
Digital Tools I Wish Existed - jborichevskiy
https://jborichevskiy.com/posts/digital-tools/
======
thundergolfer
The "Queue Management for Inbound Content" section is _exactly_ what I really
want as well, so much that I've just started building it instead of waiting
and hoping.

For me, this is the lynchpin:

> "all content I think my _future self_ would appreciate me consuming."
> (emphasis mine)

Current content feeds are optimized for engagement (ie. advertisement load)
and thus won't conceive of a "future self", only what your current self will
look at and click on _right now_.

I think that content feeds need to incorporate goal-orientation and move away
from right-here-right-now orientation. For those wanting to do anything
difficult they need to optimize their information diet over a very long time-
scale, like years, so content-feed tools should be aware of human-scale
timelines (eg. high school, college, career, parenting).

Humans thrive on learning and growth but so many platforms choose to see their
users as merely inputs to an ad-delivery optimization system.

> I have little visibility into required time investment and foundational
> context until I’ve opened it and started thinking about it.

This is another thing that really annoys me about our current media ecosystem,
and is really also a symptom of not properly conceiving of a person's personal
development over time and a person's changing needs over time.

\---

To look at this blog post from 1000 feet up, I'd say that Jonathan is
unfortunately deprived of these tools because our media software ecosystem is
madly building things for users who want to look at things and not think, as
such platforms are heavily consumeristic and thus fantastic for advertising
revenue and monetization generally (eg. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok,
Pinterest, Canva).

~~~
robertk
I have been emailing links to myself tagged with a one word keyword for the
last decade. They focus on things that I or my (unconceived, unborn) son or
daughter would like to read, learn or understand “later”. I have about 10k
sitting in my inbox (including this one) that I plan to convert into a
critical path and consumption order once I take a sabbatical.

Sometimes the best systems are the simplest.

~~~
rajlego
What kind of algorithm/system do you think you'd use to convert them into a
consumption order?

~~~
robertk
Create a rough dependency graph and perform a topological sort, potentially
skipping, down weighting, or skimming nodes that are onerous to consume but of
dubious value (e.g. a link that’s a review about a long textbook that isn’t
fundamental to a space).

------
kresten
This is taking your digital life very seriously.

I feel like saying he should have less screen time and live in the real world
cause such details don’t matter at all.

But what a hypocrite that would make me.

~~~
Hallucinaut
It can also be a case of wanting the means to that end. Some have certain
minimal needs either professionally or simply personally and the more
efficient that process, the more time there is for everything else.

------
BenGosub
I have been thinking about these questions as well. The gist is, it seems we
need tools to manage data created from all the applications that we use.
Today, there's so much data, that the most important tools are those that
separate signal from noise.

Some things that I have considered: \- I like to read long articles on my
e-paper reader, there are several services to do this. \- I need all quotings
from articles, books and my personal notes to be accessible in one place,
indexed and searchable. \- My whole knowledge base should be easily shared
with other people. \- I want to find others with similar interests to mine.

Some interesting technologies that have the potential of bringing this to
reality is the Beaker browser and the Dat format for sharing. Also, I really
like World Brain's memex for web annotation, searching and sharing.

It seems we are getting closer, but we need to connect the different tools
into a widely used workflow.

~~~
jborichevskiy
> My whole knowledge base should be easily shared with other people. - I want
> to find others with similar interests to mine.

Yes! And I think this paves the way for an interesting collaborative
knowledgebase as well.

Agreed on a missing workflow to bind everything together. Do you keep your
annotations + notes in Memex? If so, do you add an external annotations (say,
from ebooks) into it?

------
kamphey
It’s interesting that your “tool” revolves around you... in other words,
Revolves around a single user. What I see happening in the content ecosystem
are two things: 1. Easier to make content than ever before and 2. Variety of
content is collected by topic, not by user.

1\. Social Media and all web content tools are always making it easier to make
stuff. This might not be very good, but it’s good. Yes we get more noise than
signal, but in time there should be tools to cull that noise. The numbers are
astounding, 500 new podcasts are started, a day. Millions of YT videos
uploaded a minute. Medium made it fast to write.

2\. Platforms, even medium and social media, allow you to collect around
topics. Yes hashtags, but also publishers/pages. I can search IG through
#technology or follow @technology. Same name different stream of content.

If you’d like a mix of audio, video and writing, there needs to be a publisher
that creates on a single topic. Digital publishers a plenty. PopSugar, Bustle,
Jalopnik, The Athletic, etc. These will continuously get better and worse as
their revenue models mature. There will be a hybrid of ads and fees. But the
“best” ones, the higher signal to noise will be ones you pay for. $50 a year
for The Athletic is a steal right now if you want it. Trade pubs, The
Information, Business of Fashion, and the like are multi-medium publishers.

Spending $200 a year between 4 trade pubs that help me be a better person,
saves a couple days total of ads for me and supports 20 journalists do the
best work they can. Sounds like a good deal to me.

------
marionzualo
Thanks for writing this. This is awesome.

What I see missing is an ecosystem of interoperable tools.

It would be great if I could have a location/format in which all my digital
knowledge is stored. And then be able to use different tools which support
multiple processes/flows:

* a flow for discovering content

* a flow for archiving the highlights I take on the web

* a flow for writing notes

it would be great if I could change any tool while keeping the flow intact.

The only thing that somehow mirrors this is Evernote + Readwise + IFTT. There
are tons of integrations that allow you to populate Evernote from tweets,
Highly, Kindle highlights, etc. What I would love is if I could easily swap
Evernote with any other editor (e.g. Bear) without changing much.

I wouldn't mind paying for these tools I would just like this personal
knowledge software to work in a way in which you can natively add
blocks/functionality to it. Most of them have huger vendor lock in.

~~~
jborichevskiy
I like your abstraction of the different flows. Definitely agree the key is
not a one-size-fits-all approach but instead much improved interoperability
between the user's preferred tools.

------
flancian
This is what I want as well.

I feel as if this is the kind of thing Google might still be able to get
right; "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible
and useful" is still the company's mission, after all, although it's been
diluted by ten years in the wilderness of developing products in what seems
like all directions.

If Google had not strayed Keep would be this. Assistant would be this.
Honestly Assistant and Keep would be one and the same thing, perhaps: a single
Assistant that is about remembering what you need to remember, finding what
you need to find, helping you do what you need to do. This parallel universe
Assistant has an open API that nerds like you and me can really use to set up
complex workflows. We then are able to share our workflows with each other,
and eventually perhaps even build products (apps) on this platform for the
less technical users. Split the revenue in an Assistant Store. It could
smoothly diversify into Mechanical Turk territory, but with more and better
automation.

While Google is asleep, startups can revolt.

Disclaimer: I work for Google but the opinions expressed here are personal and
not those of my employer.

~~~
WillYouFinish
The issue with Google is, that Google doesn’t care about privacy and randomly
changes its behavior, like recently closing thousands of accounts for using
the live chat in YouTube. This company isn’t trustworthy.

I’d prefer such applications to run offline with automatic instant
synchronization, so no company can tell me what to do or not to do.

~~~
flancian
I understand why you think that, and you might be right. But I also know there
are _a lot_ of good people at Google, and I dream of the company waking up as
a group again and focusing on its mission responsibly. Doing the right thing,
openly.

Having said that, I personally also think that social networks and other
internet technologies should run on a federated protocol: my current (early
stage) proposal for the kind of thing we should try to do with this technology
is [https://flancia.org/agora](https://flancia.org/agora). I see it as
compatible/synergistic with the post we're discussing.

------
Jeff_Brown
Hode[1] (the Higher Order Data Editor), which is free, solves some of these
problems. (I wrote it. It's still evolving but it works already.)

> metadata is hard

Hode lets you encode and search any kind of information -- entities,
relationships bewteen entities, relationships between relationships,
relationships of any arity (number of members).

Hash, the language in which one adds and searches for data in Hode, is very
close to natural language. I'll give examples below, based on the article's
author's wishes.

> Let me compare my reading list with another to see overlap

This is the "and" operator. (There are also "or" and "difference" operators.)
The query in Hash would look like

    
    
      /find (/eval /it #is-in (reading list #of mary))
      & (/eval /it #is-in (reading list #of peter))
    

> Allow me to tag books instead of placing them into static lists

Hode lets you do even better than tags -- you can classify the meaning of the
tag. For instance, here are two commands that would add two tags to a book:

    
    
      /add The Wisdom of Crowds #was a best-seller
      /add The Wisdom of Crowds #(helps understand) finance
    

> Be tied to my highlights, annotations, and bookmarks in a non-proprietary,
> searchable, and shareable format

Hode is free software, and the data format it uses is dirt-simple.

Hode permits encoding and searching just about anything I can think of. Hode
cannot yet create the data for you to search, though -- so far you've got to
enter the data yourself.

> Let me query this tool like a relational database. For example: show me all
> books about scaling startups recommended by people I follow on Twitter or by
> people they follow.
    
    
      /find (/eval /it #(is about) scaling startups)
      & (/eval (/eval I #follow /it #on Twitter) #recommends /it)
    

> Help me deal with prioritization

Hode lets you order your search results according to any transitive binary
relationship -- "read before" or "is more important than" or "was written
before", whatever you want.

[1]
[https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode](https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode)

~~~
ledauphin
This looks interesting. If I may ask a naive question, why did you decide to
build this as a text editor rather than tooling on top of an existing text
editor (the parallel that occurs to me being Emacs and org-mode)?

~~~
Jeff_Brown
Not naive at all! Making it a console app was easier just easier. I'd love it
if Hode plugged into Emacs.

------
amoghs
Obair
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/obair/jffaiidojfhf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/obair/jffaiidojfhflballoapgofphkadiono))
is a variant of the memex idea mentioned. It's not quite a universal memex for
your digital life (which by the way is really inspiring) but rather made
specifically for work docs across different work tools.

Disclaimer: I'm working on it and it's really early in the process :) Should I
make Obair more broad?

------
angarg12
There was recently a post in HN called "There is too much stuff". It revolved
around the massive amount of unnecessary physical goods we need to shift
through to find what we are looking for. I believe the same thing happens with
content.

There is way more content out there that I would like to consume than my time
allows. Is not rare to make my way through an article or a 1 hour talk and
think 'oh well, that was a waste of time'. Or content that has pieces that I
do find interesting, but is so padded that makes the whole investment not
worth it. Currently I am reading Domain Drive Design, and I didn't find
insights that I consider useful after well over a third into the book (500+
pages total).

I do believe that content curation is one of the most promising fields in the
near future, and it will involve a mix of human and technological solutions.
This might include not only the act of recommending content, but possibly
modifying said content for the user (e.g. summaries, highlights, etc.). In
comparison, current recommendation systems are a pure joke.

~~~
rhlsthrm
Off topic, but is Domain Driven Design suddenly coming into vogue? I just
heard of it for the first time this week and went into a rabbit hole of
research. I see that the books are not new by any means. I've heard and seen
it pop up so many times just this week, including from your comment!

~~~
ratww
It seems to me that a lot of people are mixing DDD and functional programming
concepts, since DDD meshes well with the concept of "functional core
imperative shell".

------
moralestapia
From 2014 to around 2018 I was part of a team that was _heavily_ invested into
bringing these concepts to reality. What we accomplished was amazing and I
still use some of them tools day-to-day, unfortunately we had to stop.

What I wanted to share is that it was extremely hard (and ultimately
impossible for us) to accrue a critical mass of people that is willing to use
these things AND pay for them. We reached a few hundred paying customers; but
we were 6 guys working on this full-time, so that means salaries and overall
we were losing money like nothing else.

That aside, I would do it again if I could, particularly now that the
"standard tools" of the internet have become useless with time. Example,
Google never gives me what I want anymore and they're removing the URLs now
from the results (why?).

If someone reads this and want to kickstart some kind of "internet
renaissance" with me, you can reach me here: alex@<HN-username>.com

------
rajlego
I haven't read the entire article thoroughly but I think "Queue management for
inbound digital content" is something implemented in an SRS app called
SuperMemo. The way it's intended to work is that you have content and over
time break it down and through the scheduling system you eventually end up
with extracts small enough to be made into SRS cards (though it's more
complicated than that in actual use). It has a lot of weaknesses, mainly
because a lot of it is based on features from IE (thus poor PDF support) but I
still find it extremely useful. If I find any article that looks interesting I
just throw it there and eventually I'll import it, go through it with
incremental reading
([https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading](https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading))
and eventually dismiss it.

Edit: I also ought to mention, it has a very good priority/interval system for
scheduling when I see things. Essentially things I give lower priority are
less likely to show up and when I'm going through my material/doing my reps
I'm more likely to see high priority material. There's a general issue that
you find the thing you see soonest most shiny and thus a strong likelihood of
overprioritizing new material but SuperMemo helps intersperse everything to
prevent that.

It sort of can do the central search thing too to an extent, I can search
through my collection of imported articles/cards and find stuff that's
generally relevant to my interests. Though how useful it is depends largely on
how long you've used the app. I am also reminded of the brain
([https://www.thebrain.com/](https://www.thebrain.com/)) but I'm not super
familiar with it.

Have you heard of Ted Nelson's Xanadu? I've only looked into it a little but I
was reminded of it when you talked about better reading.

~~~
jborichevskiy
Thank you for bringing up SuperMemo - I remember reading through Piotr's
article on Genius [0] and thought it was a wonderful piece on the balance of
creativity and memorization.

I've looked through SuperMemo's features and while I completely subscribe to
the idea of spaced repetition (I have used Anki for some periods) I was put
off by the user interface; perhaps I should try it again.

> There's a general issue that you find the thing you see soonest most shiny
> and thus a strong likelihood of overprioritizing new material but SuperMemo
> helps intersperse everything to prevent that.

I really the idea of this approach to keep everything at its proper priority
level. Thanks for linking the brain as well - I haven't come across it.

I am vaguely familiar with Xandu as well but it warrants another deep dive for
sure.

0 -
[https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/geni...](https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/genius)

~~~
rajlego
I love that article, it changed a lot of my thinking regarding people's
potential for success. Woz has a lot of other articles you might also find
interesting here:
[https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_Guru](https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_Guru).
I've especially read through a lot of his articles on sleep and memory and
found them invaluable.

SuperMemo's interface was not designed with the beginner in mind. When I first
started trying it even basic operations frustrated me to no end. But now that
I use it as a high(er) level user, it feels very very intuitive and you start
to understand why it was designed in a way that looks so unappealing at first.
If you do decide to try it again, I would highly recommend joining the SM
discord server
([https://discordapp.com/invite/pB7jcSK](https://discordapp.com/invite/pB7jcSK)).
There are a lot of very helpful people there.

------
smacktoward
_> Content is published in a variety of formats including but not limited to
images, sound files, videos, Google Drive docs, diagrams, long-from paywalled
articles, PDFs, powerpoint presentations, and base 64 encoded blobs._

One of the great disappointments I’ve had working in tech for 20 years now has
been the way we’ve transformed the entire spectrum of human expression, which
includes wildly different forms of art and media each of which we used to
engage with in its own unique way, into an undifferentiated slurry of
“content.”

Every time I hear a child say they want to grow up to be a “content creator,”
I die a little inside. _Aspire to be a musician, or a painter, or a dancer,_ I
want to tell them. _A filmmaker, a poet, a sculptor. Dream of finding your art
and mastering it, not just extruding more gruel to fill some corporate pipe._

~~~
pgcj_poster
> Every time I hear a child say they want to grow up to be a “content
> creator,”

Do kids really say this? If so I'm going to kill myself.

~~~
tsukurimashou
I got a rope if you want, and yes, where I used to live at least, most kids
wanted to be a "steamer" or a "youtuber"

there is no hope for humanity I'm afraid

------
ollifi
There are only few types of digital formats I use really. Text, audio, still
photo, video and maybe 3d description of a place or an object, but the last
one is still quite marginal.

It would be nice make arbitrary collections of these, add metadata such as
place, time and author and send them to other users or bots.

If you want to go crazy you could add permissions and encryption which would
enable private conversation and message board / social media style structures.
Pick boring standard file formats that are "good enough" for consumer use (one
lossy and one lossless for each media)

Maybe I am dreaming of hypertext. The webserver-client structure of internet
makes things easily very siloed and the ways to share documents you come a
cross in the net are very clunky because everyone needs to reinvent the format
and the player for everything more complicated than simple text or image.

------
eXpl0it3r
What purpose does this collection of information really serve? I like having
things organized neatly and easily accessible, but I have a hard time seeing
what goal thousands of scattered annotations, text bookmarks, podcast
bookmarks, etc. serve.

~~~
Jeff_Brown
Yes -- but it's the scattering that's the problem, not the thousands. I
believe the author wants what I want -- a system in which you can easily add
any kind of data or meta-data, and easily search and sort those data in
whatever manner you'd like.

In another comment[1] I describe software I've made that solves some of these
challenges.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21665255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21665255)

~~~
eXpl0it3r
I think, I have a hard time seeing the big use from such software, because my
work doesn't really require such a reference library.

A searchable collection of data is great if you have a use case that actually
depends on such a collection, like writing a paper, news article or doing
(academic) research on some topic.

Maybe to ask a better question, what data do you want to collect and what are
you using the data for exactly?

~~~
Jeff_Brown
The details of what I record (in another comment[1]) might be idiosyncratic
and uninteresting to you. Those details aren't important. The important point
is that so much information belongs in multiple places. A single statement,
let alone article or book, might regard all of economics, justice, common
sense and beauty. It might be about parsing, Haskell, and keeping data types
flexible. I'd like to be able to search based on any of those things.

If there were a clean distinction between entities and tags, existing
solutions would be enough. But what if you want to draw a relationship between
two relationships? Most sentences longer than three words, after all, are
higher-order relationships. ("Birds #avoid beetles ##because beetles #are hard
to digest", for instance, is a second-order because relationship joining two
first-order relationships.)

The searches Mr. Borichevskiy imagined are, I think, good arguments for why
you would want to be able to encode arbitrary higher-order information. I
believe Hode is the simplest solution possible that allows it.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21665698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21665698)

~~~
eXpl0it3r
How often do you look stuff up that's older than say a week?

Personally, I'm kind of glad to soak up information as I go and being able to
just forget everything else. As opposed to constantly feeling the need to tag,
sort, archive, reference, cross-reference, keep track of information, that
future self will to 99.9% never actually need.

Yet, I wonder whether use cases start to materialize, once you start using
it...

~~~
Jeff_Brown
Projects and how-to notes, pretty regularly. Abstract concepts like comedy,
maybe yearly. It's definitely an art, knowing what to bother ingesting into
the system. I have erred on both sides.

Federation could reduce the hurdle -- both reducing the need to ingest, and
the difficulty of doing so. Borichevskiy (author of article that generated
this thread) nods at the idea of using someone else's index of books. Such
labor-sharing could be much more general.

I don't want to suggest, though, that ingesting something is a waste of time
if you don't review it. That's true of boilerplate metadata like ISBN numbers.
But for original ideas, or for paraphrased insights gleaned from reading
online, I find that sticking it into the graph produces value at the moment
it's done. The rigor of compressing an idea to a few words, and determining
which adjacent concepts it bears on, and how, has helped me understand things.

(Teachers often ask their students to state things in their own words. It's
like that, but faster and harder. Like punk rock for essays.)

------
itchap
It's sad that RSS is fading away. It simplified ingestion a lot. At the end of
the day it focuses on content and a feed provides a quick overview of all the
new content that has been published. I don't really understand why people are
not into it anymore. Blogs and news sites don't even need to provide HTML
pages loaded with JS and CSS when they provide RSS. Why would I bother loading
so much stuff when I can get the data straight away without the bloat

------
soapboxrocket
Kinda fits into this discussion, but I want playlists for netflix, prime,
disney+, hulu, what ever, but not just running down a season, but for example
a set of Christmas episodes. FXX has done some of this with the Simpsons, but
I want to see other viewers lists and the possibility of across shows.

------
reilly3000
Agreed with all points, but especially the queuing system. I started my
journey towards becoming a programmer to build something like that. Its been a
long and winding road, but it might be time to follow up on that, unless
somebody can point me to a project that already exists like described in the
post.

~~~
rajlego
I would check out the IR feature of SuperMemo
([https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading](https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading)).
There is a very steep learning curve and when you are a beginner you'll think
it looks antiquated but if you ever up becoming proficient in it it will all
just quick.

------
warwizard
GoodReads ([https://www.goodreads.com/](https://www.goodreads.com/)) might not
be perfect; but I think it at least comes close to a book log and
recommendation system.

------
bocklund
LiquidText on iOS seems to enable pulling out images, snippets, etc. as the
author seems to want. Not sure what happens when that app eventually dies
thought.

------
pontifier
I remember I used to have unlimited browser history with a never expiring,
searchable cache, but for some reason its not possible anymore.

------
lwhi
I can't help thinking that resurrection of Google Reader (and RSS readers in
general) and del.icio.us might help.

~~~
skinnymuch
How popular was Google Reader really? I don’t think many people I know irl
ever used it. There’s a handful of known or referenced RSS readers now.
Combined they just aren’t that popular. I have a hard time buying that Google
Reader was super popular.

There’s a few bookmarking services now. Some startups like linked in the
article. And Pinboard has been around for a long time. Delicious isn’t needed
anymore. I use Larder.io and Pinboard.in myself

~~~
lwhi
The demise of Google Reader signalled the end of RSS.

RSS used to be a big thing in the 90s and early 2000s

~~~
skinnymuch
That’s my point. It’s a huge talking point amongst geeky crowds. Is there any
data to point to that though? It has always felt to me that Google Reader was
never that big. Niche crowds made it seem like a huge deal though. I could be
wrong. I’d just like something concrete.

Or are you saying it was a signal of the end for the specific niche geeky
crowds? If so then I guess that’s my point. Google Reader doesn’t and never
did move the needle that much.

------
njharman
re augmented memory, from 22 years ago,
[http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/Papers/wear-ra-
personalt...](http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/Papers/wear-ra-
personaltech/)

Is what got me interested in wearable computing.

------
j88439h84
Perkeep fits some of these cases

~~~
UnmitigatedFart
Huh. This is fascinating project, this does tick some of the boxes for me.
Thanks.

