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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 4 Dec 2019
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      Alright one week in, I've settled into some steady habits using roam, so there's a habit attractor here. Progress has slowed to more day-to-day but it still feels like winning the war on entropy as opposed to losing it in scrivener, email, or twitter.

      1 reply 2 retweets 33 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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      Gonna start documenting subtle features here. First up: Roam is probably the most efficient prosthetic memory I’ve used, as in, creating efficient recall of thoughts I’ve already thunk and written up. A killer feature when you’ve written as much as I have (good or bad).

      1 reply 3 retweets 36 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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      On a scale of 1 to 10, ranking media I’ve used Paper: 1 (no recall aids unless you create ToCs or indices yourself) Email newsletters: 2 (weak searchability, weak theme/thread continuity, weak gestalt, though substack is better than mailchimp) ...

      1 reply 1 retweet 18 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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      Twitter: 4 (strong searchability, strong threadability, weak gestalt) Wiki: 5 (strong searchability, medium threadability, strong gestalt) Blog: 6 (strong searchability, strong threadability, strong gestalt) Roam: 8 (all of the above plus low friction update/create/rename)

      2 replies 1 retweet 33 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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      The thing is, recall is a virtuous cycle. The better a medium supports recall, the easier it is to attach new information in the right places. Which makes recall even easier. And the easier it is to add content, the faster this process snowballs. So a compound interest effect.

      2 replies 3 retweets 47 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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      Knowledge generally depreciates, and a holy grail of knowledge modeling and capture for a long time has been to reverse the default negative interest rate it accrues and turn it positive. There was a “knowledge banking” project at Xerox back in the day that aimed at this for eg.

      2 replies 7 retweets 34 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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      In the past most such efforts have failed because they relied on automation to try and keep entropy at bay, which sort of works weakly with relative legible and structured information. But for more squishy information, the only thing that works is a “many eyeballs” process.

      1 reply 2 retweets 24 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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      Anytime I’ve seen a positive-interest-rate knowledge repo, it’s because many people were resurfacing bits and pieces at random and making point improvements. So the only known solution to date for positive interest rate has been to collectivize and socialize the prosthetic memory

      2 replies 4 retweets 56 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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      So a good measure of the technical sophistication of a medium is to measure the number of people (eyeballs) and money (how much they’re paid) required to sustain a positive interest rate. I think Roam reduces both to the limit: 1 person and self-funded hobby time.

      1 reply 1 retweet 31 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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      Compare for instance Wikipedia (~100s-1000s unpaid) or Stanford Encyclopedia or Wolfram Mathworld (single digits -100s, but paid, directly it indirectly). This is probably because Roam allows one mind to effectively act as many (Fox > Hedgehog)

      1 reply 0 retweets 20 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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      In practice, I’m finding now that when I have a new nugget to add, from whatever headspace I’m in (working, at the gym, random thought during in a meeting, half-asleep thought in bed), I can always make a quick judgment of approximately where a thought belongs, and put it there.

      10:29 AM - 8 Dec 2019
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      2 replies 0 retweets 26 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          By contrast in weaker media, I have to be in high energy, direct focus headspace, having warmed up around 30 minutes to get situation awareness around the whole project. Only then can I reliably lower entropy and turn interest rate positive. Roam lowers threshold to 10% of that.

          1 reply 2 retweets 33 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          This btw is the maker time/manager time problem pg wrote about. Making needs 4 hour chunks because anything less tends to increase entropy rather than decrease it in any non-trivial knowledge work project. So anything that lowers that lower limit is a big win.

          2 replies 3 retweets 50 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          My suspicion is, a good KPI for a knowledge tool is minimum threshold of time required to make a negentropic update to it, with every halving of the threshold increasing its capacity to hold positive-interest-rate knowledge repos by an order of magnitude.

          1 reply 1 retweet 34 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          So a tool with a 2h minimum can sustain a 10x bigger positive-rate knowledge base with the same budget of people/money than a 4h minimum. I suspect for Roam, a very suitable project may get it down to minutes, and for a typical project, maybe 30min. Something like that.

          3 replies 0 retweets 23 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Dec 2019
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          Hmm trying a 2x2 :diagram in roam. It is pretty janky but close enough to usable that for simple ones, I'm likely to use native rather than import from a more complex tool.pic.twitter.com/0d67HIvowi

          2 replies 1 retweet 28 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Dec 2019
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          One sign I'm achieving some sort of "hedgehog closure" is that I'll find a thought in my pre-Roam notes I'm not sure I've captured yet, and when I go to add it in a page I'm not sure exists yet, I'll find that the page and the capture both exist. Falling necessity of deduping.

          1 reply 0 retweets 20 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 13 Dec 2019
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          Okay, I started using Roam on Nov 26, so I'm now almost 3 weeks in. I seem to be entering a more difficult middle phase where it's all about resolving mergeconflicts. Lots of page merges and clean-ups today.

          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 13 Dec 2019
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          I am experiencing a kind of grind that I'll call a "Windows 95 to Windows XT" experience. My current state is a complex thing (Windows) built on a primitive simple thing (DOS) and I have to now go back and rebuild foundations in light of the clarity achieved at the complex levels

          2 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 13 Dec 2019
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          This is definitely not as fun as the first 2 stages. I think I'm going through a double freytag process here. 1. Discovery (pre-Roam) increasing entropy collection 2. Sensemaking (stage 1 Roam) 3. Valley (mergeconflicts and rationalization)

          3 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 19 Dec 2019
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          Hmm. Conflicted about what to do about the content I started putting into @readingsupply a few months back. While Roam is clearly a much more powerful paradigm, I do like RS's cleaner presentation and collaboration/permissions model.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1199511350919065600 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          I guess I leapfrogged past Notion, and there were a couple of other tools I started using like http://paper.supply  but in view of this, I don’t think others hit the right mix. Hey @vidy___ you still working on your thing?
          Show this thread
          2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 19 Dec 2019
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          (in the quoted earlier tweet in this thread, I mistakenly referred to it as paper dot supply) I was briefly kicking the tires on that a few months back, but unfortunately, it didn't take as a habit the way Roam appears to be doing for me.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1140787641106911233?s=20 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Hmm http://reading.supply  is nice. Clean collaborative document archive creation space. HT @tobyshorin for the find. Kicking the tires now. So far I like it. Cc: @vidythatte another product in introvert-toolkit space, kinda complementary to what you’re working on.
          2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 19 Dec 2019
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          It'd be nice if http://reading.supply  or something like it were bolted onto Roam as a sort of classic publishing/sharing front-end.

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 19 Dec 2019
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          I was briefly being pretty evangelical about reading supply, but the enthusiasm dropped rather quickly once I realized the creation workflow friction is too high... on par with say google docs. But still, there's some stuff there that's interestingly different from Roam.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 19 Dec 2019
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          Unlike Workflowy, which I think has been strictly superseded by Roam. Again a nice product, but simply beaten comprehensively by a better one. For now. I don't think it's down for the count yet.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1207437689709969408 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          shit, moving my workflowy list over to roam was a single cut and paste operation... this is not good news for them, they're probably toast if they don't differentiate fast
          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 20
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          Important threshold: it’s now easier to create a page linked off the right existing page for a one-liner thought than to tweet it and then postprocess the tweet. Took some practice, but I do it routinely now. Roam has hacked the tweeting impulse. Like Uber hacked taxi-hailing.

          3 replies 2 retweets 22 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 20
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          When I compare to effort in late 90s (hand code new html page, edit existing to link, and ftp to home page site) the effort level to create a meaningfully linked page has fallen fallen faster than Moore’s law. I now do it on phone for 1-liners. Amazing.

          2 replies 0 retweets 16 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 20
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          Kinda like what git did to code commits and forks. Made it really cheap and got us to continuous deployment/continuous integration. Roam is CD/CI for brain.

          3 replies 2 retweets 26 likes
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        19. End of conversation

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