Incoming Links

• March 26th, 2021

  Technically, the main thing is that I highlight salient stuff in books, articles, and web pages, which highlights then get synced into my Roam graph automatically via Readwise so I can then search them, browse them, and reference them in my own notes and posts.

• 📰 Elderblog Sutra: 12

  The only piece of the text renaissance trend to buck this general trend of falling costs and complexity is Roam Research, which I’d rate at a difficulty level of around 80 to use with power-user fluency. Or somewhere between cgi-bin Perl era and the earliest blogs. And it’s not cheap. Where Substack represents a kind of airbrushed-nostalgia in medium terms, reflecting a sanitized memory of OG email newsletters (running an email listserv 20 years ago was frankly a horrifying thing a universe away from the simplicity of writing on Substack), Roam is actually a kind of Unix shell pretending to be a web app. It promises the convenience of modern technology but actually delivers some sort of nerd-out maze of worthwhile inconvenience and complexity, a hilarious kind of bait-and-switch in an unexpected direction. In that sense, Roam actually has an open-source ethos, despite being a commercial startup that charges for its product.