Books should be structured as expandable trees.
One paragraph summary of each chapter, expandable into summaries of component points/stories, expandable into the full text.
Can read the whole book in 5 minutes or 5 hours.
it’s utterly impossible for an algorithmic video-sharing website like TikTok to be a “town square” in the same sense that Twitter was supposed to be. There are all sorts of McLuhan-esque reasons for this: text as a medium is much faster to read, the reply and quote tweet function is what makes Twitter dialogic, its focus on text makes verbal wit... See more
all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write.
@softspaceninja Not a criticism of the demo! more a comment on the shortcomings of text as an interface. I want to be able to take some text and squish it to get a summary; smash two together to get some AI-inferred conclusions or list of disagreements. Text today is very opaque to most software
When I think about editing images, a vast array of options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpen, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc. Even basic image editors offer dozens of useful image manipulation tools.
When I think about editing text, a much narrower definition comes to mind: cut, copy, paste, find, replace, spell check — nothing that... See more
What if scholars & fans aided by computational algorithms, could knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature? If a reader could generate a social graph of an idea, or timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for anything in the library.