Why does the perfect note-taking system seem to be such blogging catnip? And the post always basically says "here's my system", never "here's why taking notes is valuable" or "here's something objectively valuable that was enabled by my note-taking system".
All joking aside, append-and-review does seem like a nice pattern for maintaining attention on a big heap of odds and ends, which is probably useful for a researcher like Andrej Karpathy.
I find it pretty mysterious, and am starting to think it's distributed bike-shedding. I'd wager most notes, if they are ever taken, are write-only. Seems like a distraction to me.
I have been a huge note-taker for many years, but it's mostly about tracking projects and tasks at work and home that I need to be accountable for. Whereas a lot of the recent trendiness around note-taking seems to be more like, looking for a system that is going to capture every insight you have or interesting tidbit of information you encounter, and this is going to reveal things to you.
But what people seem to find is, if a system requires a lot of work and doesn't show any benefits, they give it up pretty fast. Which is why a super simple system like TFA's is probably the only sustainable thing if you just want to remember "stuff" you hope will be useful later.
The problem is the appification of doing, data/structure should have apptributes, we should live in the structure not the function, I have a personal client that I've solved all my issues with, I've got a fair amount of polish before I can release it, but it's effectively my OS at this point.
The nice side effect is that other than chatting with agents it solves the issue of getting sucked into feeds as everything external is a single feed curated by my cluster of ai agents.
Because in a world where everything decays, including most physical objects and your health, your ideas preserved is the only thing that may remain of you in the end.
if that's your goal, I don't think you can count on future generations to try to deconstruct your notes unless you've made some other pretty historically significant contributions. you should be writing essays and academic papers.
In the future it will be easier to mine private notes for novelty.
I've developed a pretty unqiue approach to naturalistic non-arbitrary universally binding morality that has fixed my Ai alignment issues (without being able to retrain their model off their weird utilitarianism), but I'm not highly motivated to share it, it'll get around eventually if humanity doesn't implode.
By the way, here's my note-taking system: https://renormalize.substack.com/p/my-markdown-project-manag...
All joking aside, append-and-review does seem like a nice pattern for maintaining attention on a big heap of odds and ends, which is probably useful for a researcher like Andrej Karpathy.