Effortful reading habits and resisting the urge to defer attention
A Love Letter to Flashcards | Lesley Lai
A personal reflection on how spaced repetition and hand crafted flashcards helps me to keep understanding alive
Minimum Queue Publishing - Wesley's notes
A strategy for writing more often without losing momentum
Note-ifying all the things (with Boris Mann)
Conversation about note-taking, the overwhelm of tools, and future possibilities. (shortlink:…
Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management — Unattributed
Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0 I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?...
College professors face an emerging challenge: We know students are no longer reading entire books
Some teachers increasingly are shifting their approach to reading, assigning fewer books than they once did.
The 'Paperwork Flood': How I Drowned a Bureaucrat before dinner., Sightless Scribbles
A fabulously gay blind author.
Magic Paper
Working notes by Michael Nielsen, November 2017. Followup to (but doesn't require) my notes on Chalktalk.
What's the point of a note-taking app?
The true purpose of a note-taking app is to facilitate deep learning through three interconnected processes—externalizing ideas, internalizing them into new insights, and resurfacing them over time—and good design should minimize accidental friction while preserving the productive friction that enables genuine understanding.
supernote-cli: pen, paper, and a pipe
A recent NYT piece argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI. It's an efficient one-two punch. If you're not brainrotting on short form video content, you're outsourcing all of your thinking to an LLM. The result is a kind of cognitive strip-mining. What's left requires active defense. For me, one way of defending that capacity for deep work is with a pen on e-ink. Whether it's annotating a paper or starting a sketch from scratch, I'm intentionally making room for focused thought. My army of clawed Claudes and Codexes will just have to wait.
The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles
A fabulously gay blind author.
Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation
Reading augmentation systems increasingly help readers process text at scale. While these tools address real constraints of time and cognitive load, they often implicitly frame reading as information transmission, or "reading to discard," delegating interpretation and effort to the machine. Yet this delegation changes the outcome of reading. For example, in scholarly reading, deciding what a research text implies and why it matters is central to the work of scholarly production. We propose creative reading as an alternative goal: reading augmentation that supports readers in creating both readings and themselves as readers. By putting literary and narrative theories into conversation with scholarly sensemaking and creativity support, we present a provocation-oriented design space for valuing the process of reading as a way of preserving a plurality of readings and transforming readers over time.
Note taking apps
Notes, Outliners, Markdown Editors, PKMs, Memexs, Second Brains, Commonplace books, and more
Knowledgebase Apps (by Boris) — Semble
Treehouse: Note-taking Frontend
cybersemics/em
Wiki (by Boris) — Semble
self-hostable notion replacements (by Tyler Lawson) — Semble
v2 Editor