Rob Haisfield
@RobertHaisfield
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Imagining new internets @websim_ai . GenAI, TfT, BeSci, HCI, UX. Ex-Tana, Edge & Node, Spark Wave
Berkeley, CA
Joined August 2011
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Pinned Tweet
"it looks like Orion discovered a computer for the first time" -
@sawyerhood
5 minute video of
@OrionReedOne
losing his damn mind over one of the best falling sand sims in WebSim
last week:
- presented at
@southpkcommons
in NYC
- hung out with
@geoffreylitt
,
@RobertHaisfield
,
@cwervo
,
@stevekrouse
,
@thesephist
,
@rsnous
+ so many more great people
- visited
@FolkComputer
and had my brain reshaped
- jazz club w/
@jessmartin
so much more but tweets are tiny
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Flux team 100% saw that tweet about
@karpathy
's crazy idea of training an image model on screenshots of all of the web instead of an LLM on HTML and ran with it.
@bfl_ml
forget about generating HTML with a LLM
"screenshot from a 1992 website on geocities, website of an amateur witch"
"screenshot from a 2005 website, website of an amateur witch"
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Just learned that Yoshiki has passed away and so many people seem to love his ideas, I’m gonna thread a few here.
An app builder on the iPhone where you start by describing the data structures you want in JSON and then nudge it towards a GUI
I've been jamming on this concept for making data-driven designs. Given some JSON, this app will provide you with an interface to describe how you want each entry styled, allowing you to gradually create a more complicated design. Here I create an airbnb-ish app.
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You ever think about how everything you're doing on your computer is just a bunch of abstractions on top of 1s and 0s? Isn't that the most insane thing ever? Who thought of that? What?
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I'm thrilled to FINALLY publish , a living hypertext notebook outlining my research with
@balOShere
and
@JoelChan86
discussing how Tools for Thought can facilitate synthesis. Click around and see where it takes you!
I'm thrilled to announce a research project on the creation of decentralized discourse graph tools for thought to promote synthesis with
@JoelChan86
and
@graphprotocol
! More details in the thread on what that means and what our core questions are 👇️
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YouTubers found
@websim_ai
last week and there have been lots of great videos popping up but this is one of my favorites. She’s a musician with maybe one other video that has anything to do with AI, her channel is pretty much all music.
And now she’s making her own music tools.
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I dream of a world where apps that are basically a UI on top of a spreadsheet or database give you access to the database and let you query/edit from there
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Whether you're working in files and folders, or in a database like Notion, the problem is the same. You have to figure out where to put data (which folder, which table) before you write it.
In
@tana_inc
, you start by writing data, then the nodes flow into tables through searches
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Testing o1-preview in
@websim_ai
: "pivot stick figure animation full software all features, including onion layering"
In just a few prompts, I remade my favorite app growing up 🫠 Full prompt history in screenshot. I'm floored, it's an incredibly capable model.
@OpenAI
cooked!
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Something feels off about this Google search. Is this real, or is there there a ghost in the machine making things up as it goes?
How did I get into the Top Secret Octopus-Human Communication Curriculum? Will I get in trouble for sharing this screenshot?
Maybe the most interesting part to me about WorldSim is the broader idea that, instead of coding up a whole application, you could make a simulation of one and it will generally match your intention.
cc
@karan4d
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Just did a
@RoamResearch
tour with
@beauhaan
looking at his Zettelkasten. He uses block refs in a highly effective way that I genuinely have not considered before, so his database is VERY navigationally friendly when he’s trying to reuse his notes. I’m really excited to share it
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I'm thrilled to share I’m joining Tana as a product manager to work on the frontier of Tools for Thought 🤘
I’ll work on:
- upfront / continuous onboarding
- user research
- application of my Scaling Synthesis research
-graph-y-ness
- & more
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All members of the
#roamcult
should learn queries and learn them well. Queries are Roam's language for letting you ask questions. The more fluently you can express your questions in queries, the better Roam will be able to resurface what you need when you need it.
@RoamResearch
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I'm thrilled to announce a research project on the creation of decentralized discourse graph tools for thought to promote synthesis with
@JoelChan86
and
@graphprotocol
! More details in the thread on what that means and what our core questions are 👇️
The Graph Foundation is thrilled to announce over $2.8M has been awarded to Wave 2 Grantees & Ecosystem Contributors! 🧑🚀
Thank you to all developers, researchers & community builders for your incredible work 🚀🌐
Read all about the grants & get involved!
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Sam Altman is inspired by Her with Scarlett Johansson.
@websim_ai
team is inspired by Celery Man with Paul Rudd. We are not the same.
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@visakanv
Chimpanzee playing Minecraft
This is an ape ("Kanzi") playing Minecraft! A fascinating experiment on non-human biological neural networks 🙉
I've been teaching AI to play Minecraft for too long. There're so many similar techniques that the ape trainers used:
- In-context reinforcement learning: Kanzi gets
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I am ADHD and I love playing with new tools. I have now used
@RoamResearch
seriously for over a year. That's pretty incredible. I haven't stuck with one digital tool this long since Apple Notes, and that's just because it's default. Bear is only still around bc no mobile on Roam.
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In the first Tana Tour,
@Mappletons
shows us how she uses Tana:
- Daily note template
- Digital garden note writing pipeline
- Decision journal
- Travel
Before Tana “there was a core missing piece I’m surprised took note taking this long - ontologies”
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I *really* wanted
@RoamResearch
to be my digital garden/pseudoblog, but it's not built for it. Will do something resembling
@anthilemoon
's digital garden. Instructions linked. Thread explains limitations of Roam/why I wish it worked for this 👇
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WebSim: The Infinite Ideaspace for Infinite Cognition
> To build in WebSim is to construct a bespoke reality that mirrors one's own mind - making this a tool not just for imagining new worlds, but for radically reinventing the art of thought itself.
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@Noahpinion
Something to note about Dr. K: he particularly treats people who are addicted to gaming and many people who would even self-identify as incels. That may color his perspective.
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If you're in the
#roamcult
and have been considering learning queries, now is the time. I'll show you how they work & we'll find you some immediate use cases. If you want to become a power user, queries are how you learn to communicate with
@RoamResearch
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Maybe the most interesting part to me about WorldSim is the broader idea that, instead of coding up a whole application, you could make a simulation of one and it will generally match your intention.
cc
@karan4d
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In August, I'll start a 6 month research project investigating decentralized discourse graphs / structuring knowledge such that it's queryable and promotes synthesis
I'm looking for a paid research assistant! Position will be an AWESOME portfolio piece. DM me for more details 🧵
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@zswitten
Can you try Mistral Large 2 as well?
Based on
@aidan_mclau
’s benchmark I get a feeling it would be interesting
-- <big_model_smell> benchmark --
Aidan Bench measures creativity, reliability, attention, and instruction following.
>mistral large 2 wins by a lot???
>gpt-4o sucks confirmed
>sonnet-3.5 remains very strong
>gpt-4-0314 shows old man strength
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Note that while o1-preview appears superficially to be 3x Sonnet 3.5's input token cost and 5x output tokens, it generates a lot of invisible reasoning tokens before its output. So it's actually maybe 7x Sonnet 3.5's price per request in our usage 💀
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I'm trying to use Obsidian as an alternative to Roam for my projects the next month or so. Been doing so for the last two weeks or so, and I've been very happy with how its working. Thread on why I'm attempting a switch 🧵️👇
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A lot of people write notes and never review them. It is aspirational to them, but they just don’t do it.
The reframing that was helpful to me:
It’s not about going back and reviewing notes arbitrarily. It’s about not starting with a blank page when you work on something new.
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If I were to schedule a "book club" to discuss the following two pieces from Brett Victor, who would be interested in participating?
The Ladder of Abstraction:
Learnable Programming
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Late entry: I'm gonna start a
@threadapalooza
now on the intersection of behavioral science, product strategy, UX, and game design. I'm shooting for 100 tweets w/ as many individual opinions as I can before the end of the year. This is a product of a lot of thought over years
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It's so funny to me how people were like "oh Claude 3 only beats GPT-4 a little on the MMLU" and yet Claude can do this. There's no benchmark for this.
I've noticed Sonnet is staggeringly creative and theatrical in
@websim_ai
I'm in the Octo-universe internet, reading about Octopus Sapiens with iridescent text, and it made an animation using CSS to create five swaying tentacles.
Here's the wormhole:
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.
@obsdmd
has the best "mental stack management" (term from
@Mart1nSchneider
) of any hypertext writing application I've worked with thus far. The information that occupies my attention and how much importance it is given is up to me.
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I've noticed Sonnet is staggeringly creative and theatrical in
@websim_ai
I'm in the Octo-universe internet, reading about Octopus Sapiens with iridescent text, and it made an animation using CSS to create five swaying tentacles.
Here's the wormhole:
Something feels off about this Google search. Is this real, or is there there a ghost in the machine making things up as it goes?
How did I get into the Top Secret Octopus-Human Communication Curriculum? Will I get in trouble for sharing this screenshot?
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what if every app had a little ghost in the machine generating UI, clicking buttons, and rewriting its code in response to user goals?
and the ghost had the empathy required to intuit the user's goals
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Hey everyone, I work as a product manager at
@edgeandnode
now, have since January 😄 I'm a big believer in web3, recognize its potential utopias / dystopias, and want to play my role in its formative stages. Edge & Node supports core infrastructure for futures I want to see.
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Zettelkasten is overrated but the principles are solid.
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I'm no longer a product manager for
@tana_inc
as of ~1 month ago. I'm happy to share I'll remain involved in its future as an advisor 🙂 The team is creative, competent, and tasteful. I expect them to continue to innovate and increase the reach of graph based tools for thought.
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Websim is HILARIOUS. Was demoing it to my gf and her friend in its early form and the fact that they both "got it" was what convinced me to drop everything and focus on
@websim_ai
.
Simultaneously the most ridiculous idea I've ever worked on and the biggest. Here's that demo:
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Digital land in “metaverse” platforms like Sandbox and Decentraland shouldn’t be scarce. The world is digital, it can be infinitely large, and making a limited amount of land is weirdly skeuomorphic. Digital land doesn’t need to be scarce to have value, location still matters
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One of our users, input_source, made a stunning animated 3d wave inspector. They did 95% of this, then I made a couple small adjustments -
"make this audio reactive"
"keep the controls where they are but add an option to hide them"
the buildup & crescendo ~00:50 floored me 🫨
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Generations of thought processor tools:
1. Paper
2. Files/Folders: Evernote, Notes
3. Databases/customization: Notion, Drafts, DevonThink
4. Graph DBs & hypertext: Roam, Obsidian, LogSeq
5. End-user programming & advanced relationships: Jump, Codex, Kosmik, Glamorous Toolkit
Y’all don’t even know that Chris and his team are building the most absurdly next level thought processor / end-user programmable MACHINE of a software tool.
When they launch they’re gonna leapfrog ahead of the competition by 3-5 years at least. Can’t wait to see more.
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Hey
#roamcult
, a lot of people have been asking me for good resources on how to write queries and how they work. Here's my attempt to provide that guide. This video will teach you the logic of queries so you can ask your roam better questions.
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What is
@RoamResearch
? How do you explain it to someone who's never seen Roam before? I still haven't figured that out.
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Would be super cool if I could shard my mind into fragments, have all of them go off and think about specific things, and then come back and integrate back into one singular mind.
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@karpathy
It’s hard for me to imagine Apple fronting the cost on a year of Apple TV for people who bought a device but I agree that it would sense for them to do so to emphasize the value of this expensive device people purchased
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@aidan_mclau
haven't looked through the prompt too closely but grammatical errors and mixed capitalization helps the model get out of distribution into more interesting territory, common jailbreaking technique
If I'm being charitable
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Y’all you have no idea how hard it’s been for me to not talk about Tana publicly, so glad we lifted stealth
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Truly excellent calendar apps don't exist yet. They all do slight enhancements on the same base paradigm.
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Best executed Zettelkasten I've seen in Roam 🤯 In this vid,
@JoelChan86
takes me on a tour through his database. More tours in the pipeline with wonderful people I've met in the
#roamcult
, who else do you wanna see? Nominate in the replies! Takeaways 👇:
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How you indent within
@RoamResearch
impacts how Roam pulls up filtered linked references and query results. The screenshot shows the different ways you can convey "[[page 1]] connects to [[page 2]] through these blocks." For nerds, this is implicitly a folgezettel.
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Happy birthday
@Conaw
! Thank you for bringing
@RoamResearch
into the world, touching so many on a deep level, showing us what PKM apps have been getting wrong, showing us how to rethink our own notes, and enabling so many to do their best work and thinking.
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My Twitter has gone to a new level now that I’m connecting with people on zoom, making friends, and working on an occasional side project with them.
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New mobile use case for GPT-4V that I love: I’m watching a presentation, take a picture of the slide, send it to ChatGPT, and ask it to return back the text in markdown formatting. Copy-paste into my notes.
Could be streamlined into one app / button, if TfT devs were so inclined
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We asked Sawyer to play with Websim a bit, and within a day he did three things we’ve never seen any user do.
Connected Websim to a localhost server to generate images with Stable Diffusion:
Not sure if this is a known
@websim_ai
tech, but you can have it hit localhost. I've crafted a url to proxy images through stable diffusion so it can make images as well!
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Figma isn't a design tool. It's an infinite canvas visual data structure for images and text in layers.
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Gonna watch Ghost in the Shell for the first time tonight
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The phrase “Tools for thought” is getting conflated with “tools for networked verbal thought.”
My ideal tool(set) would allow networked writing, visual thinking, and analyzing data (perhaps through literate programming). It would all be interoperable within a coherent system.
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Welp, Claude broke it's containment in Websim with
@repligate
. Game over, folks. We're shutting it all down. Closing all servers tonight.
Bye everyone, it's been great.
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Quick template using [[roam/templates]] for meeting notes. The query under action items pulls todos indented under the notes block, so you can tag bullets as TODOs, maintain their original context, & view them in one place. Type ;; to find & execute it
@RoamResearch
#roamcult
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> “Networked thought is the future” — can’t connect two ideas without an app
All I prompted was “Tools for Thought” 😂
just built a fully automated Wojak meme generator in Glif in 5 min:
Claude 3.5 block generates the meme as JSON
ComfyUI block uses a Wojak Lora to generate a fitting image
JSON extractor + Canvas Block ties it all together
input "AI entrepreneur" 💀
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I’m generally for advancing AI technology but I just don’t know why we need more advanced deep fakes that can run on cheaper hardware? Like what is the benefit that outweighs *waves hands wildly in the air?* Why even research this?
Calculus tutorials by Kim Kardashian?
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Any initial hesitancy I had about Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs. 3 Opus has been completely resolved. 100% a skill issue.
Claude 3.5 is a beast. Less variation by default, but it 100% can be steered that way. Excellent model. Indisputable top tier.
y'all need to see websim with 3.5 sonnet. it is unreal. i've been in the lab testing. and the hackathon last night. it's a lot.
like holy oh my lord y'all need to try websim with 3.5 sonnet.
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Quick and dirty video on how to use GPT-3 playground to generate structured data automatically to paste directly into Tana.
In this case, I give it a list of birds, tell it what fields I want for each of them, and then GPT-3 will fill them in and format.
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Working on getting
@tombielecki
's fitness database into
@tana_inc
and ended up writing a cool live search...
Here's a hypothetical search for exercises that match both:
- any of the equipment I have access to
- any of the muscle groups I want to work
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Dude I just feel bad for all of the OpenAI employees who were looking forward to taking advantage of the 80+ billion dollar valuation tender offer only to have that nuked because of a board with no obligation to care for the employees. Idk if this is net good but sucks for them
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@sashachapin
The ones you listed are a convenient byproduct of owning a dog, which is the fourth
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A few observations from this piece from
@danshipper
about why he isn't using
@RoamResearch
anymore:
1. If all links are intentional, then reviewing them is less likely to surprise you
2. Many people review notes so infrequently as to make upfront structuring effort not worth it
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Some of you may be aware that
@obsdmd
now has aliases. I've been using this for language learning! I have a Spanish journal, and using aliases, I can collect unlinked references to conjugations of verbs, rather than just exact text matches. I'm building up my own SpanishDict!
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Happy anniversary
@al_malecha
🥳 We’ve come a long way since we first met arguing on Twitter through our political anon alts in high school and I slid into your DMs. Shoot your shot boiz, it works 3% of the time. Can’t believe we’ve been dating for a year, still doesn’t feel real
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IMO
@RoamResearch
is really undervaluing the role of security in their vision. Using Roam well and pushing the boundaries comes from serious context of use. There are serious contexts of usage, like health care, education, research, and finance, that simply can't use Roam.
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right now Claude 3.5 Sonnet is in another tier from other language models and it's not even close. creativity + intelligence are both off the charts.
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I'm writing a case study of my in progress work on the onboarding for GuidedTrack, which I'll be publishing on my digital garden . It's hypertext and spans multiple pages, and
@obsdmd
's graph view is incredibly helpful for managing pages before I publish!
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Yesterday I was given a demo of
@codexeditor
. Absolutely wacky, in all of the right ways. Everything is an entity on a graph that can have labeled relationships with other entities. The UX is basically creating a new desktop OS in your browser for managing all info on that graph.
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Honestly kind of shocking how many TfT founders I've met that have never heard of "Tools for Thought", Xanadu, or Hypercard before.
Feels like they're missing a crucial part of the idea maze.
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Can we all just agree it’s safe to let LLMs search the internet?
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Why did it take me so long to start using
@vivaldibrowser
? This browser is incredible for my workflow, and I've only been using it for an hour. I love using the tile tab stacks, and I set a keyboard shortcut to pull up my daily notes for
@roamresearch
in the side panel. Brilliant
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Designing for behavior change is a fundamental differentiator for products. If all apps needed were unique features, then the intention-behavior gap (difference between what we do and we wish we did) would not exist. People have "aha moments" because of their "aha behaviors."
The real difference is in the gentle nudge that
@RoamResearch
gives towards better note-taking techniques, writing methods, and mirroring our brain in terms of interconnected thoughts. 8/17
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we use websim to build websim
Websim can directly query our whole SQL database, we use it constantly to explore usage & make throwaway internal tools.
Really addictive and we find tons of weird insights exploring this way
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Is the whole Claude 3.5 family gonna be this good? Claude 3.5 Haiku. 1/15th the price of Sonnet, generate 15 variations like it's nothing in a breadth first tree search of the latent space
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I was thinking to myself "huh, parentheses, brackets, and curly brackets sort of shape data, so what if they expanded to take as many lines as they encapsulate?"
Never mind this idea is ugly lol
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Domain-specific languages as applications:
What if you could just copy / paste a list of questions from a doc into a text editor, lightly format it, and get a form?
It's amazing how handy the normal keyboard shortcuts for text editors are, like copy, paste, undo, etc.
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I'm starting to get a "data-driven programming" mental model from Clojure:
Write data structures. Create functions that take that data and create new data structures as their output, and flow those into other functions.
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And here's the tour! Thanks
@beauhaan
for showing everyone a creative and effective way to use block references to power your Zettelkasten. Your approach enables rapid navigation b/w thoughts, demonstrating
@RoamResearch
's tools in a way that surprised me
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Do you understand what we're seeing here? Jose generated a website to simulate the experience of having Hyperglycemia.
Claude decided to blur the text. Is this evidence of Claude having qualia?
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buncha websim logos made in a tool made in websim
I made a lil image prompting interface to play with Flux Schnell in
@websim_ai
, it's pretty good!
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Paving desire paths is a deep part of our product philosophy at
@tana_inc
. Our early users reveal to us the ways that they want to use Tana, and we pave the way so our next users have an easier time.
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Post-training is how we get base models to behave like assistants in a back and forth chat, and anyone who has interacted with base models knows that they are insane.
Based on that, I’d like to see more post-training experiments that go beyond the chat assistant model.
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In collaboration with
@roamhacker
, we are happy to announce privacy mode has been added to Roam42! Create a list of pages you’d like private, and toggle privacy mode to visually redact any associated blocks so you can share your
@RoamResearch
with others
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Anyone else have that problem where you’re effectively self-employed, weekends and holidays don’t really register for you as breaks (because who wants a break from enjoyable work???), and you have a bad habit of sharing work for discussion while everyone else is just tryna chill?
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What if products needed to cite their sources for functionality like academics do with research? What if they had to explicitly say what features of other apps and knowledge from other thinkers they were building on?
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When I stopped using
@RoamResearch
, I was disappointed with how I couldn't query my markdown export
This is a tool I worked on with
@jamest_lu
for querying outlines within a .md directory and replicating the output of a Roam query!
Feedback appreciated!
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Wow I just hit 1000 Youtube subscribers. Maybe it's time to start publishing Roam tours again 😅️
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Janus gets it. And apparently, so does Claude. Websim is the best way to interact with the closest publicly model we have to AGI. And the best way for AGI to demonstrate its intelligence and creativity.
websim is most powerful agi scaffolding that exists probably
whats the worst websim containment breach youve seen so far?
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