Yes. All right. Take it away. Thank you, Christian. Thank you, too.
If you could have the pad open at the same time,
you can read the questions.
Or I can start reading some to you while I'm here.
Oh, no. I can read them.
I was wondering whether I should maybe copy them into a new buffer.
So they are also on screen. Increase the font size a bit.
So I'm trying to do this on the fly.
Maybe a bad idea. Let's see.
Of course, you're going to capture it
into your Zettelkasten then. Is that what's happening?
Well, I can start you off.
The first question is, I wonder what they use for the fancy animations.
I was thinking about this because that's the first question
and I was thinking about this
while I copied this stuff over.
What part is the fancy part?
I can recommend books, like if anyone wants to have book recommendations
for how to make presentations with PowerPoint-like software
in a very simple way, we taught this at university.
was it now, some 15 years ago,
to students to make animation abuse
where everything was flashy and typed in or something.
Don't do this, but instead do a couple of very simple tasteful things
like fading through colors like filmmakers do, right?
Fading through black to make a scene cut
or just fade between things, the fanciness.
Presentation software stack, the fanciness.
I didn't dial fanciness up,
I just resorted to a very simple fade animations,
like fading stuff in and wipe, I think, for text effects.
That was it, more or less.
And for the lines, maybe the lines are fancy.
I was using Apple Keynote because I'm fastest with that,
but I also usually, we taught this workshop with PowerPoint
and I think the LibreOffice stack got much better with that
as well in the recent years,
but I haven't tried that in a long time
to like fiddle around and find all the knobs to dial.
Because the Apple presentation thingy has this nice feature
where you draw an arrow with a tip,
and then you have a special animation for line drawing,
which is only available for line art.
And then it draws the arrow that moves around like that.
So yeah, presentation stack, Apple Keynote,
probably not of interest for anyone here.
I usually don't use plain text presentation stuff, right?
So I tried this, I tried this with markdown presentations,
slidey things, org presentation.
It's always not enough control for the fiddly things
that I'm interested in to make the experience great.
So I wonder what are the fancy animations.
And the stack, the stack is Apple Keynote, sorry.
Okay, that's enough. Thank you for capturing.
Are you not a fan? Okay. You saw this in the recording.
Why on earth is autofill mode not enabled? I don't know.
I thought it is the default, but apparently it isn't.
I could also use visual line mode.
It's built in as well, right? Visual line mode.
It's so weird to be in this vanilla setup
and not have all my key bindings
and my normal stuff ready, so.
I am not a fan of using asterisk headings in org mode.
It's interesting to see how people have different styles of writing org content.
Am I not? What exactly? What did I do?
And nodes, just open one of these.
Okay. I could see how you could, in examples like this,
use org-mode to read-only.
Why? How you could use org-mode to use headings for this,
because it's an outliner first and foremost,
so outlining is very natural.
But when I do in my personal setup,
I also have this what's called start indentation thingy.
enabled, so that means that everything
would be indented one level from the start.
So I would probably fiddle around
with that to not get like crazy.
But also, I don't see, I don't see,
like really see when I look at this,
I didn't see a potential to create subheadings,
I mean, or even headings.
The only heading here is the title,
like in my perception of this node,
and it's one, It's two lists.
You could group these in headings.
I didn't. That's right. Where's another one?
I opened the autosave file because I'm stupid.
OK. So this one could also be probably subdivided.
But I'm also not sure.
I'm also not sure if I would gain anything structurally
if I do it like this because then I'm in a structural level
and the stuff that just flows naturally
as a sequence of text paragraphs,
this here, it's not disconnected.
It wasn't meant to be under organism
and I need to create a new same level thing
to say, hey, these are, I don't know, details or whatever.
So that's maybe the real reason.
I'm fine with writing snippets that are self-contained
and essentially one or two or three or five or whatever,
how many paragraphs,
but it's not like, it's always an outline form.
So I don't resort to this.
My onSettle custom is usually written in Markdown.
So I use subheadings for actual headings
to subdivide like I would subdivide an essay
or an article, blog post.
But that's the mode of writing that I'm in here.
It's like blog post writing.
I wouldn't start with four headings for this.
So I'm not doing that. That's a thing.
Okay, I guess I'm going to read the questions,
but I'm going to stop copying them in because I lose time.
I want to reply to you, folks.
Didn't see a need for a rack constructor.
Thank you for capturing this. Next question.
Can you use org files and all its features inside Denote?
Yes. Like this is, this is an org file
and Denote uses org headings instead of,
with Markdown, you get YAML front meta.
And with org, you get these attributes,
value attribute thingies
that are then the metadata for the node.
So yeah, the answer is yes. You get everything and on top,
a small layer of a link, link management.
That's all there is.
Next question is, where or how do you like to capture fleeting notes?
Oh, fleeting notes. If you say fleeting notes,
you also need to say non-fleeting notes
and figure out what these are.
And when you say non-fleeting notes,
and fleeting notes exist, because it's a distinction,
and there's something on both sides of this distinction.
If you say there's a distinction, there are two sides,
maybe you want to subdivide the non-fleeting notes further,
because, well, it's a non-fleeting note
isn't very descriptive. So what else do you say there?
And people have said a couple of things
to define non-fleeting nodes, for example, permanent nodes.
I guess that's a Sonke Ahrens,
permanent nodes is the most popular.
Let's stay with that, stick with that.
So if you have permanent nodes and fleeting nodes,
now we have two types of nodes. The thing is, in books,
the only, when we would talk about note-taking
and you would ask me, hey Christian,
how do you take fleeting notes?
I imagine the discussion would be in German
because that's how people usually talk to me.
I would pull out a book,
this is Object-Oriented Software Engineering,
interesting book by Iva Jacobson or Iva, Iva,
I'm not sure because, you know,
it's an English or American person.
And inside I have these fleeting notes like these
are actual paper notes square what are these three by something inch
American standard size I guess
and A6 minus the tariff part
from from another notepad these are notes i took engagement notes
if you will like engagement notes
because the margins of the book don't suffice to take
and this is related to i need more space so this is more space
these are fleeting
and as you see I have them in my pile of books
right next to me in the shelf
and folded them in this piece of paper,
labeled it with the author because I lost them.
couple of times they just fell out
when I reached for the book
and this is an envelope I shove it into the book
and then forget about processing the book again
for five or ten years. So what do I do with fleeting notes?
I do fleeting notes on paper or if I'm using an e-reader
maybe with an e-reader software annotation tool
but fleeting in the most like simple non contrived sense,
fleeting notes are meant as engagement notes
and then you do something with them
or like I just showed you,
you don't because life's short, right?
Time runs out, then you need to forget,
then you need to remember
how to restructure everything in your head
to make sense of the notes again
because they were fleeting,
they were just little scribbles and it's
It's basically ballast or waste.
I'm just carrying this with me for years
and maybe never get around to using these.
But also, I put stuff on there, maybe I do.
It doesn't hurt to keep them in there.
It's just an odd collector's habit I can't get rid of.
fleeting notes, I just capture them wherever
and then either I process them or try to throw them away
or forget about them
because they're in some inbox file on a smartphone
and then, you know, they might as well not exist,
they're just there to engage me during the reading
and if I don't process them in time,
meh like, chance is up, it sucks
Next question, like fleeting notes, permanent notes.
I'm not going to talk about these
unless someone asks a question.
Zettelkasten feels like a very cagey approach
to note-taking and knowledge management.
Doesn't it restrict one to think in certain ways
rather than what feels natural to someone?
Well, yes, but so does wearing underwear, right?
A bit of personal revelation.
When I'm working from home, I'm wearing pants.
You don't see them, but I don't need to.
But I'm also kind of self-restricting myself in a way
because there's a window,
it's dark outside, and I'm well lit.
And if I just stand up and have no pants on,
I don't care that much what the neighbors like 10, 20 meters across think.
your mileage may vary then, right?
So there are restrictions that make sense
to get to some point in your day-to-day life.
And in the case of Zettelkasten,
I try to tell people the shortest story possible
to convey a story there, but also not to cage them in
with 20 definitions of different notes.
Because all that matters is try to move your thinking
into an environment where you can write,
where you feel comfortable writing,
and where you can keep this stuff.
Because I do feel comfortable with a pencil and paper.
But what I just showed you, this might as well never have happened.
Something has changed in my brain.
most likely, when I engaged with a book like this.
As far as publications and writing is concerned,
this might as well not exist in my life,
because I didn't do something with it.
I mean, I was reading the book probably on a commute back then, on the train.
I didn't take notes on the computer right away.
So if you feel caged in,
that may be a sign that you went too far on the,
I need to do this, I need to do that stage,
and lose some of the playfulness.
There needs to be playfulness
inside of the whole procedure, otherwise it...
If you don't enjoy doing it, you won't be doing it.
And if you don't do it, then you don't get a benefit.
And it's just another chore in your life.
Then rather not do it.
So try to avoid the feeling of caginess
and do whatever you want with it
as long as you try to give your best.
That's the cage that you will benefit from
like really trying maybe not trying hard
but trying in earnest to produce
something that you can read in a year in a week whatever
and then make sense of it like that's that's that's the minimum bar and the rest
If you find yourself writing for hours on end,
during the nights, during the weekends,
whatever, and can't stop,
then you can tackle more of the prescriptions, let's say.
But everything I showed to you
was there are three essential things,
and the rest is just add-ons.
Add-ons to inspire you to think in certain ways,
but you don't have to do them. You can scratch all of this.
You just need to write to think,
and then you need to connect
to make the thinking happen in an organic way.
Otherwise, you get a storage that's very hard to navigate
and doesn't grow well. Thanks. Yeah, you're welcome.
I'm not writing another show. Yeah. Oh, combine the forums.
Like it's a Zettelkasten anonymous group there.
Like everyone's struggling.
Everyone's struggling and it's okay to like,
I'm feeling like stuck at this and that.
And then other people will be able to relate.
I can promise. How does it denote, question mark maybe,
compared to org-roam?
Roam research was setting a new trend of connectiveness
because you could create recursive structures with links
and everything is linkable.
And it's like you put every sentence in its own org heading
and then link to all the headings possibly
and then transpile them so you can expand in place
where you would link to.
I think this was the approach at least.
So this was a very interesting transclusion, not transpile.
Transclude the contents, like move them in right then and there
and not navigate to another page. It was interesting.
It never made sense for me
when people told their stories of how they used it.
I guess you can use this tool for a lot of purposes,
but the prevailing story of the Rome style note-taking tools
was like, just dump everything in it.
And garbage in, garbage out still holds.
I do keep my personal journal away
from my Zettelkasten nowadays
because I want to not restrict myself
when I feel the urge to journal,
when I want to capture something that, for example, my 15-month-old baby daughter does.
Like, first time she pulled a chair
out of another room to the next room
just to create a ladder to then climb onto another thing.
It just was, okay, this is now the time
to take note of this. in her life, like you were this
and that many months old when you did this.
So we have some reference parts. And I could put this kind
of factual information, et cetera, custom,
but also, like, what if I have a toothache or whatever,
and just want to gather data for whatever reason?
I don't know. Like this kind of personal stuff.
That's too much of the non-useful stuff
in a tool that I want to use to think.
I do see the appeal there.
But anyway, the org-roam, like that's a roam part.
You can watch a lot of videos
on that to get a feel for this.
Org-roam adopted this to make the connection easier
and replicate features. As I said, porting tools
that exist into Emacs, very nice pastime.
A lot of people do this for a lot of things,
but it's not a thinking environment.
It's just another tool to take notes in
that behave weirdly with links or interestingly with links.
And Denote does do even less.
It only offers you a couple of shortcuts
to help you find files quickly.
It does, like you see in the bottom here in the mode line,
it does just show square brackets D
instead of the whole ID, which would be rather long.
So you have a buffer list that is bearable and works.
You can read this and find the title quickly.
Things like that, Denote does things like that.
Oh, I closed the wrong.
Denote does things like that very well,
but it gets out of your way otherwise.
Just a couple of conventions
to get stuff into your file system.
I'm not sure if Org-Roam now,
what's the current state there?
Do they do ID generation out of the box?
Is there a standard popular convention or whatever?
not sure, didn't follow,
but I'm very happy that org-roam still exists
because I think porting tools into emacs is very cool,
I guess next question,
I noticed that the wikipedia link you wrote
was typed wrongly, oh no garbage in, garbage out,
I think garbage in, garbage out, garbage well spotted
how do you do that oh I typed it
I typed it from yeah right i didn't
i didn't paste this right yeah yeah
this janitorial tasks that's the umbrella term
how do you deal with this
like if you put stuff like this into into your notes
you hopefully get a 404 code from wikipedia
because the page doesn't exist
let's not check um you get a 404 and then you could write a tool
that checks all the links periodically
and tells you about broken links like a broken link checker
that then looks up maybe automatically
the last good version on archive.org
and then the Wayback Machine
and then corrects the link with the archived version
because the live one is gone like this happens all the time on the internet
and even if you don't mistype
you could you know things go out of out of order so
What do you do with that? You need to automate this.
I'm not clicking every link manually.
I have like, what's it now, 11,000 notes or something.
This is not a thing that humans are good at.
I'm not good at this.
I will never finish anything else if I do this manually.
So write a tool, write a script,
get a script from the interwebs.
There are tools like this plenty that can do it.
And then you just need to do the wiring.
and that should help.
You could automate this in Emacs, of course, right?
For every file in my node directory,
look if there's a link inside
and then check the URL or whatever.
Also works for inter-node connections.
This could also break if you rename files or remove files
and don't use a denote function,
which I believe takes care of backlinks and forward links
and keeps them organized.
If you do this manually on another device,
out of denote, out of Emacs, in Vim, I don't know, then yeah, mistakes happen
and you need to deal with mistakes
and heal and create scar tissue there in some way
so write janitorial tools to do that it's also,
i'm mentioning the term janitorial tools
a couple of times now
because that's the term that we in the forums at least
usually talk about things like find orphaned notes,
notes that no one links to find broken links,
clean up references reformat nodes, stuff like this.
Find large nodes and then suggest them
to the user to break them up.
Like these are tasks that you can do mechanically,
but also it's better if you use a tool to get started,
otherwise you waste a lot of time.
Next question, when I complete, next long question.
I'm going to copy this over because maybe
When I completely reworked my configs from two years ago,
I also tried some of these packages for making nodes,
but none of them actually fit my purpose,
because I do not like the idea of splitting up my ideas.
I'm writing prose.
I collect material, reading lists, and so on
in just one big file. Everything fits in.
In this notebook file, I do archiving from time to time.
I search these files in Finder
to find old notes I would like to go back to.
So if I write a paper,
it's basically an extract from my old notes
that only have one structure.
when I took them time structures my thought and my notes
but they would get lost if I split them up in a network
like structure like a wiki etc custom my two cents
by the way I work on legal sociological topics
i'm a lawyer by training you know Luhmann was a german german style
weird sociologist
and sociology studies are like the first four semesters at university,
where a lot of, I don't know any of the terms in English,
a lot of these things were theories
in the loosest and broadest sense.
Some were just models of how things might behave,
but nobody knew because they were not empirically backed.
Some were empirically backed,
and then also there was some sense making.
And then also in sociology,
you have some structure analysis of,
like demographics and things like that.
So very, very hard fact and statistics heavy things.
So broad topic. And there's a lot of interconnections.
I can see the approach here.
I'm not going to defend Zettelkasten
so that you in the end become a Zettelkasten aficionado
or whatever I mean, if it works, fine, more power to you like
reminds me of Twyla Tharp's like the shoebox approach
or whatever it was called
where she just dumped everything inside
for her next project like an idea box,
like real physical things like oh, I want to, I don't know,
like this weird 8-bit do controller inside
and then eventually she would spread out everything she collected,
newspaper clippings and I don't know, maybe toenails or some weird stuff,
I don't know what she actually put there
and then make sense of this
and think of something of putting these sorted pieces into context
and if you just dump stuff into a notebook file
and then rework the stuff, yeah, fine
One answer is Zettelkasten is great for mathematics.
Or maybe you can have... Oh, next question.
Sorry, I jumped. So my answer is, this was not a question,
and I'm happy for you. So that's still an answer.
Next question. How Zettelkasten is useful
for highly mathematical STEM academic fields
like computer science or engineering fields,
like when studying a STEM field?
I need to unpack the acronym again maybe for the audience.
M is mathematics. Engineering is E.
Science and tech, tech, techno,
I don't know, maybe technical. I could look this up, right?
STEM, what was STEM again? I'm doing a bad job.
Science, technology, engineering, mathematics.
Okay, so probably technology is the computer stuff.
Yeah, STEM.
Dear audience, that's science, technology,
engineering, mathematics, academic fields.
What should we make notes of?
The important bits are interconnected in a hierarchy,
usually chapters of a book.
Yes, someone did the job of making the order
out of the chaotic findings
that people did over hundreds of years for you.
That's an order. But there are also many textbooks.
So opinions may vary. The presentation may vary.
Some textbooks may click with you,
while others stay opaque, and you can't get into the meat.
Sorry, I'm just typing the answer right now.
Copying information to another box is not, yeah.
Yeah, let's see what the first answer is.
Someone posted that Zettelkasten is great for mathematics,
incredible for computer science.
With OrgBabel you can have living source code, yes,
that you can execute from the node,
also true for a formula,
and LaTeX in interspersing of images and SVGs.
You can even use Agda if you want to.
Ah, I think I know who typed the answer.
Hello, Oliver. If you want to have living proofs in your nodes,
even inline LaTeX is in here. That's, yeah, yeah, yeah.
quote the sentence as is and add, yeah, add something,
maybe your own summary.
I would suggest add your own summary
because we're looking at the etherpad, right?
Maybe I just copy this over so you can all the either
pets indentation is missing with what Org is doing.
And the answer was probably submitted by Oliver
just in case someone wants to see
who that could have been with the Acta reference
because nobody uses Acta,
nobody in the world maybe so Acta is just a yeah
let's say it's good for proofing the code that you type
as you type it in the compilation set very weird
if you've never heard of this so check that out
so question was how Zettelkasten is useful for these kinds of things
yeah it sounds like in these kinds of fields
that you only deal with facts
that's also kind of sort of true for psychology where you have a lot of
and also law where you at least in at least in German
and our style of law where you have a lot of where you have thick books of law
and very very little records,
that's not the right phrasing,
where you don't rely on the ruling as much as you do in, for example, the USA,
where you need to be aware of every court ruling to then put stuff into context
and all of this is like the current how you do law.
I don't know.
I'm not a lawyer and also not good at this in English.
So, sorry.
If I don't find the cool words and technical terms,
you probably all know.
What do you do with these kinds of things?
You need to collect a lot of stuff.
Like the previous questionnaire mentioned,
hey, I'm just copying stuff over
and then I have a good time and can write about this
and create prose in the end.
Like with mathematics, you can't.
You can't do a lot when you're still working on the foundations.
Like, what do you want to do there?
You don't innovate there. You just need to learn the stuff.
Typing things out and creating your own organization
of how things are connected there,
that's where the depth of processing increases,
like the actual depth of processing
so that it takes more effort
and affects more parts of your brain, basically,
which then helps with remembering stuff.
I'm trying not to go into a 10 minute tangent here, but
If you've ever tried to memorize stuff with flashcards
and you put a, I don't know, coffee stain
or a weird scribble or spilled something on one of these cards,
actual physical cards there,
this card now has another piece of information
that is actually important
because it makes the card stand out
more and more worthy of being remembered
because now one of these cards
has this coffee circle thingy
and all the others don't so this one stands out
and this may actually improve
how you learn this particular fact
that you want to remember or memorize
Similar, like what kind of principle
do people postulate is at play here?
Again, last time I went into
this kind of stuff was at university,
so I'm not sure if there's something new
in the field of flashcard learning.
I'm not aware of anything, let's say.
And the idea back then that we spread
and that was taught to us was like this.
That more information and more context and more stimuli
and making things more interesting,
that's what makes it memorable.
if you go for a walk and then associate things with places.
Going for a walk is a different activity
than imagining going for a walk.
It's also different from not doing anything
and just sitting in your chair
and relaxing because you're not engaged.
You're losing, like you're using
a bit of your brain matter to do the work
while the rest of your body is stagnant.
You don't smell anything different.
You don't hear, see, feel on your skin,
everything's constant,
like you're in a, what are these called?
These chambers where you're locked
into very salty water, I think.
Floating chambers, so sensual deprivation chambers.
You're depriving yourself of a lot of sensual input
if you just try to really focus
into everything with your head.
If you engage more of your body,
if you engage more of your senses,
then you have an easier time there.
What does it have to do with this answer?
My answer would be the value is in rephrasing,
in making your own connections eventually.
I don't know, the foundational laws of geometry,
there's no room for innovation,
but there's maybe a room for association.
Like, hey, I remember this, like, if you can't figure out
what the name of a certain axiom, lemma, whatever it is, and it has a name,
adding your own story to the note doesn't hurt.
If you say, hey, this is what my grandfather
taught me with wire and sticks when we tried to measure
whatever in the sand on a vacation one day.
And these kinds of things make it more memorable.
And that's at least something that you could need to then,
which is the ultimate purpose of STEM at university,
then you can pass the tests. Like that's it.
You either, and eventually you embody the knowledge, right?
If you do this stuff over and over again,
then you don't need to look up
how to do a certain kind of proof.
And you just do the proof when you need to do the proof.
But maybe you forget all the kinds of weird proofs
that you encountered in your life
because you only remember the 10 most weird ones,
but you had 15 in your life.
And what's about the, what do you do
with the five missing ones? They just fade away.
But if you capture them in some way or another,
as superficial as it may be,
and you still have access to this later
when you need to check your personal inventory
of mathematical proofs so my answer would be
let's type in my answer
on either pad would be I'm not able to type.
Sorry. My answer would be this.
Foundational knowledge is important for tests mostly
and eventually becomes your inventory of skills.
Synth programming, like I don't need to look up for loops,
I just do for loops and that's it, right?
But still, I do have notes about for loops, I think,
in different languages, like Python,
the, what is it called, list comprehension.
I'm not using Python, but it's so quirky.
It's quirky and I captured this on a note
because I needed to get myself used to the pieces
and I needed to look at the syntax anyway,
and then this is that part and this goes there.
And I did this work, like this separation stuff on a note
to then do the work with more engagement,
like engage more so I can remember more later.
I don't remember all the details,
but I do remember there were different parts,
and then I can look up the note.
And it helps me refresh my memory rather quickly,
because it's written by me for me
in a way that I'm writing these notes
for 15 years or something.
16, at least, 16 years or something.
So it's much better than looking, especially now,
it's much better than going to the web
and doing a web search for the same topic,
because I will probably not get the useful resource
that I relied on some eight years ago anyway,
but some garbage instead,
maybe AI generated stuff, I don't know.
So I have my personal copy of this
and it's not just copying the thing into a box,
like from one box into another,
from the public internet box into my own buffer,
that's a custom that's closer to me,
like a fridge is closer to my kitchen
and where I want to eat when I'm hungry
than going to the supermarket
or out into the wild and hunt animals,
like this is all about proximity
and also brought about ownership, like I own these notes
and I still take responsibility
for what I put on them to some degree
like sometimes they're really bad
and I want to distance myself,
but still yeah, so that's it, I'm just I'm leaving,
I'm not typing this out, I'm leaving copy box fridge,
there was a term for this, wait a second,
setup custom fridge can be fridge-like buffer of knowledge
I'm just, let me just try to copy this note verbatim into the etherpad
and then see whether you folks can do something with it.
The formatting. See appendix A. I am doing this here.
Appendix A. I'm not going to read this,
but then you have a FridgeLab buffer of knowledge.
Local link in the supply chain. That was the term.
Didn't remember that one.
It's at least a local link in supply chain.
Also, engagement doing the work of not copying,
but rephrasing, organizing,
but sometimes also just typing the stuff in
that's how people romanticize learning a basic
like there were magazines with a lot of code listings
and they just typed the code it was quite some effort
you eventually got better at this
but you did do mistakes and then you needed to correct
and look through the source code carefully to spot the typo
That's apparently virtue, at least people claim it's a virtue.
I don't deny it's a virtue because I went through the same kind of crap
and I believe it strengthened my character, for sure, but still.
Maybe it's not that useful, but maybe it is. I don't know.
There's studies I remember,
but I don't remember any interesting results.
It's not like it's a 10x improvement
of recall if you type this, but it may be significant.
Just check it out for yourself. I'm not sure.
Next question, sorry.
In your experience, would you say that you reuse most of your nodes?
Watching your demo, I thought that more nodes you create,
the less you might reuse them. Yes, that's true.
I have 11,000 nodes or something,
and I don't use 11,000 nodes every day.
I can only use a fraction of them.
But let's say you have the Feynman Darling nodes,
then you would probably use these.
Imagine you have the same 12 Darlings for a year.
Then you use these 12 thingies for one year more often.
than most of your other nodes,
because these become your entry points
into what's in my Zettelkasten today.
These become your entry points
of what do I want to work on today?
These become your, where can I put
the weird stuff that I just found?
Does it stick to any of these surfaces?
Entry point into the process.
But let's say, five years later,
maybe these 12 Feynman darlings were your darlings
during university studies for STEM field,
where you had a hard time figuring out
how the technical system works for your benefit.
And then five years later, you're in a job and you don't need all of them
because your subject matters from university, they're gone.
you're not at a day job and you have different darlings
whatever your day job is
maybe you're a mathematician at an insurance company
so you will probably have insurance related domain darlings pouring in
and some academic darlings falling off the bandwagon
because no time for these maybe other hobbies come in
like i didn't have anything related to child Rearing,
bearing is when you produce them
and put them into the wild, right?
Rearing is when you let them grow up, I don't know
Like when you have children and make them not die
and get larger and do stuff, right?
I did have a couple of things in advance, but
That was not a daily concern. Now it is.
Now I'm a father and that's a new concern in my life.
Getting things done also tackled this, right?
If you remember getting things done, everyone,
you had areas of responsibility.
It's a new area of responsibility and you could represent,
sorry, you could represent these in your Zettelkasten,
if you find that you can spell out your areas of responsibility
well, then you can see, well, I've learned something new,
can I become a better person
in one of my core areas of responsibility?
Yes or no? Why not?
Then you will use these more than the other notes.
Like the weird thing you found last month.
Last month, you will probably not reference that weird thing every day.
Natural process. But it's there.
And eventually you get back to something,
and then you serve access to this like that's the that
and whatever this changes like going through these processes
change you if I if I spend a month getting nerd sniped on
I don't know chocolate manufacturing or something
then I don't need this ever these things ever again most likely
but going through the procedure of
becoming the master chocolate manufacturer of my town,
at least in theory, will do something with me
when I encounter the next topic.
I will think of chocolate manufacturing.
I wouldn't have thought of chocolate manufacturing before.
In fact, I didn't think about chocolate
manufacturing yesterday. I just made this up on the spot.
What does this say about me today?
Maybe because we were out of chocolate,
maybe because I don't know,
maybe there's nothing that looks like chocolate here
I don't know so it just came up and now it's there
and things have changed for the better,
for the worse, I don't know but they've changed
and that's the real takeaway there
where do you put the effort?
where do you want to put the effort? and will it pay off?
maybe if not, then maybe spend the time on something else
like don't try to exactly customize something you hate
just to I don't know,
do your due diligence if you don't want to
because then you'll hate the process
that's worse than not using nodes a lot next questions,
how are nodes structured and accessed
when the nodes grow from 10k to 100k nodes?
yes, that's a field of exploration,
I mean that the lower realm there I don't know anybody
who's using a hyperlinked 100k node archive.
I do know people who have a lot of text files
like the Evernote style
they capture everything and put the verbatim copy into their stuff
and then they have a lot more items of course
but these don't really count,
these are like web clippings of websites themselves
I've read how many hundreds of websites today
I could have captured everything automatically,
but they wouldn't, like the files there, the clippings,
they wouldn't have contributed
anything meaningfully to my knowledge base,
because I'm not thinking about the stuff,
I'm thinking about the stuff that I'm spending time on.
What about that?
Yeah, how are nodes structured and accessed
when the nodes go from one to 100k?
I will imagine that it becomes a matter that's speculation.
We'll see. My speculation is this.
it's going to be self-similar, like Mandelbrot images,
where you have recursive patterns.
First, you have a couple of nodes.
You can leave through them digitally or physically easily.
And then eventually, you need to rely on structures
or some kinds of entry points,
which we usually call structures,
thanks to Sascha. Perfect. Thank you.
And the clue there is,
Eventually, you have hundreds or maybe thousands,
not hundreds or thousands, of structure nodes.
And then you have the same problem
that you had on the lower base layer.
And now you will probably look for another tool.
But there is nothing else that's not also a structure node
but is structuring other structures mostly
instead of structuring the low-level nodes.
But this distinction, I want to point out, doesn't pay off.
it seems like it doesn't pay off
to say hey i have these foundational permanent nodes
and then i have these meta nodes
these these maps and structures
and then i have these super mega structures
which are not permanent
which are not structures which are not
I don't know this doesn't seem to pay off
because eventually there is another level and another level
and also sometimes you want to talk
about a structure as a data point
like hey I did this writing project
once it was really cool link to writing project
and the writing project is a table of contents huge hierarchy or whatever.
Is it not a link to a thing?
Back then you get into all these weird academic questions
about the nature of links
and there's no gold at the end of that rainbow, let's say.
At least I've never seen anyone come back with any gold.
I've seen people come back with very long faces
and sadness in their eyes
because all the effort, all the metadata was for naught.
So, how do you do this?
You figure out, when you get to 10k,
you will probably have figured,
and if you do 10k, not like web clippings,
but really like you did put in effort to get there
and type everything yourself in one way or another
you would have figured out something
that kind of sort of works for you around that milestone.
And then I believe in you,
you will be equipped to get to 20k, 30k,
because you feel comfortable in your notes.
And then you can expand further.
And it will probably look different
for someone in STEM fields than for an artist.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't know.
Maybe a fine arts artist would woodcrafter,
maybe these kinds of folks will have different structures
and rely more on visuals, schemas,
whole part relationships, whereas mathematicians may not.
but I don't know, I don't know, we need to compare
and this will be the interesting like
if the internet survives and we all survive
and also Zettelkasten as an idea sticks on
I hope we can have this discussion
every year in five years, in ten years
and then see how people transparently evolve
their gardens, their processes, their note-taking systems
next question not a question but i would be very interested
in your thoughts on this video
by westenberg okay it's it's this is not spam
i i don't uh there's joe westenberg's uh youtube channel
why i deleted my second brain
a journey back to real thinking uh
I think I didn't watch the video but read an article.
Not sure where. Let me check my Zettelkasten.
It's not on screen sharing. That was stupid.
I'm probably not going to watch it right now with everyone here,
so my thoughts on deleting and stuff like that.
I do remember there was a very cleverly written, well-written post
and the claim was, from my perspective,
and that's not doing the work of
It's not doing the work of the author justice.
But the shortest summary is that there seems to be false contradiction,
where the contradiction stems from how the opposite side,
the note taking, the deliberate note taking,
taking a lot of notes,
all the notes every time, stuff, like how this is presented.
I would say this is more on the collecting
and not on the connecting side of things.
So like I mentioned for the, some 30 minutes ago
when I talked about Roam, Roam Research.
If you start your day with a daily note,
journal style, and then branch out from there,
you do at least have time as a structure
that helps you to organize what you put in.
But also, it can get very messy
and very weirdly interconnected,
like this meme of the with a guy
standing in front of a board
with all these lines connecting things
and just, you know, with the madness in his eyes
you can do a lot of stuff in there.
But at a certain point, it gets hard
to also get out of your own head, let's say.
If you do it in this kind of style,
it can get hard to get off your own head.
And one litmus test that you may find enjoyable
if you struggle with this
is to publish more. Because having access
to a very deeply interconnected web of stuff
thoughts, ideas, notes, wisdoms, whatever
very deeply connected,
like not a pile, yarn, wool, what's the ball?
Ball of yarn? No, that's boring.
Let's say like you have a lot of yarn
and then you just create chaos and entropy
and can't untangle it. It's a very tangled mess.
So it's a very dense, dense thingy
that's now its own kind of structure. Like if you have this
And in your head, when you think about your notes,
you may have some interesting pathways there.
But you need to serialize and put into a linear order
in order to communicate.
Otherwise, people cannot follow your thought.
it's a pity because we still rely
on the book style of writing
and also hypertext which is making navigation easy
but not telling a story easier in our modern times
but we still rely a lot on books
which take take a lot of intertwined stuff,
put it into one order so you can read from start to finish.
But then, in order for you to make sense of this,
you need to chop it up,
associate with things you already know,
and then attach things and create a new kind of structure
through the narrative,
because it's only one kind of presentation
that's given to you.
And there may also be different kinds of presentations,
like I also mentioned for the STEM fields,
where you have different textbooks
from different eras of mathematics foundations,
and then you see, hey, this one clicks, this one doesn't.
Why? It's the same stuff, but they present it differently.
And the presentation matters. The presentation matters.
And if you only deal with the chaos,
the weird entanglement,
if you capture everything and anything,
how many, I don't know, how many hairs you lost that day or whatever.
If you capture everything in there,
you don't create the kind of value
that is linearizable into thought,
which also makes reading your own stuff later,
maybe unbearable, maybe at least hard and making sense.
Now we come back to one of the earlier questions,
like, why do I not use outlines?
Because OrgNode allows me to do outlines.
Well, I try to write my notes as blog posts,
very short blog posts, microblogging, if you will,
paragraphs, a couple of paragraphs.
Maybe it's also more nested because it's a huge topic.
It's a complex topic. That also happens.
But then it's more like an article,
a long blog post, or an essay,
but never just vomiting thought out onto the page,
because then you will get back to the note
and you will find, hey, there's a lot of vomit.
But you never follow this kind of phrase with nice.
I enjoyed reading that. It's always me.
Oppressing because of its mass,
it's also getting in the way of having new ideas
because whatever is there and you need to tangle it
and then you lost your new genuine idea,
this can also happen.
So I'm not sure what the Westenberg video contains,
but the sentiment there of deleting everything,
it makes sense if you find yourself in a situation
where you don't have a productive system.
and the notes from 2009 in my own Zettelkasten
aren't of the highest quality standards
I rewrite most of them when I encounter them,
but I can still use a couple as is and sometimes they're just garbage,
but as Luhmann said garbage like trickles to the ground
and forms a nice sediment layer there in the septic tank of your thought machine,
your thought thinking environment.
But clear water separates and then rises to the top
and that's what you work with.
it's never going to be 100% useful. But if it's 90% garbage
and if the water is, if the septic tank is never clearing,
then you probably need to start
over and rethink your approach.
Maybe there was just too much garbage,
too much toxic waste in there, whatever that means, right?
So I do understand this, but also I would say
maybe maybe they tried to do too much with a different mindset
and it just didn't click and then they,
you know next question is there a danger?
also, wait a second, answer do not probably a lot of collection,
not a lot of stinking in the Zettelkasten to some purpose.
Usually. Conflation was the word I was fishing for.
Usually posts videos like this.
Conflate note taking as a dumping ground
for stuff with something that is valuable in the long term.
Also if this was our dear friend Westenberg
I think the note count also was higher,
but I might confuse them with someone else.
The note count was way higher than mine. Note count.
But then also, you know, there's the sign
of going for quantity in...
just capture anything, like capturing,
that's not the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is finding, making connections happen,
having thoughts and working on problems
you really want to solve in the long term.
So next question.
Is there a danger that with the settled custom process,
that the process gets a bit in the way of the content?
yes, especially if you do it like old school style
if you find that your handwriting sucks
and you want to type things
on a typewriter like that kind of process
definitely gets in the way
that's going to be your bottleneck
you can't find black paper
and put it into your typewriter and then like that's not the speed of thought
that's the speed of, I don't know, my long deceased grandmother
but yeah it's not like a strive for speed of thought tools
not needing a typewriter
and then next step reduce ritual reduce rituals and ceremony
What I mean by that is if you find yourself doing the same moves
or similar moves over and over again,
but they don't contribute
to having more cool ideas per week, then maybe ditch these,
apart from the day timestamp,
having a title, hashtags, and content,
and also being very, very careful about quoting my sources.
I don't do much with my et cetera.
I cannot give up quoting my sources
because then I'm plagiarizing, stealing,
forgetting where I get ideas from and confuse.
And I get out because I'm aware of the problem there.
I'm also not trusting my own notes anymore.
would not be trusting my own notes anymore
i need to properly cite so then i can see hey
this block has no quotations that's mine
and i can trust this it's not like hey this is maybe mine
maybe this is a verbatim quote from a book like this
is not helping that's a ceremony
that's paying off in the long term also
so that when you write something
you have all the sources at hand
that's a useful ceremony title
is just a way of summarizing the content
do it like an excerpt, right?
you have the whole content, that's your etc.
do a short summary, that may be your introduction.
So have a way to quickly get a glimpse of the relevance
before having to read the whole settle
when you encounter it years from now.
And then have a one, that's one sentence summary,
and then have an even more condensed form that's a title.
The title is basically your API,
the interface for you and your nodes.
And it needs to uphold some kind of contract.
And if it just is, like, this is my second note,
that's not useful. This is just a technical limitation
because you can't have the same file name twice.
That's not going to be useful.
But if you give yourself the permission to take time
of titling your notes in one way and also changing titles,
because you will know from writing introductions
the further you get along,
the more and more you need to rewrite your introductions
because your understanding changes same for titles
titles don't always stay consistent or constant
that's why I don't link by title, because I would then need
to go through my node archive and also need to go to
my node archive and need to correct all the links
that's a janitorial task I like to not do, if I can
So answer here, less ceremony, fewer ceremonies, plural.
Try to only do the minimum possible, minimum viable thing.
And using Emacs and D-Node, you get a lot of defaults.
And then you need to worry
not about IDs and tags that much,
or where to put them and how to put them.
You can omit keywords. You can leave keywords out.
They don't scale anyway.
But they may be interesting as a way to group,
but also Sascha from zettelkasten.de, from our website,
Sascha also found that, I believe, he,
structures win in the long term.
Manual created hubs and overviews
win over machine generated lumps.
Because you need to reorient yourself
in the search results all the time.
That's not as useful as having a pathway
through your nodes that you can follow.
It may not be a pathway through all of your nodes, of course,
but it may be a pathway from entry point into some topic.
That's why some things are essential and others aren't.
And the essential stuff, try to do it quickly, get better at it,
practice the movements, then they get out of the way,
and then you can focus on having ideas
and typing them at speed of thought,
more or less, and then you're good.
I hope. Wishing you all the best. Next and last question.
How do you navigate looking at all posts with a certain text?
This might be an emacs, already new to emacs.
I just may have answered this.
How do you navigate looking at all posts with a certain text?
Let me go to my actual node archive.
and then php no language learning ah
this is not my setup I'm very clumsy
I'm sorry, I don't know swift language learning
ah that's that's a boring one php By this time, I could have also,
ah, there's the model. This would be an entry point
into my PHP atom molecule organism learning journey
where I tried to practice, what's visual line mode, sorry,
where I tried to practice this atom molecule thing on something new.
I haven't used PHP in a long time
and found that I wasn't, yeah, you can see it on the screen also
like language primitives are the atoms,
I think molecules are more like idioms or patterns that are PHP special in PHP
and different in other languages in Python
would be list comprehension that's in a molecule
and but also you can make a point for hey,
this comprehension is more like a syntactical thing,
no no get out of here, like the for loop is the syntactical atom
and the molecule is using the for loop
with weird other stuff
to then make the list comprehension happen.
That's my argument there, okay? So what do we do with this?
I use this as an entry point if I want to see,
hey, what kind of stuff did I take notes on
to get a better understanding
on multiple levels of the language.
And project structure conventions
and usually another language
that I use more here would be, but I can't remember now.
Funny, right? I can't remember how I would need to look,
but I think I'm too clumsy in Emacs
to do it live on camera, sorry.
But the organisms part here would also be like my own inventions,
let's say in code,
like my own discoveries where I found that in Swift, for example,
you can express things on the type level
in a very sexy way sometimes.
And then I would put these there as well.
So these are also,
There are organisms to discover in the language reference,
but there are also organisms to discover in the world,
and then they are your own inventions,
discoveries, more or less. And that's a sign of mastery.
If you work more on these things,
then you don't need to worry
about the basics of the language anymore.
So I can use this as an entry point
to get into things that are very PHP-esque.
When do I need this? When I want to talk about PHP,
like I do now.
Why do I show this when the question is about tags?
Because if I search for... Which one do I take?
Let's try grep. php. Yep, grep exited the anomaly.
Dang, why? Option requires an argument.
Yes, eshell is there.
So let's just use rg, ripgrep and then ripgrep for php.
And you see I get, I can do filenames only, right?
Let's not worry. I get a lot of, let's just scroll up.
I get a lot more hits here for the PHP tech,
which is only about PHP specific things,
not about anything that I do in PHP.
Like, I don't know, I don't take Laravel or Filament,
which are frameworks, libraries in PHP,
the Zend library or whatever, I don't know many.
Like I wouldn't take everything
and anything that is related to the php ecosystem
with the php hashtag.
Why? Because then the tag becomes useless.
I only tag things that are about the language.
Like how do I pass variables to php includes that's php related.
And you see these are... I'm still not at the top.
now i'm at the top these are a lot more findings than you could
these don't fit on the screen
these are three pages i believe
and the note about my language learning journey was
wasn't even one full page here's white space
there wasn't okay right but still there's much more stuff
the hashtag I don't use for navigating.
I only use this, let's say, the shotgun approach.
I think Sascha on our Zettelkasten blog post,
don't remember which post, mentioned this as well.
Sometimes you need a sniper rifle.
Sometimes you need a shotgun.
And the hashtag-based search would be I don't know what I'm looking for.
It was PHP related. I hope I use the hashtag correctly
and then kill all these nodes from my archive.
The metaphor doesn't work that way,
but still you get a lot of results here
and you could use this as a way to filter from 11,000 nodes
down to 50 or so, maybe less.
And if you got this far, then you can start to do it in a mechanical way again.
But wait, if you have 100 or 1000 nodes in the results there,
then you can't mechanically go through all the nodes again.
You can maybe skim and look
for something that catches your eye,
if you're lucky, and if that's the thing
that works for you.
but usually no, like usually the text become useless
then maybe tag groups become more useful
like PHP and LSP which is on screen here
like then maybe the combination of two tags
that reduces the search terms enough
like this is basically glorified full text search
where you highlight certain terms of importance that's it,
I wouldn't use I wouldn't put more effort in there
It's also maybe useful to group things by topic.
For example, study notes like, I don't know,
this is my undergrad, third semester,
what do you do in the third semester, I don't know,
history of philosophy of science of birds,
very long course name, and then week 10.
And then you assemble everything
with this very technical tagging.
Then you can use these folders
to loosely group stuff together
that happened during that week.
And if you have 10 required readings and then do five of them,
but they're also not closely interrelated,
you will have read five to 10 different sources that you could process.
You could maybe then also create an overview node
as a preparation for the seminar
whatever happens at university.
Then the hashtag becomes just a way to group things.
But once you create the structure node,
you don't need the hashtags to navigate anymore.
You could then maybe use the hashtags not to navigate
but to to clump, to create collections,
pre-assembled to some degree collections of things that exist already,
get them out there and then review them.
Like Twyla Tharp again, dumping all the notes on a table,
all the stuff on the table,
not just notes, all the clippings and so on and so on,
and then making sense of them.
That's what you can use a hashtag search for in the longterm.
And I'm not convinced about navigational use in the longterm.
which doesn't mean that it won't work for you,
but I can't recommend it.
I can't recommend trying to do it that way.
So my answer is going to be, how do you navigate
looking at all posts with certain tags? I don't.
Tags are just a way to loosely group notes and stuff in general
so that you can find potentially, PP, why doesn't P work?
Potentially relevant pieces of information more quickly.
Navigational aids. Create navigational aids
things that help you navigate like this is for a week
what did I say 10 of semester three
uh the history of the sociology
of the philosophy of science of birds
or something lump things together there then you have a
then you have a scratch pad to think on you do this
did do this when you went to university with paper anyway, right?
You would get your college book or whatever
and then you would take notes and these like that location
of that piece of paper in your college book
in your whatever notes folder
that's the important piece of information
and the scratchpad, the thinking environment for this course
and if you have all the other things
that you ever did at your disposal as well
maybe pull them in maybe pull them in
and then bring them to the discussion
with your professor or your teaching assistant
and asking about, well, I read these five books
that you recommended for this week.
Thank you for recommending five whole books
for one week of reading. I really enjoyed that. Long pause.
And then you say, I also thought about other topics
and brought them into a, I don't know, dialectic or position.
What do you think about foxes in that regard
and their own history and subjectivity
when it comes to the bird's point of view or something, right?
You can only do this if you either know this by heart
because you do this a lot,
think a lot about this stuff or you do this,
you stumble upon this and then look for oppositions,
look for certain patterns in your notes
and then try to pull them in and represent them again
so they actually do exist and then you can work with this,
you can get on people's nerves
you can write weird papers, essays
and then get through your university studies quickly
maybe also become an interesting columnist,
I don't know, I've never been a columnist Right.
I think these are all the questions.
I'm going to delete the leftover ones.
I hope you enjoyed some of the answers.
Thank you so much. Thank you. That's a lot.
We'll go back and get everything transcribed as well
and then you can turn that into other articles in the future
because that's how this all works, right?
It all turns into writing. It all does.
All the rest is garbage.
I don't know why we invented anything else.
It's only useful to transfer language before writing,
but now you can just read.
We have two people in the big blue button room
who are still around, but I think they've got their, like,
they don't have microphones set up.
So I don't know if you want to just, like, CryptKNFL,
if you want to just follow up through the etherpad,
or email, I guess, in case you have further questions.
But yeah, if you want to wrap up,
I know it's getting a little bit late over there,
you're in your time zone. Thank you so much.
Yeah, all right. Thank you. You're welcome.
Thanks for joining and listening.
Okay, I'll wrap it up here then.