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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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)
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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 …Show this thread -
(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 …
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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.
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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.
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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 …
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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.
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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.
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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.
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End of conversation
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