[Perspective] The internet today feels more like a giant shopping mall than it did a few years ago.

Also posted at: https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1539264570803761153

[Engineering] Studying how capable the web browser is on manipulating files. Mainly around the relatively new "File System Access API". It turns out it's complex and limiting, at least in comparison with making copies of files and uploading them to a server.

Considering in the past we have even rougher API, I think it's part of the reason that pushes almost everything into the cloud — whether your application has social or communication elements, things need to go into the cloud to be useful on the web.

Also posted at: https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1537165095838838784

[Engineering] React performance in a nutshell:

If you know exactly what's gonna change, change that at the most fine-grained level. In extreme, you don't even need to let things go through React.

Also posted at: https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1534990774848606208

Trying to have GPT-3 write JavaScript programs.

It performs well with simple one-liner requirements like the ones in the images, but beyond that it produces nonsense.

BTW, someone is developing a note-taking app that uses GPT-3 to inspire ideas.

Also posted at: https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1534216394220650496

TIL: @Wikipedia does have "backlinks" that tell us what links to (mentions) this topic. So unobvious that I only knew this after I got familiar with "backlinks" in various knowledge management tools and even did some search to find out.

Also posted at: https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1532031026272555009

Two common modes in which an open source project fails to realize its potential:

Poor empathy: Being too self-interested and having a hard time attracting people outside the small group of like-minded hackers.

Lack of focus and strategy: Being too obsessed with serving everyone and failing to identify signals from noise, leading to mediocre moves and diminishing return, finally burnout.

Also posted at: https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1530253829174104067

I've heard the analogy "As if Miro and Notion had a baby" from at least three products in the last few months.

The combination of whiteboard and document is a thing.

Also posted at: https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1523238297333813250

How to build software that is: As elegant as iOS. As open as GNU/Linux. As ubiquitous as Google Search. And being sustainable?

Also posted at: https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1518225937535762432

Working more on canvas stuff:

"Frame" is the equivalent of "Document" in a canvas, giving us the power to author visual narratives.

While it looks similar to the "group" feature in traditional drawing tools, it encourages its content being fluid rather than being solid.

Also posted at: https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1513103798184865799

Why social media apps usually don't have "sort" and "filter" options, and even "search" feels inaccurate? The more inefficient you are, the more engagement they get?

Yes, social media apps aren't productivity software, but today we share a lot of interesting and useful information on such apps, to the extent that some become "social operating systems", not just for entertainment, and sometimes we do need to be efficient.

Also posted at: https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1507344180435386375

TIL: "auxclick" event

You don't want to open a link whenever you pan the canvas with the middle button of the mouse.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1495472543205146629

Drag, Zoom, Pan.

A good canvas allows you to mix different types of input.

Like playing a musical instrument, you may need to train your fingers to orchestrate them well, though.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1494770151429865479

Optimizing FPS of a 2D zoomable canvas built with React + DOM and hit a hard wall:

Why does this "Recalculate Style" in the rendering pipeline takes so much time? Is there any chance to improve it?

For reference, @tldraw is also built with React + DOM (SVG) and has the same issue.

Update: One temporary solution to mitigate the performance issue is to simplify the structure of the HTML, reducing the number of elements to be recalculated.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1492923570082639874

I started to think that wikilinking ("[[", "double-bracket") is like autocomplete (symbol lookup) in code editors, and tools for thought are like code editors for general information. Maybe we can borrow some ideas from code editors when building tools for thought.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1490391427322236929

What do you care most about in 2022, or, in the longer term, in your whole life? Are you putting efforts into those things? Drawing a map helps me think.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1487729785744723970

Finally have a satisfying dark theme for my computational table. The orange, yellow, and brown ones were especially hard to tune, since they are similar colors. I ended up taking hue 22°, 34°, 46° for orange, brown, and yellow.

#uidesign

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1484956993294983169

An interesting insight: entrepreneur as a career

Most people still think being a founder is only for the privileged (rich, smart, famous...) instead of an option. It is definitely harder, but consider the length of the career being 30 years+, keep learning, networking, looking for problems that you care, it's not unrealistic.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1484587722870194177

Focusing on important, difficult, time-consuming, and effort-requiring activities is hard. Especially for non-work stuff. It's so easy to get distracted by tempting, simple, yet less fruitful things. Reading and replying random emails, answering messages on social networking apps, scrolling through Twitter, Hacker News, or some Discord channels full of sexy links. When distracted, I usually ended up doing a lot of unimportant chores and collecting many seemingly interested resources (but would hardly use them). For a long time, I doubt if I had ever accomplished anything meaningful, given that the distraction feels productive. Of course the answer is no.

One trick I'm trying to fight distraction: Connect the important thing I want to do to some people, or just publicly talk about that, so there's motivation to keep me "want to show some results", thus I have more determination to tackle the important, difficult, time-consuming, and effort-requiring things.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1484171255385264128

Looks like computers have better imagination than I do.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1483885349436723204

Facebook's "thumbs up", Twitter's "heart", Github's "star", Chromium's "bookmark", Medium's "clap"... Aren't they the same thing? Can I view 'em all in one place?

The questions also apply to messages, I have emails, Discord / LINE / Messenger messages, Twitter DMs, Github / Linear comments.

And documents, there are Markdown files in a git repo / in Obsidian / in Typora, pages on Notion / Craft / Google Docs, PDFs and office files.

"Services that help us operate other services" may be something interesting.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1483444161164369924

When managers only care about market numbers, developers only care about closing tickets, a product can never be good.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1483059642783522817

After discovering the idea of "A Meta-Layer for Notes", I started to try reading in this way ↓.

Creating side notes right next to the main content is intuitive, and the reading process automatically builds up an "image" of the connections between the content and the side notes for my mind, helping me recall the context later.

The main content could be anything, from webpages, PDFs, images, to apps. Also there should be some automation tools to do semantic highlighting, screenshot, content extraction, archiving, etc.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1480590960266719232

If you want to make an all-in-one game-changing app, go make an operating system. Literally, an operating system is all-in-one, with no exceptions. Don't make an app and get trapped by human interface guidelines and APIs that will handcuff you at some point.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1479862182963978246

Found another quirk of the Chromium browser:

Using transform and opacity (setting to less than 1) together may make text blurry.

This is especially annoying when animating opacity from 0 to 1, since there would be a visual glitch where the text starts blurry and suddenly becomes clear when opacity reaches 1.

BTW, it does not happen on Firefox.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1479107789465468932

Stumbled across a demo video showing the earliest version of Jade on my computer.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1476950047384236033

Learning and thinking statistics in one month

11/23 → 12/23

Canvas: 312 → 371

Block: 4658 → 6000 🎉

I should consider making a line chart, which might reveal more insight.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1473705462688522241

Why setting backdrop-filter: blur(5px) (to make sweet background blur effect) causes "Composite Layers" almost 100x slower? Too bad...

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1473712205774585858

Finally, pushed the code, published an NPM package, and written a post "How to Draw S-Curved Arrows Between Boxes / Rectangles" for the "curved arrow" 🎉

How to Draw S-Curved Arrows Between Boxes / Rectangles

https://github.com/dragonman225/curved-arrows

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1472998315805777920

Some thoughts on duck-typing:

Types are not rigorously defined rules but patterns discovered in accumulating facts.

→ Schema should come after data accumulated and should accommodate exceptions, which may be discovered as new patterns later.

Life only gets harder, problems only get more difficult, but likewise you only grow when you get through the hard things.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1471849664416972803

Playing more with the "curved arrow" — trying to visualize how it works!

By the way that interactive panel is built with leva in a few minutes. Great work @pmndrs!

One thing I appreciate in Jade is that playing with blocks in a canvas is fun, so I don't find it tedious to rearrange them into better shape.

Also posted at https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1470466273247383554

A cool knowledge management framework(?)! Apps working around a universal database sounds like a promising idea to me.

Will read the docs to learn more about it. 👉 https://github.com/unigraph-dev/unigraph-dev/blob/main/docs/README.md

This also reminds me of Trilium Notes and @thesephist's suite of personal productivity tools (Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools, Monocle, a full text search engine, and Revery, a semantic search engine). It would be interesting to take a look at them as well.

New algorithm for drawing an arrow between two rectangles. Jade

Will write a post about the tricks and publish a package to NPM.

Shall I call it "less-perfect-arrows" as opposed to @steveruizok's "perfect-arrows"? Since mine only allows the start point and the end point to be in the middle of an edge. Open to package name suggestions!

https://twitter.com/dragonman225/status/1465373060047851520

Moodboard with custom theme in Jade!

A command that shows the number of commits in each month, which pushes me to write more code!

As Jade having an append-only database, deleted concepts are not actually deleted but marked deleted. Sometimes it's interesting to see what has become the past, and now there's a way.

Calculating the average lifetime of deleted concepts may be another fun experiment to do.

I discover that, for knowledge to be useful, it has to be reduced/compressed (merge similar ideas and make the usage of words concise) and structured (add order, hierarchy, or network).

Accumulating lots of small ideas makes me feel like being productive, but without regular reviewing and organizing, it leads to a growing mess, where, although there's a large amount of knowledge, I cannot effectively use the knowledge to solve problems or make decisions.

I failed to identify this problem when I was using document-based tools or outliners, like Notion, Obsidian, or Orgzly, since everything always "looks structured" no matter if the content is actually structured. But in Jade , with a canvas, I can easily see what is a mess and what is structured knowledge. The canvas reveals that visually and encourages me to take action.

Another thing I'm still exploring is that structured knowledge in a canvas seems to look unlike a document or nested bullet points. Trying to mimic those representations is awkward.

Fix bugs that can make you crazy. #Jade

Building CSS block to design dark mode.

As a side effect you'll also be able to create your own themes! #Jade

Inspired by Sprout.place's "Write Style Rules"

Released the first seriously written tutorial for Jade .

(If you see the old data, try using an Incognito window.)

Improved the Embed block by allowing resizing height. #Jade

So you can:

Designing a new tutorial with block links. #Jade

Greatly improved Search tool and Insight tool[1] this week, to make finding stuff faster. #Jade

[1]: You can think of it as the equivalent of "Backlinks".

Now I have accumulated over 2000 concepts in #Jade and start to feel disoriented. Therefore, I'm looking for answers to these two questions: