Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
How do you keep track of what you've read online? How do you manage your personal research? Do you have a system? Do you have collections, and keep notes? Is this an actual problem you have?
Personally, I often read something and then struggle to find it again months later, or open something in a new tab to read later only to lose the tab. Or I might write down my thoughts but then lose the context of what I was looking at when I had them. It just feels like things here could be much better.
@gattsuru, if there's one person who's answer I'd like to hear it would be you. Is there a method to your trick of pulling obscure trivia on various topics, or do you just have photographic memory or something?
I don't have a photographic memory, and may have a worse memory than most people. Have tried some techniques like the memory palace, but they're very hit-or-miss for me, at least.
I've got a handful of tools set up, but they're mostly glorified record-keeping:
a todo list for major projects separated by scope, following the Ruby-inspired rule to break apart a scope or trim down my targets if they exceed 5-7 points. I've moved it to Nextcloud for sync purposes, but for a while I was using SVN (not recommended).
a (set of) TiddlyWiki for keeping high-relevance notes (cfe The New Zettelkasten as a more aspirational breakdown that I'm absolutely not anywhere near). I'm not sure TiddlyWiki is anywhere near the ideal software for this, and even in its class there are a variety of other strong tools (eg Logseq has a lot of fans, Foam if you're a VSCode masochist). (way back in the day this went on a PalmIIIc, but that was awful.)
and I've had downloaders akin to Gwern's approach, to try to make more readily locally-searched tools for heavily-used forums and social media (largely inspired by the broken search at RPGnet back in the 00s). It's not always the better option, but it's good for narrowing down time periods to then use other online search tools.
These aren't good tools, though, and there's a reason I've got this on my list of things I'd love to hear from someone deep into the reeds on it. A TiddlyWiki dive from site->user->subject->category->timeblock is hard to actually follow unless you're looking for something as broad as an entire field of study, and in many ways that's the simplest use case. By contrast, looking up some reference from a book I read five years ago the process is usually something like subject->book->topic, but this struggles badly given many books have important revelations away from their core subject (eg, I read an important bit about multiplexing in power plant design, does this fall under electrical engineering, or under fossil or nuclear power, or something different). Grepping the full file works where there's a rarely-used technical term, but falters when a matter is more colloquial: as an example, if I'm looking up a SCOTUS cert request on warrant requirements, which narrows things down a bit, but it was a specific case where the cop was a thief, and it probably would have just been faster to do a site:scotusblog.com search for "rare coins" to find Jessop.
The philosophy behind Notes Must Link helps, a little, but only at the largest scales. I want to think tags could help, but narrowing down to a hundred posts, many of which are only tangentially about a topic, doesn't make for fast lookup. And if you have four hundred tags, you're a) not going to use them, b) not going to find them, and c) won't be consistent in application.
((and, uh, it's pretty unpleasant to read for pleasure while also taking this depth of notes. For written fiction, I'm usually just throwing a single author->book->summary + clever quotes bit, and sometimes not even that.))
More generally, I don't have any real ability to search video, and my attempts to kitbash an audio transcription capability are pretty error-prone, and there's legal reasons you shouldn't default-record audio anyway. I kept manual notes from the IRC era and still type down major information from Discord channels, but keeping up with even a couple Discords worth of incoming information is unmanageable. Other formats -- IRL, video games, VR -- are pretty much just out of scope.
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