ideas VS chatgpt-shell

I wrote some notes about this of what I want in my "life engine":

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#5-life-engine

I never got into the quantified self but I did want a portal (such as similar to the Yahoo! and Excite.com days) in the early 2000s. of personal details that I can take actions on.

Then a few years later I wrote about "life situational awareness apps"

I want my phone and desktop computer system try to have widgets for "accommodation", "travel", "food".

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3#59-life-indicators---sit...

I did write a question generator feed dashboard written in Electron that let you snap in data collectors that would let you save records of stock purchases and facts about yourself such as your salary. The idea is that you could get advice based on what you answer.

https://github.com/samsquire/living-documents

https://github.com/samsquire/living-documents-library (the app repository)

Unfortunately it's probably not buildable and I forgot to take screenshots or videos.

My blogging/journalling setup is simple.

I just use GitHub. I just rely on the default repository view on GitHub.com

I create a README.md and add markdown headings to the bottom or to the top (bottom if its a journal, top if it's a blog) and then when I get to 100-800 I create a new repository and repeat.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

Thanks for posting this Ask HN question.

I journal ideas and thoughts about computers and software. I am interested in software architecture, parallelism, async, coroutines, database internals, programming language implementation, software design and the web.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4 <-- this is recent but needs editing

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas5 <-- this is what I'm working on now

https://github.com/samsquire/startups

https://github.com/samsquire/blog <-- thoughts I want to write about, but incomplete

I use README.md on GitHub and create a heading at the bottom for each entry. I use Typora on Windows or the GitHub web interface to edit.

In 2013 I wrote about "game interfaces for work" where work interfaces should act like games. Real time strategy games make you feel empowered, if you could queue up real work in a units runqueue. Of course you'll have actions besides "build" and "attack" to map to the richness of the world.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#71-gaming-interfaces-for-...

Even the mouse is a database

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#12-the-package-manager-pa...

I call these branching libraries.

Definition: Use one kind of thing as another kind of thing.

Given X do Y

Generics gets us some of the way to what we want.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#48-branching-libraries

Using a database as a spreadsheet or a spreadsheet as a database, using a spreadsheet as a functional programming language or bash pipeline editor with each cell being the output of that pipeline step. Or reactive programming with spreadsheets.

I am trying to solve the expression problem. To introduce a new thing into an old thing you typically need to implement hundreds of functions on an interface.

Remember that all science, mathematics, theology comes from understanding an idea. So ideas are valuable to society. If you think they're worthless, then I don't want your ideas, I want people in academia and industry to have good ideas and push society forward. Science, mathematics, theories, research, theology all are built on the shoulders of giants, with ideas that provide foundations of truth to push society forward.

The more ideas you have and the more you work on them the more you grow as a person. I also work on building software to put my ideas to the test.

I journal/blog all my computer and technology related ideas on GitHub out in the open.

I have published 700+ ideas on GitHub. I create a repository called "ideas" then I journal 100-400 ideas using markdown and then create a new repository and repeat. They're all in markdown and written as simple numbered markdown headings and a few one paragraph to a page of notes. They should be enough to understand the idea and do something with it. I reread my ideas repeatedly and I uncover new ideas from my existing ideas. Ideas should be built on and improved precept by precept.

For reference, they're about software design, software architecture, parallelism, multithreading, efficiency, growth, futurism, progress.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas <- 2013

I am more likely to journal and blog if the friction to creating a post is as simple as opening a document and writing. The important part of journalling or note software is that you actually create notes. I did use Hetzner to run a Wordpress blog but it had an overhead of server expenses and keeping Wordpress up-to-date.

I don't want my data trapped in a proprietary system where it is difficult to export, so I use plaintext. I looked into Publii [1] but I prefer my current plaintext setup. Today I journal software ideas, computer ideas, startup ideas and community ideas on GitHub in the open, as README.md files. My journal is all public on GitHub at the following links. There are over 550+ journal entries, I am sure you shall enjoy them.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/startups

https://getpublii.com/

I wrote a living document interface. Nowadays it's probably similar to notion.

The idea was you could write code into it and see all the data structures of the code you wrote. There's a screencast and the code is available but broken. It's written in Angular 1. There was a cool feature where you could select different things on the screen for searching for an operation for them to merge them together.

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3064a94d00812c1373c4eb3b2...

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#4-living-documents

I think it is a tooling issue. It is in no way obvious how use LLM's effectively, especially for really good writing results. Tweaking and tinkering can be time consuming indeed, but i use lately the chatgpt-shell [1] and it lends well to an iterative approach. One needs to cycle through some styles first, and then decide how to most effectively prompt for better results.

[1]https://github.com/xenodium/chatgpt-shell/blob/bf2d12ed2ed60...

- https://xenodium.com/an-ios-journaling-app-powered-by-org-pl... - Lately, I'm having a go at building a privacy-focused plain-text-based iOS journaling app. I starte building it for someone important in my life but now using it myself.

- https://flathabits.com - After reading Atomic Habits, I wanted a habit tracker but most had more friction than I wanted, required accounts, had distractions, lock-in etc. so I built a privacy-focused app, with little friction and no-lockin (saves to plain text).

- https://plainorg.com - There are a gazillion markdown apps on the App Store, but hardly any supporting org markup, so I built one.

- https://xenodium.com/scratch-a-minimal-scratch-area - I wanted a surface where I could just dump text with as few taps as possible.

- https://github.com/xenodium/macosrec - I wanted to take either screenshots or videos of macOS apps from the command line, so I could integrate anywhere.

- https://github.com/xenodium/chatgpt-shell - I'm far down the Emacs rabbit hole, so I prefer Emacs-integrated tools. Built a ChatGPT Emacs shell to see what the hype was all about ;) tl;dr it really does help.

- https://github.com/xenodium/dwim-shell-command - A way to manage and easily apply the gazillion one-liners (and more complex scripts) I've come across. I got close to 100 utils check-in now https://github.com/xenodium/dwim-shell-command#my-toolbox

- https://github.com/xenodium/ob-swiftui - Play around with SwiftUI layouts from the comfort of my preferd editor.

- https://github.com/xenodium/company-org-block - Org block completion.

- https://xenodium.com - I tend to scratch own itches and post my solutions here.

Every so often I scratch an itch to improve my workflow and write it up https://xenodium.com.

With lsp, the gap between IDEs vs text editors is narrowing. While I still prefer Emacs, I’m pragmatic enough to jump on to whatever tool does a better job for a specific task. At times, that is Xcode.

Was also sceptical about ChatGPT and changed my mind like OP. I was less pragmatic on this one and brought ChatGPT over to Emacs https://github.com/xenodium/chatgpt-shell. Pretty happy with the result so far.

There are a handful of chatgpt Emacs packages. I happen to have authored chatgpt-shell. For making a synchronous request, can use chatgpt-shell-post-prompt. For async, use chatgpt-shell-send-to-buffer with a handler.

https://xenodium.com will hit 10 years in November. It started as a single org file for personal notes (programming, cooking, Emacs, bookmarks, iOS dev, travel). One day, I decided to export it to HTML and make it accessible to me from anywhere. Sorta just became both notes and blog over time…

While the tone of the posts may have evolved a bit, the blog still serves as personal notes/reference of sorts. The tech behind it hasn’t changed a whole lot. It remains a single org file (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xenodium/xenodium.github.i...) with my own ugly elisp hacks, but hey does the job ;-)

u/xenodium's chatgpt-shell deserves a mention. It uses an intuitive Comint-shell based interaction and includes support for executable code blocks (in the comint-shell) and for org-babel. It's very polished -- I believe it also includes support for saving and restoring sessions, which gptel is yet to add.

Yep. Turn some of them into posts https://xenodium.com

For certain concepts that I don't understand fully, I'm using chatgpt-shell. It is beyond fantastic and almost impossible to describe in a single post. This is, for example, just one of my use cases: When I'm writing a comment or a message to my colleague (and of course, yes, I edit just about any text in Emacs), I can select a paragraph and ask chatgpt-shell to improve it. It does, but it also shows me the diff of the changes, that is how I set it up.

Mine (https://xenodium.com) will hit 10 years in November. It started as a single org file for personal notes. One day I decided to export it to HTML as my accesible notes from anywhere. Sorta just became both notes and blog over time… While the tone of the posts may have evolved over time, they still serve as a notes/reference of sorts. The tech behind it hasn’t changed a whole lot. It remains is a single org file (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xenodium/xenodium.github.i...).