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Hey, this is exactly why I made obsidian-repeat-plugin [1]. The goal was to have most of my notes surface every now and then, which removes the need for me to do any digging at all.

With that said, my non-repeating notes are far from "dead". First, I have a lot of useful self-made references. Second, Obsidian really makes it easy to spontaneously group tags with its backlink system. Every now and then, I go down a rabbit hole and catch up to notes that would otherwise be dead. I only have to maintain a few "entry points" that mostly have other notes linking to them.

[1]: https://github.com/prncc/obsidian-repeat-plugin


One idea you could try to make the repeat load less of a burden, and enable more notes or items to be included, is to not just track whether they've been shown before, but to use a spaced repetition algorithm to try to estimate whether an item has been forgotten, and surface the most likely-to-have-been-forgotten items. Those are the ones you would benefit from serendipity, because presumably, if they had become relevant and you already remembered them, you'd've made use of them, and it's the forgotten ones where serendipity strikes.

I call this idea 'anti-spaced-repetition': https://gwern.net/note/statistic#program-for-non-spaced-repe...


The plugin actually does support spaced repetition, but only an "exponential" algorithm. That is, you have to manually choose whether to multiply the current repetition period with 0.5, 1, 1.5 or 2.

This "exponential" repetition it's not as optimized as the kinds of algorithms you're describing, but I find it good enough and it comes with a few distinct advantages:

1) Spaced repetition algorithms are hard to get right with two buttons like remembered/forgot. Anki for example added more buttons (easy/normal/hard/forgot or something like that), but I could never really intuit what would happen if I clicked any of them. Having 4 explicit choices makes it easy to understand what will happen, and also lets you "manually" push back notes on axes like "how much do I still care about this" and not just "how well do I remember this".

2) I really wanted to keep the metadata fields stored in the note and easy for a human to edit and understand. Right now, you only need `repeat: spaced every N days` (and similar) and the plugin adds a `due_at` field that has an easy to read ISO timestamp. You can also add `hidden: true` but don't have to.


I decided, as a first pass, to set up Anki to review notes and articles. I try to get more serendipity by telling Anki to increase the ease and scheduling newly-read articles far in the future (Anki lets you manually schedule a card for n days in the future, and will adjust the spaced repetition schedule accordingly).

I wrote a quick-and-dirty script to sync my Pocket bookmarks with Anki, since I have a large backlog in Pocket: https://github.com/telotortium/pockexport-to-anki. Over time, I'll probably deprecate Pocket, since Anki lets me make notes on articles.


From the article here it looks like people will stay on payroll until early 2023. They won't work but have to abide by Twitter's internal agreements.

Does anyone know if part of these agreements includes not seeking other employment (a typical clause these days)?


That’s not a typical clause and specifically illegal in California.

A more common clause in California employment contracts for salaried employees limits outside employment to work that does not interfere with one’s job responsibilities, based on the idea that as a salaried employee that job should be your primary job


If you want to get a taste of some of what Ramanujan seems to have been occupied with, the mathematical physicist John Baez explained "Ramanujan's easiest formula" in an approachable way https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/ramanujans-e...


Nice! We built something like this 3 years ago while I was still at Intoli. Instead of Puppeteer we used our own Web Extensions API based framework called Remote Browser [1], the core of which was written by my cofounder.

The tour is still up at [2]. The servers that actually run the Remote Browser have since gone down, but interestingly you can still run the tour. That's because if you don't change the code in the REPL window, you get cached results (except step 7/7 which scrapes Hacker News and won't work). To get those results, we built a little tour "recorder" that would be run on every release. If I remember correctly, we allowed some dynamic ES6 imports through a custom Babel compiler for the code that's input, which also allows first level async stuff, which still works :)

[1]: https://github.com/intoli/remote-browser [2]: https://intoli.com/tour/


A few aphorisms about Voja Antonić:

1. He was involved as a skeptic and wrote a well-received (among my friends at least) book debunking psychics and various kinds of nonsense. As a teenage boy in Serbia (in the late 90s?), I asked him to translate a portion of the book to English and put the translation on my website. He graciously allowed me to do so. Part of why I wanted to go through that massive effort was to convince an English-speaking girlfriend (whom I've met online!) that astrology is nonsense. You could say that relationship did not last long.

The book is now available as a free PDF on his website. [1] I don't know what happened to my website.

2. He moved to the US at 65 to work SV, and had some emotional things to say about the move. [2] It stuck with me.

(Both links are in Serbian.)

[1]: http://www.voja.rs/dpdl.htm

[2]: https://noizz.rs/intervju/voja-antonic-za-noizz-o-odlasku-u-...


Too bad, I'd have loved to read this astrology debunking. And to forward it to a friend or two :P

You sure you don't still have a copy of it somewhere? 0:-)


You can use the famous Carl Sagan book The Demon Haunting World instead. Voja's book was inspired by it and covers the same topics in similar manner.


Slight correction: _The Demon-Haunted World_, Sagan, 1995.


Luckily we have today online translate services. I've copied the first 2 pages from the "Astrology" chapter from the linked PDF of the book to give you an idea how the automatic translation looks like:

"In order to understand astrology well, it is necessary to know it from the very roots. It originated in ancient Babylon, around 1000 BC, although some historians claim that astrology was conceived by the Sumerians, a whole millennium earlier. The precondition for the existence of large cities was well-developed agriculture, and this required knowledge of a precise calendar, as agricultural who had to know when to start sowing and how to adapt all agricultural work to the seasons. Establishing an accurate calendar is not it was possible without a good knowledge of mathematics and constant astronomy observations, and these jobs were most suitable for priests (the picture shows a stone on which is a record of the movement of the Moon, found in Mesopotamia). Thus the first astronomers were clergy, and it is logical that celestial bodies, which they discovered, were named after the then Babylonian gods. We we still use those names, actually theirs Roman translations: Mars instead of Nergal, Venus instead of Ishtar, Jupiter instead of Marduk and so on further.

Here we come to the first paradox which is an integral part of astrology: although the names of the gods were assigned to the planets in the random order in which they were discovered, the meaning and the significance that each particular planet carries with it bears is firmly attached to the role of the god by whom it is got its name, and it has remained unchanged to this day. For example, Nergal (Mars) is the god of war, so the summers that began with a stronger the radiance of the planet Nergal in the sky was immediately women as particularly suitable for military campaigns, and the springs in which the splendor of Ishtar (Venus, the goddess of love) was emphasized, were destined to be concluded marriages.

Same as for the planets, and for the stellar constellations the rule was that people born in a certain sign of the zodiac were attributed traits derived from the name of the sign. In the Babylonians, the number of characters that consisted of constellations initially changing between 6 and 18, but stabilized at about 600 BC 12. Soon the first horoscopes appeared: the oldest known dates from April 29, 410 BC. By the way, the division of the zodiac into 12 signs is not even today valid worldwide - Chinese and Indian horoscopes have 28, and Toltec cultures (in Central America) 20 characters. However, he respects all these horoscopes is the principle that the characteristics of people born in someone character directly depends on the name of that character. The oldest surviving critique of astrology was written by Cicero in 44 BC new era. His philosophical skepticism could not relate human characteristics to astronomical parameters at birth. He states that he would it would be more logical to establish the influence of meteorological conditions on the child at the time of birth, but not to notice any connection there either. The Greeks learned about astrology when they conquered Babylon in the fourth century BC, and the Romans took it from the Greeks. Before the end of the twelfth century ideas were taken over by northern Europe, so astrology soon entered the then school system. Around the seventeenth century, the sudden rise of science (primarily astronomy) caused the expulsion of astrology from European universities, so thus we come to another great paradox: its “golden age” astrology not experienced during the Middle Ages, when people were deeply religious and knowledge was transmitted mainly orally, but only since 1930, when British astrologer Naylor (R. H. Naylor) received an entertaining column in the daily newspaper in which he introduces an innovation: the horoscope! The interest of the audience in reading the fate was such that in record time all the papers got theirs horoscopes, and astrology experts sprouted like mushrooms afterwards rain. Today, for example, 96% of people in Europe know in which sign they were born, and only 34% know their blood type."


I wonder if the Wayback Machine people are using a (potentially more modern) version of the AOPIC algorithm to decide what to archive. I wrote an article about that algorithm (which is similar to the original PageRank, but simpler IMO), and stated that a service "like the Wayback Machine would probably use something like AOPIC." It would be nice to remove that first like from the sentence!

[1] https://intoli.com/blog/aopic-algorithm/


No, Heretrix doesn't really do any ranking as it crawls, it's all up to a cleverly chosen seed.

AOPIC looks to me like it's roughly the same as Yahoo's iterative pagerank algorithm, but I didn't look at it that carefully.


To be fair, 200X was the Year of the Linux Desktop for us Linux users.


A lot of the comments here are arguing for or against the author's specific choices, but I would like to point out how great it is that Linux desktop environments are this customizable in the first place.

I recently switched back to Linux after using a Mac for a couple of years, and was blown away with how far Gnome has gotten in terms of customizability -- even if most of it is done through extensions. Moreover, if you can't tweak it to your liking, perhaps xfce or i3 or KDE will prove more accommodating...


My co-founder wrote a bit about Asciinema as part of a comprehensive comparison of terminal recorders [1]. There's a lot to love about it (wide availability, very nice JavaScript playback -- check out the Game of Life playback at [1]), but it's a bit of a chore to self host, if that's important for you.

[1]: https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/


The difficulty in self-hosting was what prevented us from using this at my job. Proprietary source code, and whatnot.


asciinema dev here. Where did you get impression it's proprietary? I'm really curious because it's fully open-source, with all components open-source and usable independently, and there's no company or business model behind it. Just me and my spare hobby time.


Traffic to Lambda from the internet and between Lambda and S3 is free. The only thing you pay for are the transfer costs from S3 (at cents per GB).


Assuming resulting audio of 3 minutes, then 1000 uses would result in 9 GB, or about 81 cents. As long as you can get ads for $1 per mille, you should be good. That said, you'd probably need to implement something to prevent abuse (single user bypassing the frontend and just spamming your backend).

Looking forward to the next post in the series.


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