flâneur

Spaced repetition | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com · 10,465 words · saved by 1 readers

I find memory endlessly frustrating; we have so many unique thoughts and insights and we are forced to watch them circle the drain. Worse yet, most people aren't even aware this is happening, no internal inventory has been taken to show the poor state of affairs! The tech community has a fixation on life extension, but I am worried I am not even properly remembering the life I am living right now, nevermind tomorrow. The interesting thing about the stream is that it is different each day. The stream I live near is a tidal stream, since I live by the ocean. Sometimes the tide is high when I go, so the water is brackish. At those times, I can see puffer fish and some kind of long narrow fish with large eyes and fins that look a bit like wings. When the tide is low, the carp swim from upstream along with the turtles. Blue herons stand in the shallower sections trying to catch the endless minnows that skip through the pebbles in the river bed. I have often thought to record the stream by t

I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I am regularly concerned with the number of thoughts and interesting ideas I have each day, and don't manage to write down or otherwise preserve. I have begun recording some minor annotations and idle thoughts on paper a month ago and after reviewing them today, I am shocked at how many I simply do not recall writing down at all. Worse, some of the information has lost context: I wrote it in a certain state of mind, certain emotional state which I no longer have and so the…

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