Just came across a very cheerful multicultural rendering of the International (Communist anthem from France) by Qinghua students and teachers. And I was surprised by some of the lyrics - I was singing this in Norway as a young socialist, and didn't remember it talk about racism..

Turns out there is a new translation/adaptation which changes the message quite drastically, which is used here for the English lyrics. I think it's quite interesting to compare that to the original text.

This is a huge milestone for me, which I'm very excited about. One and half years ago, I visited Crete. First time in Greece, and I got fascinated by both the history and the language. I left with a copy of Sophie's World in Greek, and a basic knowledge of the alphabet. I spent the first few months mostly using Duolingo (which I'd never liked before, but somehow seemed to work great for starting Greek, since I had to master both the letters and the pronunciation). I quickly got tired of individual sentences though, and began reading...

New video: Explaining some basic Tana data structure concepts - what is a tag template, what happens when you apply/remove a tag to a node, or add/remove a field from a tag template? ... Someone in the Slack community said they had used Tana for six months, but no supertags, because they were confused about what happened with data migrations - if I remove a field from my template, do I lose all the data that I already wrote, etc...

So imagine you go to an international weird (amazing) high school in Italy, with people from all around the world. And one of your roomates is a wonderful guy from Bolivia/Russia, with whom you have lots of fun. And you don't really stay in touch for 20 years... And one day he messages you out of the blue and says he is coming to Oslo in a few days, can he come to visit (I live nearby). And so he comes for dinner, brings some great Dutch cheeses (from his new home), and we have a wonderful conversation. He is working in IT now...

I often read Twitter on my phone, and I've been missing a good workflow for what to do when I come across an interesting thread or link to an external resource I want to check out. For the longest time I used to email myself. Lately I've been Sharing to @tana_inc Capture... BUT It looked like below, a list of URLs, which gave me no clue about the context. I wanted at least the text of the tweet, maybe even the thread. Elon has been making it harder to access the API, but today one of the community members tipped me about a way to get the tweet text...

Here's a 1000$ idea for free: imagine if you signed up for a course to gain better self-insight, and you got an email each day with a short question or prompt. Before you get out of the car, you open @tana_inc on the mobile, and read your answer to the question into your phone.. That's it - a quick five minute exercise, maybe it's the same question every day, maybe a different one. Maybe it's every morning, or maybe you suddenly get pinged at a random time from Whatsapp with a prompt. 5 minutes, and back to work...

I've always liked the idea of startup/shutdown routines, weekly reviews etc. But I'm often stressing out of the office to pick up my kid right after a meeting - and I try to stay away from my laptop during weekend. Now with Tana capture, it's easy to "capture the weekend"... Just spent five minutes on Sunday night on the couch talking "to Tana" on my phone, recapping the highlights of the weekend - the race we participated in, the family we met, and I sent a few images from my photo roll. Tag as journal, and I can now look back on it whenever I want.

Simple use case for AI in @tana_inc : If you have a setup like Zettelkasten, Evergreen notes, or even Feynman Questions - on your day tag, add a field that gives you N random references, and then an AI prompt which takes these questions and suggests connections... You can feed GPT3/4 the full content of each node, or even a search which looks at backlinks to those nodes, and ask it to look for connections, differences, generate questions for you etc. A great way to do "spaced attention" with a prompt to get you thinking and writing.

This probably went under the radar for most users of @tana_inc , but I did a podcast interview weeks before the public launch last year. We've come a long way since then, but a lot of the ideas I mentioned there are still alive. youtube.com/embed/-iBpOB5L… Could be fun to do some more interviews about Tana, knowledge management etc - especially related to AI. What would be good channels to be on?

Weird how access to TV/series and music is so different. With Spotify, I can't remember the last time I heard about some obscure group from any country in the world, and couldn't find the music on Spotify. I listen to Greek, Korean, Indonesian and Norwegian music every day +++ But with movies and series, it's still hopeless... Nextflix has an incredibly spotty selection of international movies (although some good series). I've been desperate to find good Greek movies - of a list of top ten best Greek movies, none are avail. for streaming.

Retro Thursday: Post some old blog posts, Youtube videos, or other digital contributions you made. Here are a few very old videos I uploaded.

Like this talk 14 years ago to a LatAm conference about a Peer2Peer Course on collaborative learning with tech Or this short video I edited the same year for a talk, which consists of cut of open educational videos from around the world.

Tana users continue to amaze me. AI and Commands have only been out for a few days, and today @Sarah_A_Bentley shared in the community Slack a setup where she used @Replit and @LangChainAI to set up an AI agent with access to tools - like Wolfram Alpha, Google, Wikipedia... Half an hour later, Brett Adam made a template and I was running queries in the Tana Inc workspace, getting actual information from real information sources...

Several tutorial videos coming as soon as Youtube is done, where I build some cool AI + API commands in Tana, and end by publishing them as templates which I'll share here. When designing the AI functionality in Tana, we both wanted to lift some functionality to the level that everyone could use it, like Ask AI, Add AI lookup to field, suggest new AI columns etc. And over time, we'll keep adding more stuff that "just works"...

@tana_inc has many ways of letting you link information. A simple inline reference tells you "this node is somehow related to this other node".

Using fields gives you a named relationship, which gives you much cleaner linked references (and searches, grouping, filtering), etc.🧵 But what if Tana could understand the semantic function of a link? Saying "Hamar" is a part of the province "Innlandet", is a different relationship to saying "jaundice" is a synonym with "icterus". Which is different from saying "The meeting happens on Tuesday, and lasts 30 min"

GPT Chat is insanely useful for languge study! This is exactly what I would need if I wanted to try learning to read Urdu again

The @tana_inc user community is amazing, and a bunch of them just launched the Tana Pattern Library. This is a shared workspace containing patterns from the community, that you can one-click import into your own workspace. They are really nicely documented. For example, if you liked @Mappletons's Evergreen Note setup in the video , you can import all the tags with a single click. Or maybe the Meeting setup @jcfischer uses with his team

Just released something I've been working on: a query linter. @tana_inc searches can be very powerful (note that you can also get very far by just doing a simple tag search, and using filters and grouping, sorting in the UI), and we noticed some common mistakes that users made... We now display a live-updated "explanation" of the query, to give users a better intuition for what f.ex. inserting a reference to a node will do (it narrows the search to nodes nested below that reference, which is very different from what a reference in a Roam search will do)

What am I getting myself into? Maybe it was a combo of @m_ashcroft's enthusiasm, and some interesting discussions on an Obsidian forum today... I still have a pretty high confidence level that Obsidian will never be my daily driver (but not 100%)... However, I'm really frustrated by Roam missing some essential features, and Logseq still having too many performance problems... So let's try something totally different :)

Also, there's an insane amount of cool plugins and good thinking in the Obsidian community,

Vision: all of my thoughts and readings are well indexed, and show up in backlinks where you'd expect them.
Actual case (10 min ago): Hm, this reminds me of the memory researchers who compared showing someone many paintings by the same painter, vs paintings by different painters That was from a really interesting podcast, I remember I took copious notes. I also remember which street I was on, and what the weather was like, when I listened!

But why isn't it showing up in my [[memory]] backlinks? I don't have that many...

Using @RoamResearch after exploring @logseq, I desperately miss page tags. I want to tag the entire contents of this page #transfer, so that I can later search for eg. (and [[transfer]] [[perception]]). I refuse to put a bullet with #transfer on top and nest everything below. The infuriating thing is that in theory, top-level attributes in Roam should be able to play this role. However, you can't query for them. I was tweeting about this two years ago - no improvement.

https://twitter.com/houshuang/status/1233273670690377728

In Logseq, you can add top level tags and query for them.

The founder of @logseq, @tiensonqin recently gave a long interview to the Chinese podcast ByteTalk (@lzzy @laike9m). I thought I'd share some key points here for all of the non-Chinese speakers. Hope I caught it properly, 请多多指教！:)

https://twitter.com/tiensonqin/status/1474668346498969608

Tienson used to work remotely for a Canadian company, and used Emacs and org-mode. He began developing Logseq because he wanted something that he could use on iPad/Mobile, and dreamt of a tool that his daughter could one day use to learn and grow. Initially built it for himself.