An analog note taking system that emphasizes connections between atomic ideas. First introduced by Niklas Luhmann.

Related:

• Richard Hamming talked about the value of connecting disparate ideas to think creatively about problems.
• Andy Matuschak uses a similar system and makes it available publicly on his website.
• Luhmann’s essay on learning how to read talks about the demands on the reader to learn from ‘theoretical texts’ by uncovering what is important and connecting it to existing information.

See also:

• Communicating with slip boxes Translated essay from Luhmann
• Zettelkasten, Emacs, and Creative Thinking - essay on how I implemented Zettelkasten for notes.alexkehayias.com
• Zettelkasten community
• org-roam

It seems like we should have better options for a full fledged, on-demand dev environment, that lives in the cloud, available from any internet connection, and you only pay for what you need. Why don’t we see more remote development environments?

Overtly stating or doing something for the purposes of letting other people know your position on a social issue for fear of being looked down on.

See also:

• Difficulty discussing social issues
• Signaling as a service

User experience for a non-trivial web UI tends to degrade over time as more functionality is added and more engineers add to it.

This is analogous to entropy where poor UX is correlated with the number of macro states possible within the system (user interface). The number of states increases as more functionality is added and engineers tend to add more lines of code than they delete (heat).

If you define the ideal UX as a screen with a single button that solves the user’s problem then increasing entropy is adding more complexity (states). Complexity makes it less clear what the user should do and makes it harder for the engineers to focus on a specific use case.

See also:

• Conway’s Law shows people and organizations are a meta-agent acting on systems to increase or decrease entropy.

The subjective quality of the user’s motivations and feelings towards the interactions with a product.

From an entry point uncover all of the possible actions a user could take in a user interface. Actions are anything that causes the state of the application to change.

This could be used to automatically generate the plan space for use with graph analysis or working on planning problems (e.g. what are all the ways a user can accomplish a specified goal). You could use the state machine with a planning AI algorithm to generate optimal sequences of actions to achieve the specified end state.

Is this possible to do just by looking at code and not running the full browser session e.g. static analysis?

See also:

• The Fuzzing Book (specifically GUICoverageFuzzer which explores the user interface to generate a grammar and state machine)
• Fuzzing

A book by scientist J.E. Oliver on research and discoveries with thought on how to apply his approach more broadly.

ISBN-10: 0231076207

PowerPoint has low information density. It forces the author to communicate using bullet points whcih incorrectly emphasizes (or de-emphasizes) key information.

For example at NASA, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board formed to investigate the tragic accident that killed all seven astronauts, found that presentations given to officials (using PowerPoint) were over-optimistic about the dangers of damage to the wing. This was due to the use of bullet points and slides.

Memo style (long form writing) is better for communicating complicated/complex ideas.

Read the essay

It seems possible to generate all states of a purely functional UI so that it can be analyzed and audited.

An application of this would be to render screenshots of a user journey so they can be audited for quality, detect unexpected states, fuzz for errors, and provide linting errors/warnings when a screen is too complicated (e.g. too many states that it could be confusing).

See also:

• UX (user experience)
• UX entropy
• Measuring UX
• Deriving user flows and optimal path to goals
• Fuzzing
• Fuzzing Book chapter on GUIsCrawling UI

SCQA stands for the *s*ituation, *c*omplication, *q*uestion, and *a*nswer. It’s a way of writing an introduction in a way that clearly communicates the key question a piece of writing will answer.

I’ve found this greatly improves business writing and it’s easy to coach others to do.

See also:

• Introduced by Barbara Minto in The Minto Pyramid Principle
• Writing is thinking
• When to write a brief

Mathematician and computer scientist.

Important ideas:

• What matters is working on important problems or work on things that could lead to something important. Otherwise, why bother? He emphasized the need to work on the most important problems in your respective field–both knowing the problems and dropping everything to work on it when an approach to solving it emerges.
• You don’t need to be a genius or the best–but you do need to work hard and learn what works so you can seize the opportunity when it arises.
• To make important contributions you need to work on the right problem, at the right time, in the right way.

See also:

• Lecture - You and your research
• Lecture - Learning to Learn
• Lecture - Creativity

Physicist and author of ‘Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman’ who worked on the Manhattan project and won a Nobel Prize.

A sub field of artificial intelligence (AI) concerned with helping agents generate valid and coherent plans of actions to reach a goal.

Approaches were divided into state space planners and planning space planners. State space would be something like ‘the door is open’ where plan space would be ‘open the door’. Generally plan space planners are faster (there tends to be fewer actions than states) to search when looking for a solution.

One limitation is that problem domains for use with planning algorithms must be known in advance. This limits the applications to domains you can fully specify and isn’t resilient to change (e.g. the actions or effects change dynamically).

Another limitation is searching for an answer tended to be slow. For example, in the least efficient case a search for a plan devolves to an exhaustive, brute force search. GraphPlan is a much faster approach that generates graph data structure that trims the search space.

Applies a result (usually favorable) to an activity e.g. learning (the activity) is valuable because of the outward effect on, for example, being better at one’s job and earning more money

See also:

• inherent value

A sociologist famed for his prolific output–he wrote 70 books and 400 scholarly articles on a wide range of topics. He came up with the Zettelkasten system as a “second brain” to work through connections of ideas.

Acclaimed author that looks at the world in a unique way that’s very entertaining.

See also:

• Interview with Tim Ferris where he talks about his approach, advice to writers, and tools

These days I wake up very early for the puppy ~5:45 AM so between getting the dogs ready and starting work I have about three hours.

I begin with a new journal entry recorded which captures recent articles I’ve read, things on my mind, and anything else (it’s not very structured). I review my short term notes and cut new notes for anything I’m interested in recalling in the future. As I write the new note I flesh out the idea some more, often going back to the source material to make sure I really understand it. This is also when I add links to existing notes. I publish the notes to this site, it’s a great feeling to publish just a little bit every day.

I do ~20 minutes of exercise, usually cardio (running or indoor biking) interspersed with low-impact yoga every two days or so. I need to do this every day to maintain my mental health and I have not missed a day in 6 months. Cardio clears my head and leaves me feeling like I did something good for myself—it’s a successful day even before I’ve done anything else.

User experience is subjective which makes improvements in UX difficult to calibrate since we need to rely more our collective taste and/or talking to users.

Are there more empirical measures of UX?

What are the nearest approximations that provide directional guidance in how to improve the experience? For example, if you lowered UX entropy would that reliably correlate with a better subjective user experience?

Talk given by Richard Hamming as part of the art of doing science and engineering course.

Transcript of the lecture via paulgraham.com

A talk given by Richard Hamming about the art of doing science and engineering.

Watch the lecture