xseparator's comments

xseparator | 5 years ago | on: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

It's absolutely relevant. The need for those investors to even have an exit is what set them on the course to IPO. Today's situation is a direct result of investors herding them in this direction.

xseparator | 5 years ago | on: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

This reminds me of a piece Stephen Johnson once wrote for the New York Times called "Tool for Thought", which described his process using DEVONthink software.

(https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-tho...)

"The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me[...]Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head -- I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection -- and I'd select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me."

That process eventually turned into a startup around 2010 I helped found in NYC. Good times.

xseparator | 6 years ago | on: Houston's sprawl drives up transportation costs

Native Houstonian turned New Yorker (25 years!) here. I often say to my Houston family and friends that while it may be hotter in Houston, we New Yorkers deal with the summer heat way more than they do. They go from their air conditioned houses to their air conditioned cars to their air conditioned destinations. We New Yorkers are out in it all day...we walk a hell of a lot more, and stand around in the ovens otherwise known as subway stations. And there are just way more spaces that simply lack A/C in NYC.

Yes we do have smaller living spaces, but I will say that my household electricity usage is about 50% less than most of my Houston cohorts, especially in the summertime.

xseparator | 7 years ago | on: Solving My Email Problem

The one downside I've found for this is that many email forms prohibit "+" in an address. They shouldn't as it's a perfectly valid character for an email address, but you know...devs.

xseparator | 10 years ago | on: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

As a paying customer, I see Evernote as awesome and terrible at the same time. I've enjoyed using Alternote on OSX as an Evernote client to get what I really want out of Evernote...a place to store, umm, notes. No chats. No web clippings and highlights. It's just notes I write, and associated attached media like document scans or images, in a clean interface. One of my favorite Evernote features is automatic OCR of images within notes. They do an excellent job at it.

I only use Evernote for my personal note-taking, and as much as I shake my fist at the massive clutter that has always existed in their first party apps, I can't live without it. (Notebooks AND Tags AND Search AND a map? Why?) It has never once occurred to me to use it as a collaboration tool. It boggles my mind why they would think this is something their customers want from them.

I've been using Evernote for so long the thought of having to move dozens of notebooks and hundreds of notes to another platform does not sound appealing!

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