Design tokens are platform-agnostic and are the first layer of design decisions in a design system.

https://whalebird.social/en/desktop/contents

Whalebird is a Mastodon, Pleroma, and Misskey client for desktop application

https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought

He covers much of what I observe in the zettelkasten overreach article.

Missing is any discussion of exactly what problem he's trying to solve other than perhaps, I want to solve them all and have a personal log of everything I've ever done.

Perhaps worth reviewing again to pull out specifics, but I just don't have the bandwidth today.

🤗

We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us....

https://fasiha.github.io/yoyogi/

Yoyogi is an alternate Mastodon reading interface that shows messages by author / thread and not as the traditional timeline.

Similar to Pinafore

https://app.sane.fyi/space/kevinmarks-gmail-com-tools-for-thought-87615

An example of the Sane user interface.

https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/

History of Philosophy: Summarized & Visualized

This could be thought of as a form of digital, single-project zettelkasten dedicated to philosophy. It's got people, sources, and ideas which are cross linked in a Luhmann-sense (without numbering) though not in a topical index-sense. Interestingly it has not only a spatial interface and shows spatial relationships between people and ideas over time using a timeline, but it also indicates—using colored links—the ideas of disagreement/contrast/refutation and agreement/similarity/expansion.

What other (digital) tools of thought provide these sorts of visualization affordances?

Natto https://natto.dev<br /> built by Paul Shen https://twitter.com/_paulshen

https://ncase.me/nutshell/

For those interested in the ideas of annotations, inline footnotes, expandable text, additional context, stretch text, hovercards, etc., Nicky Case has recently released a new project called Nutshell (https://ncase.me/nutshell/) which has some fun user interface as well as code with which to play.

I'm sure I read this ages ago, but it's not in my notebook yet. Perhaps worth another pass for notes.

https://winnielim.org/library/collections/personal-websites-with-a-notes-section/

Winnie has some excellent examples of people's websites with notes, similar to that of https://indieweb.org/note. But it feels a bit like she's approaching it from the perspective of deeper ideas and thoughts than one might post to Twitter or other social media. It would be worthwhile looking at examples of people's practices in this space that are more akin to note taking and idea building, perhaps in the vein of creating digital gardens or the use of annotation tools like Hypothes.is?

What other forms/shapes might it take?

The randomness of interesting tidbits in a social media scroll help to put us in a state of flow. We get small hits of dopamine from finding interesting posts to fill in the gaps of the boring bits in between and suddenly find we've lost the day. As a result an endless scroll of varying quality might have the effect of making one feel productive when in fact a reasonably large proportion of your time is spent on useless and uninteresting content.

This effect may be put even further out when it's done algorithmically and the dopamine hits become more frequent. Potentially worse than this, the depth of the insight found in most social feeds is very shallow and rarely ever deep. One is almost never invited to delve further to find new insights.

How might a social media stream of content be leveraged to help people read more interesting and complex content? Could putting Jacques Derrida's texts into a social media-like framing create this? Then one could reply to the text by sentence or paragraph with their own notes. This is similar to the user interface of Hypothes.is, but Hypothes.is has a more traditional reading interface compared to the social media space. What if one interspersed multiple authors in short threads? What other methods might work to "trick" the human mind into having more fun and finding flow in their deeper and more engaged reading states?

Link this to the idea of fun in Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes.

@pratik Mastodon caps at 500 as a default. The information density of the particular language/character set is certainly part of the calculus.

Here's a few to start (and see their related references): - https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/How-Constraints-Affect-Content%3A-The-Case-of-Switch-Gligoric-Anderson/de77e2b6abae20a728d472744557d722499efef5 - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0280-3

Ideas fill their spaces.

When writing it can be daunting to see a long blank screen and feel like you've got to fill it up with ideas de novo.

From the other perspective if you're starting with a smaller space like a Twitter input box or index card you may find that you write too much and require the ability to edit things down to fit the sparse space.

I do quite like the small space provided by Hypothes.is which has the ability to expand and scroll as you write so that it has the Goldilocks feel of not too small, not too big, but "just right".

Micro.blog has a feature that starts with a box that can grow with the content. Once going past 280 characters it also adds an optional input box to give the post a title if one wants it to be an article rather than a simple note.

Link to idea of Occamy from the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that can grow or shrink to fit the available space: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Occamy

https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam

A user talks about why they've stopped using Roam Research.

I suspect that a lot of people have many of the same issues and to a great extent, it's a result of them not understanding the underlying use cases of the problems they're trying to solve.

This user is focusing on it solving the problem of where one is placing their data in hopes that it will fix all their problems, but without defining the reason why they're using the tool and what problems they hope for it to solve.

Note taking is a much broader idea space than many suppose.

https://annotations.lindylearn.io/

What a great UI for annotations on Hypothes.is and Hacker News.

I wonder if this is pulling data from the public Hypothesis API? What triggers inclusion into the lists?

This truism is certainly much older than John Palmer, but an interesting quote none-the-less.

It could be useful to meditate on the ideas of "spatial interfaces" and "spatial software" as useful affordances within the application and design spaces.

What exactly would be the ideal group of features in a writer's perfect tool? There are many out there for a variety of axes of production, but does anything cover it all?

Functionality potentially for:

• taking notes
• collecting examples
• memory
  • search or other means of pulling things up at their moment of need
• outlining functionality
• arranging and rearranging material
• spellcheckers
• grammar checkers
• other?

With

• easy of use
• efficiency
• productivity

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/can-distraction-free-devices-change-the-way-we-write

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis </span> in 📑 Can “Distraction-Free” Devices Change the Way We Write? | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>12/27/2021 14:09:33</time>)</cite></small>

This part resonates strongly with Victor's enunciation on "how Writing made thought visible". (Previous video at 10'33") and "Mathematical notation made mathematical structure visible" (11'33'") and how the invention of modern mathematics was not because of a particular idea, but because of the equations notation "user interface" (~12'30")