Radical Simplification: A Practical Way to Get More Out of Limited Foreign Assistance Budgets

What do you mean with Zettelkasten ratchet? I am too unfamiliar with the word ratchet to really understand the meaning.[9:46 AM] Or if someone else has an idea and can help me out

someone from outside 00:11:06 the discipline within which they um provide some new paradigmatic understanding uh is looking at the old problems with fresh eyes

Skip Freeman  · eonrspoSdt8656904u6a1ht12a1979t5t2c5511lg699alg0l292600a521l  · Shared with Members of Evernote CommunityHEPTABASE - I started evaluating Evernote alternatives back in late Summer. I have fallen in love with Heptabase. No trial & not cheap. Here is who it is & is not for:FOR: Someone who needs to pull together complex topics from multiple sources & make sense of them all. Cards are created for information and can contain as much or as little info as appropriate. Each card consists of "blocks" so, information can be connected and/or extracted. Tags can be used too. Putting it all together on a WHITEBOARD is the ULTIMATE MAGIC where everything is visual and connected.Additionally, you can create tables & Kanban boards (it's a database).Students, academia, someone working on complex projects (but note, it is NOT PM software), someone doing research (I sure wish I had had this when I was working on my Master's thesis), are all going to love Heptabase.I will provide an example. I am a student of Chris Voss' negotiation techniques as presented in his book "Never Split the Difference." (Tactical Empathy is the overarching term he uses).As I read the book on Kindle, I made many highlights. My highlights go into Readwise, and I have Readwise connected to Heptabase, so all of my notes from Kindle are visible.Next, I also have many notes I have taken from listening to Voss on podcasts, YouTubes, plus papers, and blogs.Trying to organize and make sense of everything is daunting and complex.In parallel, I am a professional executive recruiter. I am working on figuring out how to use Voss' concepts of tactical empathy to improve hiring processes for companies. Trying to do it with traditional notes and folders is impossible.Laying everything out on a Heptabase whiteboard and being able to connect things, move things around, and more, I began to see the overarching methodology and how I could apply tactical empathy in recruiting, thus helping companies hire better. I am working on a book now and would have never gotten this far this fast with other applications.While I have certainly not tried them all, I have tried Mem.AI, Rome Research, MyMind, Notion, continued to use Evernote, OneNote, and I know there are a couple more in there that I can't remember the name of at the moment. WHO HEPTABASE IS NOT FOR: If one is looking for a to-do app, just general note-taking without the need for figuring out how all of the concepts fit together, or to just have an inexpensive depository for things which can be searched on (and I WOULD recommend MyMind for that), then Heptabase is not for you. They do not have a trial, and the subscription is $13 a month. Since it is a little more complicated, the psychology, at least for me, was that I had to make good use of my $13 and learn how to work the software. It's a little more complicated than most, but in the end, it is the best I've ever used.Help is available within 12 to 24 hours. I've developed a nice relationship with PJ in China They are bringing out an improvement almost weekly and the upgrades are quick and easy. You do not have to worry about losing data. Also, a history of all of your cards are kept so if somehow one gets messed up, you can go back to a previous version and retrieve everything.I've gotten carried away sharing my enthusiasm for Heptabase and made this into a much longer post than I intended, but I do hope my analysis helps someone.

Heptabase is not designed to do anything useful with 100, much less 5000, .pdfs thrown in all at once. And that's the first big difference with say Obsidian, it doesn't really try to pretend it is good at large volume collecting, it wants a curated set of Topic Notes as input. Of course it can collect, but that is not the speciality.What Heptabase does focus on is converting Topic Notes into quality Zettles, Contexts, MOCs and Permanent Notes. That is stages (3) and (4).

I’m in the early days yet in Obsidian but was really taken with the workflow that Heptabase affords for research and synthesis of new information. Nothing else I’ve seen is as clean in terms of the workflow to extract bits of information to manipulate and digest on a whiteboard. Very strongly inclined to include it to be my research and learning ground, while Obsidian serves as my polished topic notes repository. I’d been looking for a direct comparison of the two and hadn’t yet found anything out there.

when building on unenclosable P2P systems like Holochain, it’s actually possible to have it both ways: clean-energy projects that have the resources for large-scale impact and are not at risk of becoming corrupt in protection of proprietary business interests.

To determine how to win, an organization must decide what will enable itto create unique value and sustainably deliver that value to customers in away that is distinct from the firm’s competitors. Michael Porter called itcompetitive advantage—the specific way a firm utilizes its advantages tocreate superior value for a consumer or a customer and in turn, superiorreturns for the firm.

the brain stores social information differently thanit stores information that is non-social. Social memories are encoded in a distinctregion of the brain. What’s more, we remember social information moreaccurately, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “social encodingadvantage.” If findings like this feel unexpected, that’s because our culturelargely excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect. Socialexchanges with others might be enjoyable or entertaining, this attitude holds, butthey’re no more than a diversion, what we do around the edges of school orwork. Serious thinking, real thinking, is done on one’s own, sequestered fromothers.

a phenomenon that psychologists call “thecaricature advantage”: the fact that we recognize a caricatured face even morereadily than we recognize a true-to-life depiction. While a caricature does distortits subject’s actual appearance, it does so in a systematic way, exaggerating whatis unique or distinctive about that individual—thereby making him or her evenmore instantly identifiable.

In both instances, people used these unregulated forms of “justice” to pursue personal grudges or gain professional advantage.

The elimination of what is arguably the biggest monoculture in the history of software development would mean that we, the community, could finally take charge of both languages and run-times, and start to iterate and grow these independently of browser/server platforms, vendors, and organizations, all pulling in different directions, struggling for control of standards, and (perhaps most importantly) freeing the entire community of developers from the group pressure of One Language To Rule Them All.

JavaScript needs to fly from its comfy nest, and learn to survive on its own, on equal terms with other languages and run-times. It’s time to grow up, kid.

If JavaScript were detached from the client and server platforms, the pressure of being a monoculture would be lifted — the next iteration of the JavaScript language or run-time would no longer have to please every developer in the world, but instead could focus on pleasing a much smaller audience of developers who love JavaScript and thrive with it, while enabling others to move to alternative languages or run-times.

Some people "get" the idea of systemic privilege and ask "But what can I do?" My answer is, you can use unearned advantage to weaken systems of unearned advantage. I see white privilege as a bank account that I did not ask for, but that I can choose to spend. People with privilege have far more power than we have been taught to realize, within the myth of meritocracy. Participants can brainstorm about how to use unearned assets to share power; these may include time, money, energy, literacy, mobility, leisure, connections, spaces, housing, travel opportunities. Using these assets may lead to key changes in other behaviors as well, such as paying attention, making associations, intervening, speaking up, asserting and deferring, being alert, taking initiative, doing ally and advocacy work, lobbying, campaigning, protesting, organizing, and recognizing and acting against both the external and internalized forms of oppression and privilege.

cultural capital

Although it is open-source, Snap on the other hand, only works with the Ubuntu Store. Nobody knows how to make a Snap Store and nobody can. The Snap client is designed to work with only one source, following a protocol which isn’t open, and using only one authentication system. Snapd is nothing on its own, it can only work with the Ubuntu Store.

What we didn't want it to be was for Canonical to control the distribution of software between distributions and 3rd party editors, to prevent direct distribution from editors, to make it so software worked better in Ubuntu than anywhere else and to make its store a requirement,"

Svelte takes advantage from its position as compiler to make reactivity a language feature

This allows the shooter to relax and concentrate on the intended target at which they are shooting.

Because of that, it's easy to end up in a situation where the styles for a given piece of markup are defined far away (in terms of number of lines) from the markup itself, which reduces the advantage of having styles and markup co-located in the first place.

A park with children's games is located 3 minutes walk from the house:)

The shops nearby allow you to do all your shopping on foot, especially thanks to a nearby minimarket.

Our house is in a quiet area, 5 minutes by car from the city center of Reims, 15 minutes by bike (15 minutes by tram)

Google charges a lot for their translation tool. It is fairly difficult to build something similar without running up against their free API limits or having the user create an API key.

That’s because the Google Translate extension uses some internal Google-only APIs (Mozilla also does the same thing).

Apparently Firefox does have translation built-in, it's just not enabled due to lack of usage agreement / API keys. https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/a3eb8e502006

This approach allows treatment with patient-specific factors at an apparently physiologic ratio of growth factor concentrations.

The genius of The Power is that it conveys how entirely the world is built on male power and male privilege, to the extent that societal structures topple as soon as women are given the advantage.