Avy, Not-Zettelkasten, Pictures, and Other Stuff
Something of a "slice-of-life" post

For the last two weeks I've disabled line numbers in Emacs and instead moved to using Avy, by indirect recommendation from Irreal.

Worth it! I was subconsciously abusing Consult to jump within buffers anyway, but more often than not i just want to jump to a specific word that's already on-screen. So avy fills that need pretty well. I especially like the fact that there's a pre-highlight of where a jump will take me, whereas using Consult doesn't have any visual indication of where the match is, even if it's in the window.

There are some actions that I will probably try to add to the dispatch to make life easier – particularly a "roll" command. The idea being that I can select a new point for the cursor as usual, but "roll" it such that the current cursor position spatially within a window is retained. Almost like a more powerful version of zt or zz in Vim.

Karthinks has a pretty great post on more complex actions with Avy, for example by using Embark. I haven't dabbled with that too much, as the basic functionality of jumping has been enough for me. Realistically if I can work with some simple tools that get the job done, why make it more complex?

I read How to Take Smart Notes over the summer. From what I can tell it's basically turned into the standard form of propaganda for Zettelkasten users, and it was fairly successful in making me at least want to try it!

TL;DR: Organize your notes in thoughts in a way that you can later on traverse them easily for recall or ideas. That requires your note structure reflecting some sense of interconnection of ideas, and each note being atomic enough that you can accommodate complex interconnection of ideas. You can do that with Zettelkasten, yippee!

There's some nice asides on more meta-advice of doing research, learning and thinking about life that I also quite enjoyed. The book is written by a sociologist, so it's not perfectly transferable to the engineering realm – several of our notes are basically information dumps or documentation, whereas that is maybe not as relevant for a sociologist. But the core concepts are pretty good nonetheless.

I modified the Zettelkasten methods pushed by the book and rabid Obsidian users a bit to suit my own needs a bit better. Specifically, I keep a separate out-of-zettel folder for project-specific notes, documentation, and draft-writing. I have heard of Obsidian users that choose to lump it all together, but I felt like meeting agendas and stuff would cause cruft to accumulate throughout the core Zettelkasten graph.

Combining Zettelkasten with some of my older Org notes via the org-roam package has been fairly ergonomic, and combining it with the org-roam-ui package leads to nice graph views like the one here.

It also gives some structure to my pre-existing habit of writing out my notes and thoughts on legal pads. I usually end up keeping a bunch of those legal pad/memo pad ages on my desk for weeks at a time for reference, but long-term the ideas have nowhere to go or be filed. So this helps.

The problems here are that filing away notes takes time… a lot of it actually. In "smooth sailing" times it's not too bad and I can get through the 2-3 memo pad pages that I've filled with ideas, questions, and notes. And if I've been to class on a particular day, those can be filed away in relevant sub-nodes as basically a transcription pass.

But it's not always smooth sailing. Especially when research gets rough, there is straight up not enough time or energy at the end of the day to spend about an hour going through and logging all of these notes somewhere. And even worse, when I transcribe my notes and thoughts it's not just verbatim, I usually try to engage with the ideas as I type them out. I enjoy that part of the process, so it's not a downside, but it does cause pretty high time overheads. Some days I put out a lot more than 3 memo pad pages, and it becomes rather infeasible to get it all typed out in a single shot. As we speak, I have quite the backlog of memo pad pages ¹ that I didn't log into Roam because of a paper deadline (which has now been met!! First paper submitted!!).

Another professor in the department also uses legal pads extensively for ideas and scratch notes, but relies more on physical filing folders to keep track of them rather than any sort of digital ingest. That feels easier at filing-time, but I have my concerns long-term w.r.t accessibility.

I've been trying to treat my relation with the internet more consciously lately, half to improve productivity and half to just feel like I'm less fried by the fire-hose of information these days.

While I do enjoy Substack blogs (Irrational Analysis, Chips and Cheese, and SemiAnalysis are all gems) the main feed has gotten pretty bloated with random suggestions, and that's kind of what I'm trying to avoid? So I've moved pretty much all my regularly consumed blogs into an RSS feed, which I now read through Emacs. I feel like I've spent a lot less time getting sucked into random recommended posts as a result, with the side benefit that I'm much more up to date with the goings-on of Planet Emacs.

Somewhat related, but less so:

1. I am now on Mastodon, and have found some very cool individuals through it! I especially appreciate the lack of a "curated feed", a la Instagram or Twitter.
2. I've kind of stopped looking at Hacker News and exclusively stalk lobste.rs. HN has gotten really inundated with AI-written slop posts and that sort of rhetoric. It's important to stay updated with the big moves in AI, sure, but I really hate how fabricated and attention-hungry the whole forum has gotten. Communication is an inherently human thing, and I want to read things that were… written by people? I have far more ranting to do on this topic, but that's for another time.

The time I've bought back has, of course, been partially spent on additional side questing. Some of that has been the Emacsen mentioned here (and some not), and some has been reading.

Well I guess I was reading blogs the whole time, but I've started getting back into reading books for leisure, which has been nice. In addition to the funny Zettelkasten book, I've gotten through Seneca on the shortness of life, part of Crafting Interpreters, and am currently reading The Pentium Chronicles.

I stopped reading Crafting Interpreters about halfway through the jlox implementation because I realized I wanted something more theory-flavored. Picked up a copy of the Dragon Book from the university library, and plan to start reading it soon. I've enjoyed the Pentium Chronicles so far, I feel like anyone who's vaguely interested in the goings-on of computer architecture would too!

I said I would post more pictures from around campus when I posted about my first experiences with the X-Pro 3, but never got around to it!

So here are some pictures over the last 3 months that I thought were pretty decent. Reading the manual and generally having more time to get used to the quirks of the X-Pro has helped picture quality, and I'm having less difficulty with blown-out highlights and issues of that sort. There is some biasing towards pictures from July/August, I got pretty busy in September with research and PhD applications.

Everything is SOOC as always – some of these could probably use a good crop or lighting corrections, but I'm not a huge fan of editing in post.

I have been alive! I have been doing things!