The founding text is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992). It's short, funny, entertaining, and full of new ideas in a freewheeling early 90's spirit. The list in the comment you are replying to is not bad, since most interactions you will ever have with someone about a metaverse will hinge on shared descriptions you have with them of a metaverse, so whichever books you hear about the most are by definition the most useful ones to read.
Almost everyone has read or heard of Ready Player One (2011), which contains extensive descriptions of its own corporate dystopic metaverse, albeit one that I find insufferably cliche and unoriginal.
Metaverse descriptions are descended from the first cyberspace descriptions in Neuromancer (1984) which is a beautiful book worth a read.
Obsidian is the closest thing I've found to the Pensive from Harry Potter. It's a data recording format good enough for me to extract thoughts from my mind, represent them with enough fidelity to reconstruct later, connect them to the concepts that they are related to in my head, and then forget the thought completely so I can move on and process it later.
I was only willing to try it out because I had heard it mentioned [0] on CGP Grey's cohosted podcast, Cortex, in the episode they did on productivity software subcultures. Specifically I think CGP Grey was saying he didn't "get" Obsidian but had observed a fanatic fanbase around it of people who thought it was god's gift to note-taking because it represented the links between knowledge in a unique way. Apparently I'm one of those people because I went from installing it for the first time to writing all my new thoughts down in it in the space of 3 days.
I suspect the real reason I liked Obsidian right away is that long ago I used Microsoft Onenote as a freeform notetaking app to just spew unrelated thoughts into that I could organize later. Onenote's interface was good, but there was no way to port those notes in an exportable format to a new computer when the one with a Onenote license died.
You’re right it was on Cortex, clarification though:
Grey loves Obsidian, Mike doesn’t really get it though. Neither like Notion, even though it has a massive fan base.
There is a whole episode (maybe the one in question) where it comes to light that Grey has spent most of his life NOT making notes like most people do and instead just highlighting areas in source material and referring back to it.
Very funny episode given they were over 100 episodes into a productivity podcast at this point and had spoken about note taking extensively - without realising that one of them has a very different concept of the practice/process.
I spent a while trying Notion, seeing if it could be a good replacement for Evernote, and I had trouble with it as well. I can certainly see its use-case for teams, where the whole notion of homepages and things makes sense. But for the individual, it seemed too much. You're basically making a website.
My biggest gripe with it may have simply been the endless hyping and gushing that all the "productivity gurus" on YouTube and elsewhere did over it. Indeed, it seemed custom-made for YouTube productivity gurus, since you could make everything look so clean and beautiful and polished. It seemed the sort of note-taking tool for people who cared more about how the final result looked, than for people who wanted to quickly add or go over notes.
That said, I recognize that there was much there I probably never really used to its fullest-extent, databases being the fundamental differentiator between Notion and most other note-taking apps, and potentially very powerful.
Yes! That’s the episode. To hear two people realise they’ve been effectively having two different conversations with each other about the same topic without realising it is a special kind of amazing.
The comparison to the Pensieve is so so so good. I had previously used Tim Ferriss' metaphor for writing: that it was to freeze thoughts into a solid so that you could sculpt it into whatever shape you wanted. But as you've already noticed, there isn't really a final form a thought takes, and a lot of it's value is in bouncing amongst other thoughts.
I know this isn't a very hacker newsy comment, but wanted to highlight how amazing your comparison is :D
> The proper desktop version requires an office license
That's not true in my experience. I'm running a proper "OneNote 2016" version without any license or subscription. This is also stated on a Microsoft support site [0]:
> OneNote (formerly called “OneNote 2016”), the _free_ desktop app which runs on all supported versions of Microsoft Windows and which is part of Office 2019 and Microsoft 365.
Further down, it's stated:
> Download OneNote as a free standalone Windows desktop app (some features may be limited).
The link to the "free standalone app" just gives me OfficeSetup.exe (7.0MB), which did not give me a standalone app when I last tried it, but if that works now. Great!
> You can export your notes in a HTML-like format. I haven't tried to convert it into a different format yet, though.
You can export as a .pdf, .xps or into most MS office doc formats like .docx
OneNote isn't great if you want to regularly export to a different format. Especially if you want to make your notebooks accessible to other non-MS software. Right now, I sync my notebooks between several different devices which is kind of a pain.
Do you have a source for that? I don't believe this is true. When creating a notebook, I can specify if I want a OneDrive-synched notebook or a local one (OneNote 2016). Such a limitation _might_ be part of the Store version of OneNote, but that's just a guess. Also a Reddit thread I found discussing this topic stated there's no such limitation in OneNote 2016.
Bee genetics are wild. When I was a beekeeper we learned that queens lay two types of eggs - normal fertilized eggs, which will hatch into females and grow into workers if fed pollen, and queens if fed royal jelly, and unfertilized eggs, which hatch into males (stingless bees called drones) who will fly off and mate with the queens of other hives in spring. [1] At the time I had never heard of unfertilized eggs hatching, and the implication was that by creating male clones of themselves (haploid offspring, [4] not exact clones), queen bees are directly mating with the queens of other hives.
This information applies to the Italian honeybee subspecies kept in captivity (Apis mellifera ligustica) - the OP's article is about the african lowland honeybee (Apis mellifera scutella). The different honeybee subspecies are interesting: italian bees are nonaggressive, russian bees are hardy, etc.[2]
There's nothing special about workers having offspring either. When a honeybee queen gets old or weak, brood pheremones stop being able to suppress worker reproduction (worker policing fails [3]), and there are workers running around laying eggs in brood cells. Because workers have never mated with a drone, all their eggs are unfertilized and therefore hatch into drones [5]. This south african subspecies with a self-cloning female worker is really something unusual and unexpected, since those females should only be able to lay haploid eggs.
I've had the misfortune of several alcoholic roommates, and it's disturbing. They'll yell at you, threaten you, get emotional, violent, cry, the whole works, and then deny it all the next morning.
In contrast, every regular marijuana user I've known long enough to form a judgement about their habit is very inoffensive to the people around them. It doesn't seem to bleed out into their work and emotional lives as much.
Heavy marijuhana smokers can show some or all of that traits, too.
But in general if I would have to chooss between a heavy pot smoker and a heavy drinker as roommate, I probably would "prefer" the average marijuanna user
I've been to a few antiques stores where they have a blacklight case to show off the fluorescent uranium glass teacups and candlesticks. If you don't have a blacklight with you, it's tough to tell the difference between truly radioactive glass colored with uranium salts, and green-tinted depression glass produced at the same time last century that is neither radioactive nor fluorescent. Depression glass has an interesting story all its own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_glass)
It actually surprised me that you can buy uranium glass online on ebay or etsy. It's not controlled or anything, and there are some very weird old curios manufactured last century. (https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...). I bought a tiny little salt cellar this way once the desire to own something radioactive overcame me.
It’s actually fairly easy to own radioactive things. Bananas are fairly cheap, and potassium has a high enough radioactive fraction to give your body a few positron emissions a second. Of course your risk is still higher from slipping on the banana peel hilariously.
Is it better to live in a world where the future is unknown, and the best we can do is guess where value will be, or one where the future is known, and the prices of all investments are stable and already priced at their exact values? In which world is optimism and class mobility possible?
Excellent question that reminds me of two anecdotes:
1) In my CS ethics course, we had a writing prompt asking whether, assuming perfect capability, it would be better to replace sports referees with computers
2) I wrote a cheat program for a word game my dad liked playing. Super proud of my accomplishment, I showed it to him, and he was impressed for a minute before stating the game wasn’t fun that way (also have an earlier version of this memory involving a Sega Genesis Game Genie)
Excellent point. And to drive a steak further into this idea - ironically gambling is the one where all the prices / chance / rewards are absolutely known up front and calculable. I guess that's what sets wall st. apart from gambling in a casino.
I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before that becomes an astroturfing target as well. At least there's account history associated with it, so there is some effort associated with creating or purchasing accounts with believable histories. Long term I think facebook wins this space because they have the most in depth real digital identities tied to people.
The funding model is extremely sus. I used to trust them but your criticisms are right on, and their 'the best x' lists have a curious tendency to prioritize brands that already have high ad spend, rather than surface little known indie choices.
The possible saving grace of their funding model is that, even if the manufacturer itself doesn't have an affiliate program, they can probably still get some sort of affiliate link through Amazon or Wal-Mart.
That said, there's just no amount of "not actually sketchy" that will prevent this sort of revenue model from seeming sketchy. Hard not to wonder if there are small Internet-only companies that only sell direct-to-consumer who are being shut out of independent reviews, or are feeling pressure to give them a cut in order to avoid being cut out.
I've heard that Stephen King considers the Dark Tower series his greatest work[1][2], but almost none of his fans do[3][4]. The intent of a work can be far divorced from the public reception of it.
here i am ben says bill
nothing but a lousy playwright
and with anything like luck
in the breaks i might have been
a fairly decent sonnet writer
i might have been a poet
if i had kept away from the theatre
...
well says i pete
bill s plays are highly
esteemed to this day
is that so says pete
poor mutt little he would
care what poor bill wanted
was to be a poet
Well, the first 4 books are some of his best writing, I think... The final 3 suck terribly, and were a great disappointment (to me, of course, maybe some people actually liked them)
Overall I agree, but I actually quite like the ending of the series. I've read lots of folks online who absolutely hated what ultimately happens to Roland - I thought it was a cool ending which was very much in keeping with the sort of "cosmic cycles" theme of the books. That said, there is a _lot_ of junk in those final three books, and the seventh one in particular drops the ball in several disappointing ways before it ends.
