
Pensieve: An intelligent repository for the million things in your head - renuka
http://www.pensieve.ai/
======
ColinWright
Wonderful product! I use it all the time!

Oh ... vapourware ...

How I _hate_ these posts that pretend that this thing exists and is wonderful
and tells you everything it can do and how it will solve all your problems,
and only then tells you to sign up so you can get told when the miracle
occurs.

Closed. Good luck, hope it works out for you.

~~~
renuka
Hi Colin, I'm sorry to hear you feel that way. We're working hard to make
Pensieve a reality, but we need to know that we're building the right thing.
If you really are excited by the potential of an idea like this, we'd love to
hear from you about how you would use it and what features it would need to be
most valuable for you.

~~~
ColinWright
Where will the data live? If it's outside my servers I can't use it.

How will it decide what's important? We have _so_ many things that automated
systems have declared unimportant and yet which turn out to be critical.

Currently commercial spam systems are running at around a 10% false positive
rate. Quite simply, we can't rely on them. Why would your system be any
different about deciding what's important and what isn't? Critical information
is often not recognised as such until significantly after the fact, and very
well may be in a throw-away comment.

So we have a system that crawls our email archives, chat logs, and other data
sources, and uses an automated word2vec-like and tf–idf system to find
similarities. Then we have a browser that makes the database look like a wiki
- you just click on links till you find what you want, usually just one or two
clicks away.

But I have _no_ idea what you're building. The description is of something
magical that will solve all your problems, but it doesn't say anything about
what it actually does. The web site is slick, but it makes it look like you
have something ready to go. Then the rug is pulled out from under me and it's
clear that while you might have something in development, you don't have a
product.

Why not be honest? Say up front you're working on this and offer decent
inducements to get quality feedback on people's concerns, what they use, what
their current system gets right, their pain-points, and what they'd like to be
able to do but currently can't.

This may be unjust, but the site feels dishonest. I know it's the current
trend popularised by some book or other to pretend to have a product and see
how many bites you get in order to gauge your potential market, but it puts me
completely off. I now don't feel like I can trust you.

To address your actual questions:

Would I use it? No idea - you haven't told me why I would. What features would
be valuable? No idea, I don't know what it might be able to do.

What do I want? A machine into which I type a vague query, it asks for
clarifications, then gives me a definitive answer, or a definitive "That's not
in my records."

So there you are, 400 words, 10 minutes of my time. Even though I feel cheated
by your web site I hope you find that useful, and wish you the best of luck.

~~~
renuka
Really appreciate you taking the time to write this down. To be fair, we found
someone who thinks about this problem as much as we do. So maybe the books
weren't wrong after all ;) It sounds like you've built something inhouse and
are using it. Would you be open to us emailing you to learn more about it?

~~~
ColinWright
Feel free to email me and I'll tell you what I can, but my time is _severely_
limited, and my colleagues are totally paranoid about talking about _anything_
that's in-house.

But you can always ask.

------
featherverse
This is a neat idea but unless I can operate my own private version then it's
not really useful.

I've got a private wiki that provides essentially the same function. It's not
as convenient to add new notes, but that convenience comes at the cost of
organizational sanity.

I tried using Evernote for this purpose and what I discovered was unless you
can control it yourself then it sucks. Eventually they're going to have money
problems or they'll get DDoSed or whatever and suddenly this vital resource
you've learned to rely on is not available when you need it.

You might as well use notepad & nextcloud.

There are only 2 things an app like this can offer to make it 'special'
compared to the thousands of other available methods. Searchable tags, and a
convenient UI.

~~~
renuka
Thanks for the feedback. We're definitely thinking about tags - even beyond
just making them searchable. A lot of people run into issues like forgetting
what tag they used and having a user-feedback and a UserFeedback. Also issues
when a project name changes and so tags need to be migrated. Do you have that
problem? What do you mean by private version? Do you mean running it on-
premise?

~~~
featherverse
Yeah I would rather have a php based webapp that I can download and install on
my own server, than any sort of SaaS thing. I hate SaaS, I think it's a kind
of gamble, I am gambling that the people providing that service will be
successful and operational until I quit using it.

But in the real world that isn't always the case.

However with a localized application that I can download, install, and run
without any reliance on "the mothership", if the developers should go belly up
(obviously nobody wants that), I can at least continue to use the software for
a length of time while searching for a suitable replacement.

That's just one example. There's other things, such as data security, short
term outages, and so on. In general SaaS has always been a terrible idea. It's
good for corporations, but it sucks for users, and computing is about what's
good for the users.

------
anithian
Omg I can't wait for this! My team and I were just talking about this problem.
Just signed up for your waiting list.

~~~
renuka
Thank you :)

------
drwicked
Your signup form is behaving strangely. Seems like a state management issue.
Text input gets narrow onmousedown.

~~~
ajprax
Unfortunately this is a known issue with css display: grid. What
browser/version are you using?

~~~
drwicked
Chrome latest

~~~
ajprax
Yeah, that's where I've seen it as well. Unfortunately it's intermittent
(which is probably why it's still just a known issue).

------
zitterbewegung
I currently use a git repository for this purpose. It would be nice to have a
better interface for it.

~~~
renuka
Interesting. How do you use it? Like a key-value store?

------
rujdesh
I love that line 'Conversations that begin with “Got a minute?” are almost
never that short.' Use it so often! :D

