therefore all chances of it ever being waited by it are gone), it is reparent to init, which is expected to reap it (which means calling wait on it).
    2. In other words, someone has to clean up after "irresponsible" parents that leave their children un-wait'ed, and that's PID 1's job.
    3. Have lost their parent (i.e. their parent exited as well), which means they'll never be waited on by their parent.

      He's supposedly defining a zombie process, but here ends up defining an orphan process, conflating the two.

    4. Now, unlike other processes, PID 1 has a unique responsibility, which is to reap zombie processes.
    1. A low-level approach is to fork twice, running the desired process in the grandchild, and immediately terminating the child. The grandchild process is now orphaned, and is not adopted by its grandparent, but rather by init.
    2. The process group mechanism in most Unix-like operating systems can be used to help protect against accidental orphaning, where in coordination with the user's shell will try to terminate all the child processes with the "hangup" signal (SIGHUP), rather than letting them continue to run as orphans.
    3. In a Unix-like operating system any orphaned process will be immediately adopted by an implementation-defined system process: the kernel sets the parent to this process
    4. Even though technically the process has a system process as its parent, it is still called an orphan process since the process that originally created it no longer exists.
    1. Let's look at a concrete example. Suppose that your container contains a web server that runs a CGI script that's written in bash. The CGI script calls grep. Then the web server decides that the CGI script is taking too long and kills the script, but grep is not affected and keeps running. When grep finishes, it becomes a zombie and is adopted by the PID 1 (the web server). The web server doesn't know about grep, so it doesn't reap it, and the grep zombie stays in the system.
  10. Oct 2022
    1. Ryan Holiday does touch on all parts of his writing process, but the majority of the video is devoted to the sorts of easier bikeshedding ideas that people are too familiar with (editing, proofreading, title choice, book cover choice). Hidden here is the process of researching, writing, notes, and actual organizing process which are the much harder pieces for the majority of writers. Hiding it does a massive disservice to those watching it for the most essential advice they're looking for.

  11. Sep 2022
    1. In fact, every timeone combines and recordsfacts in accordance withestablished logical process-es, the creative aspect ofthinking is concerned onlywith the selection of thedata and the process to beemployed, and the manip-ulation thereafter is repeti-tive in nature and hence afit matter to be relegatedto the machines

      I am not sure if I agree with this statement, since for every discipline, the details of manipulating the data, refining, and creatively thinking may be vastly different. Can one really confidently declare that after the selection of data, the manner of thinking and manipulation of specific data can be generalized?

  12. Jul 2022
    1. Worth taking a look at the various affordances of folders vs. links vs. tags.

      Some of these functionalities may be highly dependent on the particular tool in question and what affordances the tool allows for these ideas.

      Has anyone done this comprehensively across a number of tools other than threads in fora like reddit, zettelkasten.de, etc.?

      https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/vofakc/folders_vs_links_vs_tags/

  13. Jun 2022
    1. We’ve been taught that it’s important to work “with the end inmind.” We are told that it is our responsibility to deliver outcomes,whether that is a finished product on store shelves, a speechdelivered at an event, or a published technical document.

      Example of someone else saying this...

      We focus too much on the achievement and the end goal and the work and process doesn't receive its due.

  14. May 2022
    1. “This technique alsoexplains why I don’t think at all linearly and have trouble finding the right sequence ofchapters when writing a book, because indeed every chapter must reappear in everyother.”22
      1. Luhmann, Archimedes und wir , 145.

      Luhmann indicated that his note taking system made it difficult for him to be a linear thinker. Instead he felt that each chapter he wrote "must reappear in every other."

      This seems quite similar to Carl Linnaeus' work which he regularly recycled into future works.

    1. To produce meaningful work, and then forget about it, so you can move on to another and hopefully greater act of linear will.

      This completely loses the fact that two different areas of work can be used fruitfully in combinatorically creative ways to expand insight and knowledge. While you can loosely forget what is in your notes, the fact that they exist and are interlinked helps you resurface and reuse them. If you're not reusing and constantly linking them, then you're failing.

  15. Apr 2022
    1. in reality pretty much everyone out there has some messiness in their graph and that's okay

      Newcomers to note taking practice using tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, et al. often see very nice and clean-cut toy examples of note collections which are impeccably linked and maintained. This may also be the case for those who publish their notes (or portions thereof) in public settings on the web. In reality, this sort of rigidness and beautifully manicured practice almost never happens. There are varying levels of messiness in actual people's notes. Beginners should be aware of this and not hold themselves to too high a standard and use this as an excuse not to practice and get their work done.

    1. lack of common learning goals among the student

    2. Institutions may supply learning environments that facilitate social interaction and collaboration and assure effective support to students with technological difficulties. Technological difficulties can cause student frustration as well as communication problems, which hamper collaborative processes such as explanations, sharing answers, and negotiation (Ragoonaden & Bordeleau, 2000).

    1. https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1517207721866452992

      It took me a long time (probably more than 7-8 years of working in the industry) to get somewhat decent at capturing notes in meetings.<br><br>How can one get better at note taking? What has worked well for you? What do good note takers do particularly well?

      — Shreyas Doshi (@shreyas) April 21, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      This question and the responses are an interesting snapshot of note taking practices, particularly for work related meetings.

  16. Mar 2022
    1. nicholas lerman is a sample of one 01:09:54 and if the zerocarton is a tool for thinking there are all these other thinkers out there who are thinking um and do we know how they're thinking how their 01:10:07 how you know what note systems are they using i'd like to i'd like to be able to place lerman yeah amongst all these others and and sort of in the zerocast and 01:10:23 see what others are doing as well and yeah i mean if there was one project i would have loved to do is going around 01:10:36 asking everyone i whose work i admire how do you do it how do you do it exactly what do you do in the morning how do you sit down how do you digest the books you're reading 01:10:48 um i was obsessed with the idea and it's just because i'm too shy to follow up on that

      Some discussion of doing research on zettelkasten methods and workflows.


      What do note taking methods and processes look like for individual people?


      What questions would one ask for this sort of research in an interview setting (compared to how one would look at extant physical examples in document-based research)? #openquestions


      Link this to the work of Earle Havens on commonplace books through portions of history.

  17. Feb 2022
    1. I used to use Roam for lots of things: a daily diary, book notes, keeping track of lists like my todo list, and taking meeting notes.Today, this is my stack:Daily Diary / paper notebookBook Notes / split between Roam and MuseTo-do List / ThingsMeeting Notes / Apple Notes

      An example of a user who is (no longer) centralizing everything into one place. Also an example of a person overloading their use of note taking tool as a melting pot of data. Do they have a mental map of how to separate the pieces to get the value out of their system?

      It seems like they want it to "just work" without any conception of what this looks like

    2. After some time though, reality started to sink in. ‘I am not really going back through all of these notes as often as I thought I would.’

      Example of someone not using the system as it may have been intended. Visiting one's notes on a somewhat frequent basis should be part of one's regular practice.

      If you're not doing anything with what you read, why are you reading it? Similarly, if you're not doing anything with your notes, why bother taking them?

      Naturally, creating notes certainly has a valuable use for learning, but to get the most out of them revisiting and linking them has other value, based on one's need.

      Missing in this article is a specific use case for why the writer is taking notes at all.

    1. There is one reliable sign if you managedto structure your workflow according to the fact that writing is not alinear process, but a circular one: the problem of finding a topic isreplaced by the problem of having too many topics to write about.

      Writing is a circular generative process and not a finite, linear one.

    1. Informal observations include direct observations of our own and others’ behavior as well as secondhand observations from non-scientific sources such as newspapers, books, blogs, and so on. For example, you might notice that you always seem to be in the slowest moving line at the grocery store. Could it be that most people think the same thing? Or you might read in a local newspaper about people donating money and food to a local family whose house has burned down and begin to wonder about who makes such donations and why. Some of the most famous research in psychology has been inspired by informal observations.

      Tenicia Daniels: This is interesting. Informal observations have guided me in curiosity and lead to exploration in random fields of interest. Like signing up to run the 2017NYC marathon. Therefore, connecting research inspiration with day-to-day life decision making, seems to resemble the same thinking.

  18. Jan 2022
    1. A Mental Squeeze Point is when your unsorted knowledge becomes so messy it overwhelms and discourages you. Either you are equipped with frameworks to overcome the squeeze point, or you are discouraged and possibly abandon your project.

      Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/BuMcAnr4EeyxO-PwNBfPrg (Dan Allosso's analogy about the Kuiper Belt)

  19. Nov 2021
    1. ot its deepestlevelW whatever the mediumW note taking involves variations on and comXbinations of a few basic maneuversW which w propose to identify as the fourSsh storingW sortingW summarizingW and selectin

      Ann M. Blair categorizes four variations of note taking which she calls the four Ss:

      • storing
      • sorting
      • summarizing
      • selecting

      (In a modern context, one might also expand this to a fifth and include sharing.)

  20. Sep 2021
    1. Run the Rails server (bin/rails s) and the Webpack Dev Server (bin/webpack-dev-server) via your preferred method. Two terminal tabs will work or create a Procfile and run via overmind or foreman.
  21. Jul 2021
    1. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.

      This underlies the reason why the acceleration of the industrial revolution has applied to so many areas, but doesn't apply to the acceleration of learning.

      Learning is a linear process.

    1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man who encouraged his friend Thoreau to start a journal and the man who had the most success with the journal > lecture > essay > book method, kept elaborate notebooks just for indexing his other notebooks.
  22. Jun 2021
    1. There is one very important reason for enabling job control to be useful inside scripts: the side-effect it has of placing background processes in their own process groups. This makes it much, much easier to send signels to them and their children with one simple command: kill -<signal> -$pgid. All other ways of dealing with signaling entire trees of processes either involve elaborate (sometimes even recursive) functions, which are often bugnests, or risk killing the parent in the process (no pun intended).
    1. Process based parallelisation is simpler than thread based due to well, the GIL on MRI rubies and lack of 100% thread safety within the other gems. (I'm fairly certain for example that there are threaded bugs lurking within the mocks code).
    1. Parallel testing in this implementation utilizes forking processes over threads. The reason we (tenderlove and eileencodes) chose forking processes over threads is forking will be faster with single databases, which most applications will use locally. Using threads is beneficial when tests are IO bound but the majority of tests are not IO bound.
  23. Feb 2021
    1. The rsync and sleep commands (the sleep is just an example) are run through exec to prevent the creation of zombie processes if I kill the parent script while they're running, and each potentially-long-running command is wrapped in its own subshell so that when exec finishes, it won't terminate the whole script.
  24. Dec 2020
  25. Aug 2020
    1. It’s not that Slack is too distracting and killing individual productivity. It’s that your company’s processes are so dysfunctional you need Slack to be distracting and killing individual productivity.

      Kwok points out that Slack's reputation for being a productivity killer doesn't get at the root of the issue. He argues that resorting to Slack is a symptom of the underlying cause: dysfunctional business processes.

  26. Jun 2020
  27. May 2020
    1. If any Firefox engineers are reading this, please don't try to subvert the above workaround, it requires multiple steps and administrator rights to set up, and we must all agree that it is of little sense for Firefox to try defending against unwanted programs or malware that has root access on the device.
  28. Apr 2020
  29. Sep 2019
    1. scientists are uncovering and debating an increasing array of other evolutionary processes at work in bacteria, some of which are suspiciously Lamarckian in character4–6
  30. Mar 2019
    1. A composite process, remember, is organized from both human processes and computer processes

      Human-system/Tool-system fine-grained intersections and compositionalities. There are UX and UI levels here. There are likely further levels having to do with intentionalities of (semi-) autonomous Tool Systems, how they are to be guided by Human intentionalities, and - most importantly - how humans fully ascertain and guide their own intentionalities.

  31. Jan 2019
    1. osthumanism as an attempt to engage humans asdistributed processes rather than as discrete entities. In

      just like a distributed computer system uses more than one computer to run an application, this is the notion that the idea of "human" is social/communal, and does not exist on the individual level.

  32. Sep 2018
    1. conditional distribution for individual components can be constructed

      So the conditional distribution is conditioned on other components?

    1. calculation once again involves inverting a NxN matrix as in the kernel space representation of regression

      this is why we use MCMC or other distribution sampling technique instead

    2. in equation B for the marginal of a gaussian, only the covariance of the block of the matrix involving the unmarginalized dimensions matters! Thus “if you ask only for the properties of the function (you are fitting to the data) at a finite number of points, then inference in the Gaussian process will give you the same answer if you ignore the infinitely many other points, as if you would have taken them all into account!”(Rasmunnsen)

      key insight into Gaussian processes

  33. May 2018
  34. Jan 2018
    1. The frequent assessment of the use of standardized leading practices and processes

      How can I monitor and evaluate the use of our project management processes and practices for better project performance?