I, as a non native writer (and an error prone one in general), so wish mb would sync edits between my blog and my mastodon account. cc: @manton

Dev Notes

Good to see that state management in SPAs is still hard since the last time (3,5 years ago) I used one of these frame works. This time it’s vue3 last time it was react.

The long afternoon walk with the dog made me incredibly tired today.

Notes on Notes

Previously

An interesting difference that just occurred to me: Knowledge management and idea generation are not the same things. They are related, but a note system and its user may have to decide if they’re building an archive or if they’re building an idea generator. I’d say the latter is much more valuable for individuals.

Previously

Readwise Reader… You were the chosen one! Their feed reader cannot handle daring fireball’s feed. And it’s a long standing issue. Great. I guess I’ll have to take my feeds to a dedicated rss reader app once more?

Notes on Notes

As somebody who has taken notes for a long time now, I have gone through iterations of my setup to interact with them (last year I tried to use Agenda for my periodic and project notes, which I later abandoned in favor of using exclusively Obsidian again). In the process of moving from one app to the next it was not uncommon to leave notes behind. Not always did this happen intentionally. My current incarnation of my notes system consists of about 5000 notes, when I started to move from Evernote to Obsidian I left thousands of notes behind. If I’d need to guess, a count of all of my notes ever written reaches probably around 100000. As I have a full-time job, a little family and little time, my current situation doesn’t allow me to do work on my notes all the time.

So I will probably never be able to collate, deduplicate and unify all my notes into my current system. But I have learned that this is really also not as important as one might think at first. I use my notes system as a way to think and generate new ideas. The argument for having a notes system like this continues usually this way: “…and the more ideas you have, the more you’ll create/find…”. But I think more important than the total amount is to reach a critical mass of notes, which seems to start for me around 50 or so. By this point I seem to be able to always find something to connect to something else. There is always something else to elaborate, so ideas are generated, which is exactly the goal of my system.

I don’t need all my 100000 notes to do it. These 50 notes also don’t need to be perfect notes, or only capturing “atomic” ideas. Some are short reflexions, others are definitions, quotes, maybe a picture, a copy and pasted line of code. Often times they are daily notes that log what I have done that day with links to other notes. (See also: The three types of notes I take)

Heterogeneity and being in various states of completion are really not a problem, as long as there is enough of a critical mass in the system to generate new notes.

EDIT: You may be interested in my little constellation of “Notes on Notes” about the process of working with a notes system:

Forward

Games

Playing Stellaris again, which I do every time a new dlc comes out. The newest dlc is a “First Contact Story Pack” and I do love it a lot. Just a great game. I have played it hundreds of hours and am still enjoying the occasional round (which can take me upwards of 30 hours).

I was (and am) so enamored with an article I read that my sleep deprived self decided in the morning after walking and feeding the dog to take notes for three hours instead of going back to sleep. Now I’m exhausted.

Nothing better than tortilla leftovers for lunch. 😋

Task Management

Peviously.

I don’t know why, but I may have for the first time really understood how OmniFocus' repeating event functionality works. Amazing how much complexity they managed to cram into this feature. I can actually express all my recurring tasks in my task manager. But: It almost certainly means that I’m stuck with OmniFocus, because no other app can do this.

Forward

Having learned about mastodon’s capabilities of being a ddos tool, I wonder: Are URL previews a dark pattern in itself?

I feel like you could argue they are, because they may seriously mislead you (a preview could be tailored in a malicious way), scale badly in a federated context (in the naïve case as implemented by mastodon) and responsibility for the problem is not as easily attributed. Should I as the user feel responsible?

It also shows that fundamental design decisions about software architecture are still very much a centralization problem. Or rather: They express the reality that somebody has to make a decision about these things. Having your own instance doesn’t change a thing about that. If the protocol defines link previews in this way you have to follow suit in order to be compliant. No way around that.

Knock on wood: Things in the old as well as the new company are solved. The job transition ought to work out now. What a relief. Working remotely abroad has it’s challenges. 😅

My Current Thoughts On Therapy And Mental Health

Mental Health

Part of my depression is a degree of apathy; the more I can focus and get excited about something the more I feel I’m on the right path. I do worry, however, that it’s a mask and I’m just distracting myself.

And that’s how I feel about all this in a wider context. Treatment and therapy don’t magically make you a happy person. Instead, they mask the symptoms or provide better coping strategies, ways to head off the worst of it before it can take hold.

Colin Walker.

As somebody who has had several mental health breakdowns and three therapists in my 20s (I’m 36 now), my current perspective on therapy is that you create the world in which you’re living in and therapy can give structure (and meds, if needed) towards creating a livable world, for you. Meaning that you are actually not just getting rid of yet another veil that makes you see things more clearly - or on the contrary putting another mask on to make you see things less clearly. Instead your world can’t literaly be anything else than what you focus on. If you’re focussing on being happy, coping and so on, chances are that your world “becomes” what you see.

This is not as simple as just using willpower, however. Not least, because willpower is like a muscle and ego depletion is a real thing. It’s also because depression can be thought of as an an active but independently acting agent in your consciousness: Deciding to want to focus on something else is important, but a mental illness wouldn’t be called that, if you could ‘just decide’ and stick to counteracting it.

This is where therapy can be incredibly helpful: In my experience visiting with a therapist changes your environment, your habits, which is itself - not even taking into account their skill at treating you - an important step to creating lasting behavioral change. But therapists offer also structure on top of just existing in your environment. In my experience they offer a source of serendipity that makes it possible to reach break throughs, new frames of thinking, new ways of looking at things. By showing up and interacting with a therapist you’re making a real effort to change what you believe to be the boundaries of your current situation. Yes, this can be in the form of recipe-like coping strategies, but it can also just mean to interact with an expert on mental health. And that communication has a very high likelihood of being surprising - which is so important to feel something, anything else as regards to your current mental health.

So in short: We are and our world is what we are focussing on. There is no trick here. Nothing is revealed or hidden by engaging differently with the world, instead it is just that: A different perspective, a different world. To make a sustained effort to change this perspective for good means to change the environment (because willpower alone won’t cut it) and to being open to be surprised.

Medicine can really help in some cases. But even then it’s not guaranteed that your conscience is built to accommodate even one new way of perceiving the world that doesn’t include your mental illness. People are different, they can and can’t do different things. A goal for one person to be completely healed from depression might just simply not be in the cards for others. However: Even temporary relief or a more manageable severity of symptoms might be totally worth the effort.

Finally, there is no relief in thinking that you may never find relief and therefore doing nothing. I would like to say: Whole-ass the thing, but I don’t mean it to say “don’t do anything else”, I mean it in the sense that if you’re doing therapy, take it seriously, treat is as a creative task. The task of reinventing your world.

Task Management

Previously.

(I’m not using teuxdeux anymore. And after a short liaison with Todoist, I’m back with OmniFocus.)

Reading the old scripture on the forecast perspective makes it clear to me, that this was intended to be used as a way to tell how due dates and events on a calendar interact.

It’s true you can also show deferred tasks and use a forecast tag to surface tasks without a due date in this perspective, but that is just secondary functionality. And it shows.

Forward.