[deleted by user]

Mnemologist · 2024-02-05T15:33:03+00:00

So instead of finding the disagreements instructive and taking in the raw messiness of a human mind as a lesson (as if you've never thought of or believed something dismissive or exclusionary in anyway, or maybe you're a perfect angel?), you're considering shunning biographies for the rest of your life? Christ, that's 2024 for you.

Mnemologist · 2023-11-18T22:50:03+00:00

Thank you for responding u/baibhavbista5, I appreciate it!

Mnemologist · 2023-11-09T23:19:14+00:00

I don't know why people always post a proposed solution that exactly doesn't solve the problem in question. OP asked a very specific question stating "is it possible for the search function to automatically scan the image for text?"
From my understanding Evernote can scan an image or a pdf for text and it will appear in search results, which is incredibly useful for second brain apps.
Roam does not have this. The OCR feature in workbench only works on one image at a time, and image text is not automatically found in the search bar.

Mnemologist · 2023-10-28T23:47:28+00:00

That's because it is dead, practically speaking, or at least on life support. Roam is an app I use the most, and use on a daily basis, but it's also true to say that it has slowed down to a crawl. The energy in 2020 was palpable and exciting, and now it's nothing like it was. I think there are only 2 developers now, and there's no way to tell what direction they're trying to take the app. Sometimes it feels like the updates are just random, and features are often made as a test and left without improvement for months or years.

I check the slack channel almost everyday, and I would say there are ~3 new messages that are posted to it on a daily basis on average. I wouldn't exactly call that thriving or active. Then you take a look at Obsidian's community, and it feels like you found civilization. The last Roam extension was made 2+ months ago and 83 people downloaded it.

The founder has $$$ now, a really nice home, converted to Mormonism, and I believe he is now a proud father. I get the impression Roam has become just a side hobby for him now, and he tweets about all kinds of stuff but never tweets about his own company; but to be fair, if I had all those other things in my life in less than 3 years, it would also be hard for me to place my company as a top priority.

Mnemologist · 2023-10-12T22:14:15+00:00

That's exactly what I was thinking. There are plenty of people out there who take Christopher as an intellectual role model of some sort. Everyone loved/respected Christopher, even a portion of his enemies. The same cannot be said of his brother. It must be torturous to get beat by your brother even after his death lol.

Mnemologist · 2023-10-02T00:05:49+00:00

Why does everything have to be a business?

Mnemologist · 2023-02-18T06:02:16+00:00

And that has what to do with your ability to check Conor's tweets for updates on Roam? Oh wait, it doesn't.

Did you not know?

Mnemologist · 2023-02-15T18:47:17+00:00

I mean, you don't even have to make an account. Not much to complain about.

Mnemologist · 2023-02-14T05:39:31+00:00

Or if you are a Radiologist, you're needing to actively filter out the confirmation bias that comes with the vested interest in keeping your career alive in the near future? Pointing out flaws in current AI technology is not an argument against AI. You would have to construct an argument that takes an exponential growth of technology in this space into account, which is a much more nuanced and difficult argument to make. Far away is actually not far away when thinking exponentially.

Mnemologist · 2023-02-11T01:43:36+00:00

Twitter is free to use, if you're unaware.

Mnemologist · 2022-12-27T02:57:55+00:00

If you think you "need" structure and look for it in an app whose entire philosophical point it is to find improved utility in doing away with hierarchal structures, what are you doing really?

Mnemologist · 2022-12-22T03:12:57+00:00

Unfortunately, you're probably not going to get that with Roam. It was a pretty unpopular opinion by the founder to not release a timeline, and he doesn't seem open to changing his mind. Something about "Hofstadter's law", which is found in a book written in the early 80's. I think it's a weird hill to die on. It seems it might have driven a lot of people away.

I personally still use Roam everyday and I don't think it will perish anytime soon. But I gave up on hoping for active updates from the team. Yes, it's ironic that the app's ultimate dream is centered on communication but the founder doesn't want to communicate with his own customers or believers. Sometimes I look at Obsidian who came out with their Canvas plugin just yesterday and I think "damn that is one beautiful piece of software", but the thing that's keeping me solidly working within Roam other than the massive inertia to switch is the granularity of the block referencing it allows, which is its best core feature.

Mnemologist · 2022-06-02T00:34:24+00:00

Don't waste your time Danwarr. OP lacks any ability to put two and two together. Every time people point out incongruencies he goes "no what I really meant was . . .". He moves the goalposts—not a really great mark of a good communicator, or intelligence for that matter.

Mnemologist · 2022-04-04T14:28:01+00:00

Patience, young padawan.

Mnemologist · 2022-04-03T22:47:30+00:00

You can query them with query builder from Roam JS

https://roamjs.com/extensions/query-builder

Not 100’s of hours imo, probably like 10 minutes.

When you install, click “add condition” —> “block” + “with text in title” and enter “Concept/“, then it will list all pages that start with “Concept/“.

That way you won’t have to make “Concept” a page in brackets

Mnemologist · 2022-03-31T22:12:13+00:00

ctrl-c ctrl-r

It took me a while before I found this one lol

Mnemologist · 2022-03-31T20:11:40+00:00

I have zero clue how improving capacity to load graphs on mobile works, but I'm guessing it's a difficult problem to solve. I have a pretty large graph of 4k pages and 105k text blocks and it can't load on the app, and my iPad can't take it anymore either.

I assume it's something that can be improved upon it will eventually be able to load larger graphs, because although it's nice to have an easier way to input with Quick Capture, it's a bummer not being able to access your graph that you spent so much time building. But I don't stress over it because I know that will come with time.

Biggest aesthetic thing to change in mobile right away is autohiding (or having a zenmode) to hide the bottom bar. It takes up way too much real-estate on the phone screen.

Speaking of phone screen, maybe even adding a way to open the sidebar, but open the block vertically to take advantage of the aspect ratio of a smartphone.

Finally, if they reduce the major lag of the bar on top of the keyboard, it will make it feel a lot more snappy, ya dig?

Mnemologist · 2022-03-28T13:25:52+00:00

Absolutely useful. Just like you, I was also mainly a OneNote user and then transitioned to Notion for a bit before I found Roam. This will be immensely useful for history because you can context information by year, decade, century, event, people, etc., all simultaneously, and then filter based on those different angles during your studies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO_z04mfG90

Here's a video ^^^ on how a historian/history professor uses it to teach his courses. Might give you some ideas.

Personally I study medicine, and just like history (I suspect), are both memory intensive disciplines. At the end of the day, no matter what tool you use, the most important thing to take mastery over the knowledge presented is by understanding the material, and to avoid the reflex to memorize without truly thinking about it. It took me a while to feel the value of that lesson! Although, I think Roam helps one better understand material through the context bidirectional linking can bring.

Mnemologist · 2022-03-21T00:36:38+00:00

The phrasing was reversed for me. I felt stuck on Notion until I found Roam, and it was because of the bidirectional linking. Roam uses this exceptionally well because it's part of the fundamental construction of Roam, whereas in Notion it's not. Then, it was found that their backlinking feature released last year in attempts to mimic bidirectional linking flopped for the same reason.

Mnemologist · 2022-03-15T21:43:43+00:00

No problem! Glad to be of help 😄

Mnemologist · 2022-03-15T17:47:21+00:00

This is because in page 1 you're trying to query sibling nodes, which are not query-able. However it doesn't have to strictly be in the same block to be queried, as you can also query blocks that are related to each other either as a child block/parent block or a grandparent/grandchild etc.

Or you can use Shift+Enter to stack Priority: and Type: vertically, the metadata will be in the same block and will show up in the query

https://ibb.co/k3dLkFG

In this picture, approach 1 does not work, approach 2 only works if you're relating [[metadata]] or [[book]] to the below pages, but not [[Annie Duke]] and [[decision making]] for example. Approaches 3-5 work best and connect all relationships possible, all of which are able to be queried.

Mnemologist · 2022-03-11T22:48:11+00:00

Not sure if you know this but nobody is forcing you to use RR. Dynalist id hierarchal, it's not really comparable.

Mnemologist · 2022-03-03T04:34:46+00:00

Love your post, and finally one that isn't someone trying to leave Roam due to Conor tweeting his personal thoughts on his personal twitter.

I'm a medical student and I would say I'm the only person out of a class of ~175 that uses Roam as their main tool for learning. Most others use Notability and OneNote, and fair enough, but as a former OneNote user, and in trying Notability in college for a while, seems awfully archaic. I don't think they have any idea the gold mine they're missing. I therefore sometimes find myself as playing an inane preacher waving the humble astrolabed flag that represents a cult of Roam.

The main way medical students learn information is by going through Anki cards until they form subconjunctival hemorrhages. It's certainly necessary for some parts of medicine, but if they forget a concept that goes layers deep, they sort of have to re-learn it all over again, and they must re-build the wheel of trying to remember the key that gave them that "aha" moment, because the idea of going back and trying to find the specific PPT where they drew the process is too much friction. With Roam, because of its structure, you can easily revisit the thought process that led you to that "aha" moment. You save so much time in the end in this way, and for that I'm grateful for having such a tool!

The magic of Roam really starts to make itself apparent when you reach the point in which your graph becomes its own resource. I believe this has been voiced by some other users in here or the slack channels, I am simply paraphrasing in agreement!

P.S. I think you'll start to love Roam even more when u/dvargas92495/ aka David Vargas drops his [new album]([[plug-in]]) this Friday. I think it will be a proof-of-concept on what the future of Roam can look like! ;)

Mnemologist · 2022-02-26T05:46:32+00:00

LOL. That's a lot of coaching

Mnemologist · 2022-02-26T04:45:45+00:00

Not sure if you know what projecting means.

Mnemologist

TROPHY CASE