The problem with relying so heavily on argument from coincidences is that one then incurs the epistemic responsibility to seek out and explain alway other coincidences in the neighborhood putatively pointing to alternative explanations (a step people often forget, but is essential for the validity (insofar as one can speak of validity) of one's argument from coincidences). And such coincidences are always easy to find, since coincidences are cheap. (To take just one example, the pandemic happened shortly after the World Military Games, which US servicemen attended, at a time when the relations between the two countries were at their worst in recent times, and who came from a country one of whose household names novelists once publicly fantasized about all the world's nations coming together and use biological weapons to wipe out the entire population of China, based on none other than the desire to curb China's peaceful rise (cf. Unparalleled Invasion)) Do these "coincidences" need explaining away? Do they need to create a presumption in favor of the bioattack theory? If not, what is it about spatial proximity coincidence that gives it such power to confer that sort of presumption?
I've found the best note taking system that works for me is literally to store my notes in a full fledged programming language with built-in OOP support.
So for (a super simplified) example if I want to have a daily note system, I'll just define (say) a JavaScript object called DailyNotes, and everyday I'll just append some lines to my code saying, in effect, add the key for today's date to the object DailyNotes and assigns that key an array and each time I have a thought or idea I just pushes ["thought", "…"] into it.
So all of my notes comprise a huge code project.
(My actual system isn't quite like that, I use a custom syntax + language server that serves my purpose better and faster (in particular, it makes it easier to write multiline notes without need of escaping and makes it easier to default to do the literate programming style of defaulting to text))
The nice thing about it is I get to piggyback on IDE features of vscode. All the "roam-like" features are available in VSCode and implemented better (think the "peak" feature, and the wiki link feature, which can easily be simulated by using function calls! (And you can project-rename a function name at a reference just like in Roam)
I absolutely love the show Girls. I loved it so much, I was positively depressed when it ended and I emailed Lena Dunham multiple times to BEG her to revive it. I literally witnessed myself turning into a "fanboy" like I'm 16 again. Normally, if I love something I have reason to consider a "guilty pleasure", I will feel reluctant to publicly say I love it for fear of being judged. But in the case of Girls (and Titanic), I have so often been moved to tears watching them, I have so often experienced the feeling (for me, the mark of great art, because it's the exact same feeling I feel when falling in love) of "death is no longer something to be afraid of because I've just caught a glimpse of something eternal, something that is bound to go on exist forever" - I have so often experienced such feelings watching them, that it's immediately clear to me that it'd be a silly betrayal of my entire being to try and pretend I don't love them. It would be no different from publicly joking about my mom's appearance just to fit in with the cool kids. Have you watched Girls? Yes, it's comedy. Yes it's often silly. But there is so, so much more to it. I'd go so far as to say that anyone who's watched Girls without becoming mesmerised by Lena Dunham by the end, has not really watched the show.
Is Bill Gates still programming nowadays? He seems to have completely abandoned it. Which seems a little sad, because if he really liked doing it you'd expect him to at least work on a utility app or something in his spare time.
Cool name … but why do so many apps insist on using simple English words as names? Whatever happened to more boring, uncool, old-fashioned composite names like PhotoShop or Notepad or Powerpoint?
The problem with one word names is that if the app gets big, it pollutes the search results for those words, making information hard to find. Just Google "Kafka", "electron" and you'll see what I mean.
I get that there is a "cool factor" in using "austere" names. But please be considerate of the need of other professions … Naming your app "electron", "polyhedra", etc makes it harder for physicists and mathematicians or even just the average person to find the information they look for.
It's interesting to note that font designers generally are more considerate of not polluting the public naming space than programmers. Fonts are generally given names that just sound like they are names of a font (just like drugs are generally given names that "sound like names of a drug"). Apps used to follow similar conventions, hence PhotoShop, FrontPage, DreamWeaver, etc. I'm really not a fan of the "austere" naming aesthetics that have prevailed in recent years. And as a Kafka fan I'm tired of constantly coming across results about Apache Kafka when I'm searching for information related to the novelist. Yes, I know I can be more specific in my queries, but you'd be surprised how many good resources there are about Kafka that don't contain "Franz" anywhere, or how many pages on the internet are about Apache Kafka but don't contain "Apache" anywhere on the page. I used to have a Google alert set up for Kafka results and I had to turn it off because the noise to signal ratio is just too high.
Maybe I'm just a trivial person, but when I ask myself why I wouldn't live in those places, or any place, I find I'm simply psychologically incapable of being motivated by anything other than living standards, the attractiveness of members of my opposite sex, proximity to friends and family, and all that.
I would much rather not live in China, for the same reason I'd much rather not live in Montana, i.e. the living standards are a LOT lower in China than where I am, and it will be a lot harder to meet someone on places like Tinder I can feel attracted to.