If a prospective employee told me a story about how they used a note-taking app like this to optimize their school grade output I would be extremely worried for a lot of reasons and consider it a major red flag.
What would be encouraging is an app that does not REPLACE your note taking but rather amplifies the capabilities.
You must take notes to learn deep. Handwritten is very important.
You will miss some things, which an AI could be tracking and summarize
What I would consider valuable is an app that supplements your notes. It would need two components... the app you have now, and reading in the notes that you have taken. Then if you asked it to go deep on a particular note or section you took notes on, it could add to the notes that you took without stealing the important part of the learning process
I thought I was the only one who thought this way.
The process of note taking is what really helps me learn things. I think I'm slicing and dicing what I'm reading and imposing on it a structure that helps me create connections and get a deeper understanding. After this, I review the notes almost daily and the way I've written it, positions on the page etc. all help me recollect the material. Over time, it becomes reflexive and I can use that as a foundation to build the next layer of knowledge.
I can see AI tools as a great way to index large amounts of rarely used reference matter. e.g. To solve the "Yeah... I remember reading about that but I'm not exactly sure where". Then retrieve it and everything comes back.
I also see it as useful to quiz me on things which I think I've studied. But outside of that, I think such tools will not help learning but will hold one back. However, this is very dependent on the method of learning one uses.
> The process of note taking is what really helps me learn things.
Yes, it reminds one of Douglas Adams' "Electric Monk", that was built to believe things -- so that people wouldn't have to exert the mental effort of believing things themselves.
Similarly, this app can take notes for you, so that you won't have to exert any cognitive effort while learning.
Because then it would be a better pun on "Wii". I also thought that "kawaii" was kind of a missed opportunity, personally. I would've gone for "kawaii" or something.
There's a fine line between eustress (positive stress) and distress (negative stress)
The magazine has a narrative it is trying to push. Anyone running a business sees this type of thing quite differently. You have to keep people motivated and pushing themselves. You can do it in such a way that is positive or negative... riding that line is exceptionally difficult and every person is different. It is quite possible that culturally they excel when pushed in such a way. Hard to tell from the bleachers.
At some point I need to write an article about this topic. I disagree with a lot of the conclusions about that article.
You aren't making a lathe for someone with no experience. Anyone who is a potential customer for a lathe has SOME experience, even if it's just enough to say "I want a lathe" and the amount of effort they will need to go through to onboard to using the lathe properly is directly proportional to the applicable mental models they have for similar tasks. This probably involves hand eye coordination and gestures along with physics and a bunch of other things to onboard quickly.
Intuition is about using the most fundamental mental models that your customer(s) should have and simplifying the connection of those to the new task.
So intuition is contextual. The main goal is to save the user time. The narrow goal is to make the product easier to learn compared to your competitors. The big problem is no matter WHAT you do, the mental model a user will use when they approach a new task for the first time is inevitably different than the one you did.
Or, "You are not your customer" or however you want to phrase it.
Haha, oh yes. Ever had a project where, at some point, the (key) users said “but Excel”? Well, you better listen to them. Sure it may be great for the layperson to edit a building’s layout visually. But know what? The expect just wants to enter the coordinates. In a grid, using only the keyboard.
I’ve had so many projects where we took users for fools. Boy did they fail.
> You aren't making a lathe for someone with no experience.
Probably the #1 image I wish I could purge from my mind is that of a lathe accident. I saw the picture maybe 15 years ago, and I still remember it in horrifying detail.
Some tools really shouldn't be used until a person has had thorough safety training. The two that immediately come to mind are lathes and table saws.
I said it elsewhere, but one of the first things I learned about power tools, from my father, is that if you don't know how to use a tool or tool setting, you don't use it.
Granted, power drills are moderately benign as these things go, but you can do a lot of damage to a work piece really fast if you select a tool or setting you're unfamiliar with. Which is why there manuals, books, videos, and classes to teach you.
Blogging about discoverability in the context of power tool interfaces is just peak software engineer naval gazing.
Pretty benign until an idiot holds a small piece of sheet metal in one hand and drills it with the other. Guess how I know :)
To my defense, I put a bit of wood between the metal and my hand to prevent drilling my hand but little did I know how the drill catches the steel on the very last part of the cut.
Power drills are pretty benign to the operator as long as they know not to try to use the drill bit as a router or sander. I've seen plenty of people try to knock off an edge with the side of a bit. Sure it can be done, but its also a great way to have it jump and catch the side of your hand.
You can also easily break your wrist with some of the stronger ones that are available. I've also had one wind-up part of my work glove on accident. And the big plug-in drills are just terrifying in general, with how much rotational inertia they have. I won't touch those.
Easy to say, but working on a house framing/electric/plumbing project for 8+ hours I would rather have the gloves on. With a lathe or mill, of course I'm not gonna wear gloves.
Even "standard" tools have dangers. I was wearing gloves to protect my hands and was using an impact driver to loosen a nut... and I tapped the trigger, tool ran, my glove wound around the socket and pulled my finger in. Hurt my finger, luckily didn't break/permanently damage it. Took a second. I wouldn't have predicted.
How do you prevent your bare hand from getting abraded when it accidentally brushes up against the sanding belt, drill bit, or other fast moving parts of the tool? Yes, I know, exercising caution is always a great idea, but accidents do happen, right?
I have a bench grinder that I use to clean rust off various pieces of metal, and you'd better believe I wear gloves when using it. My reasoning is that the chance of accidentally touching the grinding wheel is high, and a glove will prevent most injuries, while the chance of the glove getting wound around the grinding wheel is near zero because it doesn't take much pressure to stop the wheel. Am I wrong?
Planers aren't so bad once you get into power feeders, which can be gotten as cheap as $500 with a DW735. (Yeah you can get a power feeder for a table saw too; it's $500 and more like $1500 just for the feeder!)
The others: very, very yes. Very yes. Jointers too. Jointers exist to show malice.
Ah I mistyped there, jointers are actually what I meant rather than planers! I use hand planes when jointing boards and forget that power planers aren't that fancy.
I don't remember hearing about any serious planer injuries (though I'm sure it happens), jointers on the other hand are more ornery than an alligator with all them teeth and no toothbrush.
I've had knots thrown back at me by my planer before. That was before I upgraded to the DW735 with those power feeders and a much deeper body to keep the cutters further away from the human, though.
I have a reasonably safe checklist and set practice for my jointer and I still don't trust the thing.
A lot of software doesn't really follow the business/consumer model though, and is either outright public infrastructure or de-facto public infrastructure. Something like train ticket machines are a good example – I don't know what the current situation is because I haven't been there in years, but for a long time the train ticket machines on the Dutch/German border were a completely unusable mess of confusion. How can you mess something like this up so badly? I don't know, but they did. And then there are things like tax services, e-identity services, and all of that, much of which is far more complex, and easier to screw up.
De-facto public infrastructure are things like banking, energy companies, stuff like that. "Public infrastructure" is perhaps not entirely the right term for this, but it is something more or less anyone is expected to be able to use, and where competition is often limited (or sometimes even non-existent).
Remember the UK Post Office scandal? While I strongly feel the main cause was not the software[1], one reason the cunts in charge manage to gaslight people for so long was because the software is so complex, difficult, and does suck.
Some tools are very standardized. Basic modern lathes are all very similar to Maudsley's original precision lathe, which is in the Science Museum in London and worth a look. Someone who knew how to use Maudsley's original lathe would be able to use a modern non-CNC lathe with about five minutes of checking it out.
But faced with a basic modern 3-axis CNC mill, they'd be totally lost.
You are about to bite off a lot. I do this for a living.
You have some software experience, this is good. Assuming you have embedded software experience (which is essential for what you are doing and not at all like web programming) you have a foothold to finish this project without going completely insane.
Hardware is a completely different beast. With software everything happens in your head and when you get stuck you can usually think your way out of it. With hardware, you really do need to learn to do things meticulously and step by step. There are many things that can go wrong. You will learn a lot on this journey.
Don't be afraid to ask for help. Finding a hardware community will be essential to do this as you learn the skills you need. You're going to make a lot of mistakes, best to go in embracing it
A large amount of the work you will find yourself doing at the beginning is just figuring out where and who to ask questions about things like the keybed and other hardware issues. None of this is terribly 'hard' but none of it is easy. Most of it comes from experience.
It is almost always best to use someone else's product when you are designing your first. Roger Linn (https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/) gave me some fantastic advice a couple years ago when I was trying to design switch caps: "Do you want to be a company that designs switch caps or one that designs synthesizers?" and that stuck. I don't want to design switch caps, so I bought them off the shelf, contracted someone to design my own, and moved on.
So to that end... just buy a couple keybeds from Fatar or someone else, or just grab a synth you already have or buy one off ebay and harvest the keybed from that (often times much cheaper than buying direct!)
Don't be afraid to spend money on tools. If you find something difficult, like soldering, I have not once regretted spending money on better tools. They grow with you and save you hundreds if not thousands of hours of unnecessary frustration. When you know you need a tool, find a way to get it.
When you take audio out of the equation you don't need a lot of things:
What makes the sound? Not needed anymore. So any ADC/DACs, DSP code, analog voice hardware, etc is not needed. The DSP in particular is fairly complex and can be expensive depending on what you're doing
If you take the analog side of things out you don't need as complex power and all sorts of other things, so you may not even need a power supply at all, which is huge! Etc, etc.
Then there are things in the middle, like CVs, which are 'kinda' audio but not really since they are just control voltages. You can run them quite slow and still be useful (like 10kHz even). Or, you can treat them like audio, which is definitely my preference, so it depends on your implementation.
MIDI is a great place to start on a path to developing your own instruments. The amount you can do with a controller is CRAZY when you start to see how far it can go
I can't see this changing much if they water it down to a point where liability isn't an issue. If a company is weighing whether to put resources into a security update vs. roll the dice on whether they are used as an attack vector, where they will be sued and just declare bankruptcy, I don't think it would be effective.
Doubly so if their products are still in use after the company goes under. Now who is liable? What protections can one create for this scenario?
Most consumers will never file a lawsuit against such behavior because it is an incredibly uphill battle.
I get the sense that regulation like this will just create a new goalpost that won't ultimately help consumers, we've seen it happen time and time again, but I don't have a better idea. I suspect if you tried to enact real change you'd get too much opposition.
This is one of my favorite things to do, it reveals a lot about fundamental skills I never really actively think about...
If I'm below average at walking, what would it look like to be above the curve?
... at reading?
... at eating?
... at relaxing?
... at sitting or standing?
I've been spending a majority of my time lately re-examining the skills I will rely on for the rest of my life. Been surprisingly helpful so far.
What would be encouraging is an app that does not REPLACE your note taking but rather amplifies the capabilities.
You must take notes to learn deep. Handwritten is very important.
You will miss some things, which an AI could be tracking and summarize
What I would consider valuable is an app that supplements your notes. It would need two components... the app you have now, and reading in the notes that you have taken. Then if you asked it to go deep on a particular note or section you took notes on, it could add to the notes that you took without stealing the important part of the learning process