Drop #136 (2022-11-14): Knowledge Surfing & GTD in a Sea of 8B Humans

Acreom; daily.dev; We're Gonna Need A Bigger 🎂

To everyone who, last week, helped give polysci academics & pundits fodder for a thousand papers/books/blogs/pods: thank you! Special thanks to Gen Z (ima still snark on y'all, tho) and women who — as I'm sure all the data will eventually show — truly turned the tide for 🇺🇸 democracy.

Acreom

We use Notion — one of those "knowledge graph" wiki killers — at work, and I emphatically despise the UX. Since I have to use it, it's killed my Roam usage (they're just enough different, and I really don't want to have to commit both idioms to muscle memory), which makes me sad.

Honestly, though, neither of them was all that great, and their cousins, like Obsidian, are fine, and all, but I think none of them track with me since I'm not their target audience. Sure, I'm a "knowledge worker", but I'm first, and foremost, a "hacker" and also someone who has many scattered thoughts/ideas and gets easily distracted. 🐿️!

Between frantic attempts at breaking my ⌘+R keys last week, I stumbled upon Acreom [GH].

I shall not wax poetic, since this is yet-another-knowledge-graph-thingy. It's not FOSS (yet — see below), either (despite the link to GH), which, I realize, will cause half of you to go to the next section.

Acreom is in today's drop because if it is free (some features like gCal integration are only in the paid version), is "local first" — so it actually works w/o "the cloud", and stores everything in Markdown, which means your data is your data.

It is also designed with hackers/developers in-mind. The UX supports / commands like the other graph databases, but it actually doesn't feel half-backed like it does in most of the other ones. And, it ties together calendar and tasks in a way that feels way more natural (to me) than the other ones (many of which don’t natively have this feature at all).

Their roadmap is out in the open, and looks really solid:

• Support for different date formats

• Multiple tabs

• Jira sync

• VScode-plugin

• Improved publishing

• End-to-end encrypted sync

• Real-time collaboration

• Plugin API

• Open-source acreom

• Dev team workspace

• Github integration

If you're in the market for a knowledge graph app uplift, I'd suggest giving acreom a go.

daily.dev

As noted in many previous editions, I live and breathe RSS feeds. While Inoreader (and other, similar, services) make some effort to enable discoverability, it is definitely possible to get stuck in a rut with the same OPML sources.

IMO the presentation is a bit over-the-top, but the daily.dev [GH] has managed to combine a curated set of topical feeds (aimed squarely at developers/technologists) with community/collaboration/gamification features that is actually pretty useful.

While it can be used via a browser extension, I'm not really a fan of those, and have just been using the progressive web app (PWA). Honestly, it's kind of amazing to see what can be done in a PWA these days.

Daily.dev will in no way, shape, or form replace my RSS addition, but it has given me new sources to add to my OPML, and some of the community blathering on various articles has been useful (it is odd seeing useful comment threads).

If you give it a go, I suspect you'll find a few new items a week that you might have missed.

We're Gonna Need A Bigger 🎂

Photo by Luke Michael on Unsplash

Via the U.N.:

"This year’s World Population Day falls during a milestone year, when we anticipate the birth of the Earth’s eight billionth inhabitant. This is an occasion to celebrate our diversity, recognize our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “At the same time, it is a reminder of our shared responsibility to care for our planet and a moment to reflect on where we still fall short of our commitments to one another,” he added."

The actual day is November 15th, but it’s going to take a while to get eight billion candles on a 🎂.

For those interested in the data behind all this, the U.N.'s World Population Prospects 2022 has you covered with:

[Data files with] key demographic indicators for each UN development group, World Bank income group, geographic region, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) region, subregion and country or area for selected periods or dates within 1950-2100. An online database (Data Portal) provides access to a subset of key indicators and interactive data visualization, including an open API for programmatic access. For advanced users who need to use these data in a database form or statistical software, we recommend to use the CSV format for bulk download. Special Aggregates also provide additional groupings of countries. For the first time, the estimates and projections are presented in one-year intervals of age and time instead of the five-year intervals used previously. The various datasets disaggregated by age are available in two forms: by standard 5-year age groups and single ages.

Grab all the data and start your analysis engines!

FIN

Hope everyone has a great week ahead! ☮