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by cratermoon 376 days ago
The author doesn't mention what I consider the true value of writing and organizing your notes yourself: that work is the work that drives learning and understanding.

I experimented with feeding my notes into an LLM model for RAG and was underwhelmed. The resulting output was repetitive, stilted, dry, and uninspiring. I wanted it to see if it find relationships between my ideas that I had not found on my own, but was disappointed . It did not provide me any new insights into my thinking. The style of what it did write was so foreign to my own style I found myself needing to read and re-interpret what it wrote back into my own ways of thinking that it was more busywork than help.

1 comments

Yes. People seem to be forgetting that, in many contexts, the greater part (or at least a major part) of work's desired outcome is to make changes to the conscious and subconscious minds that enable them to better handle future situations.

I'm all about automated solutions for things — but I find that my desires are typically for unrewarding physical activities. I still don't have a virtually costless robot butler, driver, farmer, chef, and maid to anticipate my needs around the house and home office; to transport my family and me around town safely and on time; to grow microplastic-free food hydroponically; to do my meal planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning, tidying, and laundry with effectively no intervention and supervision on my part. Why not?

Now that would really 10x my productivity.