 Keeping a diary is like a part-time job. Maybe I'll drop keeping it. I spend hours every week keeping it, and I so rarely read it afterwards! I have more than two years of notes, and they are daily since middle of 2021 or so. I often proclaim that i live by the Pareto principle, id est 20 per cent of effort give 80 per cent of result. Thus, if one is OK with 80 per cent of result, instead of 100, then why bother? It helped me to get through this semester. So, why bother with the diary? 22 comments
 @bouncepaw @aynish Why does it matter how many places you publish in? (I've heard this sentiment from you before.) Even the word 'publish' feels overly serious for what we do. I think of it as 'post'. Posting something always has some purpose for me. It's never an end in itself. So what's the purpose in watching the number of locations you post to? @akkartik @aynish oh yeah, I have said that in Lion's Discord. Big number of places where I am tires me very much. I then forget about some of them, and they get kinda lost. A lost incomplete part of me. This one of the reasons why I hesitated to join the Fediverse for half a year or longer. Dunno, it kinda stresses me. @bouncepaw @aynish I was trying to understand how important it is to you. If it's important, keep a list of everything you post. If it's slightly important, keep a list of sites where you post. If it's not important, write and forget. But if the purpose of writing is to be read by some audience you care about, I'd never limit where I write. I'm a packrat, record everything I type. Shell commands, chat, emails, notes, docs. But even I make utterances that don't constitute losing part of myself. @akkartik @aynish oh, keeping a list of everything I post is basically impossible and not worth it IMHO, I always wonder how you do it. I should make a list of the sites, right. I always talk about limiting the number, but I have no idea of what the number is. > But if the purpose of writing is to be read by some audience you care about, Well, the best audience is the focused audience! If I write in 30 places, I won't have much of an audience. I also love internet points. @bouncepaw @aynish I still think your priorities are misplaced. Many of the places I write in have the same people. Sometimes I talk to my wife in the park, sometimes I talk to my wife in the home, sometimes in a new diner far from home. It makes no sense to limit _where_ I talk or discuss or debate. It's where the conversation is happening! If I want to participate I have to talk there!  @bouncepaw I found that the act of writing things down allows me to reflect on things one more time, when I stop, time seems to just slip through my fingers @neauoire writing things down, as on the Now page?: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/now.html That's very low-detail, compared to my daily notes. Do you have a different, private diary? @neauoire for comparison, how many paragraphs do 3 random daily entries have? Mine are 10, 15, 8. There are photos too. @bouncepaw wow, that's a lot. Mine are about 2-3 lines and it takes me about 2 minutes to write, anything longer I'd promptly give up on. @neauoire I used to be able to do the same two years ago! Too many things happen nowadays, too many things worry me nowadays, and I talk with too many people nowadays, compared with 2020. @neauoire OK, I'll carry on an experiment: less volume in my diary! I'll start 2023-01-01. @bouncepaw Just saw this. What did you think of the recent https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought? @akkartik Reading it now. > Tools for thought promise to let you centralize and hyperlink all your data. Oh yeah, they do! And they often fail to do. Mycorrhiza works bad for keeping link collections. I have a big link collection in a couple of Mycorrhizae. Reading further...  @bouncepaw @akkartik personally, I have a folder of plaintext files (in reality, a folder in apple notes) where I just write the date and time, and dump whatβs on my mind. i donβt force myself to do it every day, but i usually remember to keep it updated with cyclical bouts of intensity. including the time before this with paper journals, I have about six years of βdiaryβ entries, which has been enormously helpful in gaining self-perspective over time. @akkartik This is a very good article. Saved it to MervNews as well: https://merv.news/post/111 The author spent a big portion of their life building a universal information keeping system, and then understood it's not really worth it. I understood that 1.5 years ago, lucky me. @bouncepaw I couldn't relate to it at all, but it seemed like you might π I think the lesson from the author's experience is not that building your own wiki engine is a waste. The lesson is that it's counterproductive to build infrastructure far in advance of need. Search is easy at any sort of personal scale. I generate ~1MB/yr of plain text, and grep works just fine over 20 such years. If some organization seems onerous, I stop organizing. But I keep writing. Nice list of use cases, though. @akkartik yeah, they said well: > But in a personal database it makes a lot more sense that links should follow usage: they should be a crystallization of the trails youβve followed, rather than an a-priori structure that you impose before usage.) Structures fail. |
Gregory's Server
Oh yeah, there is a thread on self-quantization on the Forum:, started by @aynish.
https://forum.merveilles.town/thread/66/to-what-end-should-we-quantify-the-self%3f-3/
Maybe I should join. Maybe I should not. I don't really want to publish in yet another place.