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> And yet instead of feeling accomplished, several years ago Leca realised he felt an internal void. > Has anything he’s built really improved people’s lives?

> And yet instead of feeling accomplished, several years ago Leca realised he felt an internal void. > Has anything he’s built really improved people’s lives? > To hear Leca describe it, the development of Beam is as much an effort to improve the web browsing experience as it is a spiritual quest for meaning. > “The only reason I’m doing this is to be working for the greater good,” Leca said. “Is this something I can explain to my kid and be proud of the fact that it’s not just a stupid business to make money?” This reads like a parody of SV hubris. It's a startup to slap note-taking onto a browser shell. It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell. > “What do I have for all these hours I spent on the internet?” he said. “Nothing. I’ve got three bookmarks and a few notes here and everything else is basically lost.” It's crazy to me that the author thought that and their solution was "I should make it easier to take notes" and not "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media." The knowledge base should be primarily in your head. If your mind doesn't feel like a knowledge base to you, it's because we're all so busy jamming new data into it that we never slow down and take the time to reflect and process what we've already consumed.

azinman2 6y ago
> "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media." How do you know that is the target audience? To me it's people who are research focused, which doesn't necessarily mean they're fucking around at all. Academics, scientists, etc, often spend a ton of time reading papers and researching things + taking notes. You're making a big assumption here.
- type0 6y ago
  Yes and that already exists - https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/ and works as a simple add-on. I don't see what new benefit the dedicated browser could bring.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    There's more than one way to skin a cat...
    - type0 6y ago
      I feel that in the case of Beam browser all cat lovers will be disappointed.
      - _carbyau_ 6y ago
        Hang on, are the cat lovers here wanting their cats skinned or not? :-P
        type0 6y ago
        Here is an article I would like you to read about cat taxidermy https://www.catster.com/lifestyle/pet-cat-memorials-preservation-taxidermy https://www.catster.com/lifestyle/pet-cat-memorials-preserva... it explains why you can become disappointed
        _carbyau_ 6y ago
        While we've gone OT, thanks. That was an interesting read from a different point of view. Personally, I had never even considered taxidermy on a pet. It'd feel too much like having a relative stuffed and put on display which somehow feels disrespectful. But then, there are things like Lenin and Mao being on display. Way off topic now so I will stop.
jeromenerf 6y ago
> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head. I agree generally, then there is also a case to be made about writing down notes as a way to memorize the information. Particularly useful when starting on a new subject and could be great for teaching. There is also information that isn’t worth memorizing but worth annotating. Shopping for instance. I would appreciate a 2-way annotation system, where existing notes would appear when visiting a page and where pages would appear when visiting organized notes.
- munificent 6y ago
  I agree that note-taking is important. But I don't think eliminating a single click to switch from the browser to a note-taking app will make any measurable difference in the quality of anyone's knowledge base or note-taking. The thinking and writing is the hard part.
  - jxramos 6y ago
    Reminds me of an old Wilde quote someone used to post at work... If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you. Oscar Wilde
  - jeromenerf 6y ago
    I don’t know. Browsers are already huge beasts, but I feel like their large feature set mostly benefit the cloud services than the user. I am not advocating for even bigger browser, but I would welcome a better local-first integration with surrounding apps. As of now, extensions are pretty limited in what they can do around the browser UI. On desktop, extensions can merely add icons to a toolbar and inject content to the current page. Vertical sidebars are gone. On mobile, it’s even more limited to adding actions to a menu and some background tasks. Browsers escaped from the crazy and sometimes fragile extension system that could interact with the browser chrome, maybe for the better, but nowadays, they are mostly sandbox screen readers or huge cloud only monoliths à la chromeOS.
Kuinox 6y ago
"The knowledge base should be primarly in your head". Unrelated to the article, but I often vaguely remember that I did read something on internet, and want to be sure of what I did read, but google search is not powerful enough to find the thing I already seen. I wish I had a search engine for every content I browsed, watched, heard, but I don't care about the content I didn't read yet.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  > I wish I had a search engine for every content I browsed, watched, heard, but I don't care about the content I didn't read yet. You want something like ArchiveBox[1]. [1]: https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/
  - Kuinox 6y ago
    Thanks I will look that !
  - Kuinox 6y ago
    Now that I did read it: The storage part is exactly what I wanted, but the search part is missing.
    - nikisweeting 6y ago
      It has full-text search with Sonic (or ripgrep as a fallback), it's a new feature released recently (v0.5.3). If you use the Docker setup it should work out-of-the-box.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
derf_ 6y ago
> It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell. I have worked on software for treating cancer, and I have worked for Mozilla. And boy, let me tell you, the latter sure felt like it had a much bigger impact on the world.
- skavi 6y ago
  Are you affirming munificent's claim of "SV hubris" or do you actually feel you made more of an impact at Mozilla? This is an honest question; I can't tell which way you are trying to go with your comment.
  - derf_ 6y ago
    I don't know. It was a sincere statement. Let me tell you a little bit about medical software. It is incredibly hard and expensive to get data. It usually involves finding enough people who are dying in a particular way (already hard), and managing to collect comparable data from each (i.e., with the same process: even harder). There is never enough of it to do the statistics you want. Once you have some, and you maybe come up with some way to do some step of the treatment process slightly better, there are a lot of hurdles and it takes a very long time before anything you did can actually be used on a patient. Rightfully so. People's lives are at stake. With cancer in particular, maybe after a decade in the field you might know if what you did had a positive impact on treatment outcomes. Maybe. That's the best-case scenario. For me, I don't even know if any line of code I ever wrote was actually used to treat a real patient. Oh, yeah, and those dying people whose data you used to come up with and test your idea? Yeah, you could not do anything for them. They got whatever treatments were the best available at the time, and good luck. If they were great treatments, you probably would not have been working on the problem. So that sucks. Meanwhile, at a browser company, I was able to write a patch and within a month or three it was deployed to over a hundred million people. Software projects I worked on are currently used to encode and decode a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. They are deployed on every Android handset and every iPhone (not just in Firefox), so that's a few billion devices. Every time you make a Zoom call or use probably almost any other video conferencing service, you are using at least one, if not several, of those projects. I understand people are doing a lot of video conferencing these days. Maybe even some telemedicine calls between radiation oncologists and their patients. So, uh, yeah. I feel like that had more impact. Not to discourage anyone from trying to cure cancer. It's incredibly hard. P.S., "cancer" is actually a thousand different diseases with a thousand different causes and requires many different treatments. There will never be a "cure for cancer".
mrieck 6y ago
I had the same existential crisis from of all the time I waste on the internet. My solution was to make the Productivity Owl. It’s not for everyone, but if you need an extremely strict browser extension to change your browsing habits I think it’s useful. (also free and open source) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/productivity-owl/eoagmdboiealblmpaahjlhajggndaahi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/productivity-owl/e...
- Glench 6y ago
  Hey that's awesome! If you ever think about charging or adding paid features, check out my extension payment service https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com It's nice because it's cross-browser and you don't need to run your own server :)
phailhaus 6y ago
I'll take the exact opposite side on that one. Here's the red flag: > The knowledge base should be primarily in your head This is exactly the same thing as saying "you shouldn't need search engines, you should be able to find it yourself." But Google proved that if you can change the way people find information, you can literally change the world. It is precisely in building new tools, new fundamental primitives by which we interact with information, that we can make the biggest impact. It remains to be seen if he can execute, but the idea of decentralized, personal knowledge databases sounds like it could be one of those indispensable tools in the future.
addicted 6y ago
This is the guy who created Sparrow, which basically kicked off a revolution in mail clients, a space that was moribund until Sparrow arrived. I think he’s earned some benefit of doubt.
- dikei 6y ago
  Wasn't Sparrow got acquired then killed off by Google ?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
placebo 6y ago
relevant: https://youtu.be/WqoYoXY-RC0?t=114 https://youtu.be/WqoYoXY-RC0?t=114
baxtr 6y ago
That’s a key insight for all of us. The internet contains just too much stuff that is interesting. We will never able to consume all of it. So you have to restrain yourself eventually.
throwaway2245 6y ago
> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head. Making it easier to store and recall useful information, without using your brain, is a good thing that has fuelled progress in recent decades. The impermanence of the internet requires you to store useful information in your brain (you can't guarantee that it will be stored for when you need it), when really it would be better stored externally. The fact that the internet is impermanent encourages you to treat it as something you need to siphon information from (jam all the data into your head), rather than a safe store that you can depend on.

azinman2 6y ago

> "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media." How do you know that is the target audience? To me it's people who are research focused, which doesn't necessarily mean they're fucking around at all. Academics, scientists, etc, often spend a ton of time reading papers and researching things + taking notes. You're making a big assumption here.

type0 6y ago
Yes and that already exists - https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/ and works as a simple add-on. I don't see what new benefit the dedicated browser could bring.
- azinman2 6y ago
  There's more than one way to skin a cat...
  - type0 6y ago
    I feel that in the case of Beam browser all cat lovers will be disappointed.
    - _carbyau_ 6y ago
      Hang on, are the cat lovers here wanting their cats skinned or not? :-P
      - type0 6y ago
        Here is an article I would like you to read about cat taxidermy https://www.catster.com/lifestyle/pet-cat-memorials-preservation-taxidermy https://www.catster.com/lifestyle/pet-cat-memorials-preserva... it explains why you can become disappointed
        _carbyau_ 6y ago
        While we've gone OT, thanks. That was an interesting read from a different point of view. Personally, I had never even considered taxidermy on a pet. It'd feel too much like having a relative stuffed and put on display which somehow feels disrespectful. But then, there are things like Lenin and Mao being on display. Way off topic now so I will stop.

jeromenerf 6y ago

> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head. I agree generally, then there is also a case to be made about writing down notes as a way to memorize the information. Particularly useful when starting on a new subject and could be great for teaching. There is also information that isn’t worth memorizing but worth annotating. Shopping for instance. I would appreciate a 2-way annotation system, where existing notes would appear when visiting a page and where pages would appear when visiting organized notes.

munificent 6y ago
I agree that note-taking is important. But I don't think eliminating a single click to switch from the browser to a note-taking app will make any measurable difference in the quality of anyone's knowledge base or note-taking. The thinking and writing is the hard part.
- jxramos 6y ago
  Reminds me of an old Wilde quote someone used to post at work... If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you. Oscar Wilde
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  I don’t know. Browsers are already huge beasts, but I feel like their large feature set mostly benefit the cloud services than the user. I am not advocating for even bigger browser, but I would welcome a better local-first integration with surrounding apps. As of now, extensions are pretty limited in what they can do around the browser UI. On desktop, extensions can merely add icons to a toolbar and inject content to the current page. Vertical sidebars are gone. On mobile, it’s even more limited to adding actions to a menu and some background tasks. Browsers escaped from the crazy and sometimes fragile extension system that could interact with the browser chrome, maybe for the better, but nowadays, they are mostly sandbox screen readers or huge cloud only monoliths à la chromeOS.

Kuinox 6y ago

"The knowledge base should be primarly in your head". Unrelated to the article, but I often vaguely remember that I did read something on internet, and want to be sure of what I did read, but google search is not powerful enough to find the thing I already seen. I wish I had a search engine for every content I browsed, watched, heard, but I don't care about the content I didn't read yet.

vorpalhex 6y ago
> I wish I had a search engine for every content I browsed, watched, heard, but I don't care about the content I didn't read yet. You want something like ArchiveBox[1]. [1]: https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/
- Kuinox 6y ago
  Thanks I will look that !
- Kuinox 6y ago
  Now that I did read it: The storage part is exactly what I wanted, but the search part is missing.
  - nikisweeting 6y ago
    It has full-text search with Sonic (or ripgrep as a fallback), it's a new feature released recently (v0.5.3). If you use the Docker setup it should work out-of-the-box.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

derf_ 6y ago

> It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell. I have worked on software for treating cancer, and I have worked for Mozilla. And boy, let me tell you, the latter sure felt like it had a much bigger impact on the world.

skavi 6y ago
Are you affirming munificent's claim of "SV hubris" or do you actually feel you made more of an impact at Mozilla? This is an honest question; I can't tell which way you are trying to go with your comment.
- derf_ 6y ago
  I don't know. It was a sincere statement. Let me tell you a little bit about medical software. It is incredibly hard and expensive to get data. It usually involves finding enough people who are dying in a particular way (already hard), and managing to collect comparable data from each (i.e., with the same process: even harder). There is never enough of it to do the statistics you want. Once you have some, and you maybe come up with some way to do some step of the treatment process slightly better, there are a lot of hurdles and it takes a very long time before anything you did can actually be used on a patient. Rightfully so. People's lives are at stake. With cancer in particular, maybe after a decade in the field you might know if what you did had a positive impact on treatment outcomes. Maybe. That's the best-case scenario. For me, I don't even know if any line of code I ever wrote was actually used to treat a real patient. Oh, yeah, and those dying people whose data you used to come up with and test your idea? Yeah, you could not do anything for them. They got whatever treatments were the best available at the time, and good luck. If they were great treatments, you probably would not have been working on the problem. So that sucks. Meanwhile, at a browser company, I was able to write a patch and within a month or three it was deployed to over a hundred million people. Software projects I worked on are currently used to encode and decode a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. They are deployed on every Android handset and every iPhone (not just in Firefox), so that's a few billion devices. Every time you make a Zoom call or use probably almost any other video conferencing service, you are using at least one, if not several, of those projects. I understand people are doing a lot of video conferencing these days. Maybe even some telemedicine calls between radiation oncologists and their patients. So, uh, yeah. I feel like that had more impact. Not to discourage anyone from trying to cure cancer. It's incredibly hard. P.S., "cancer" is actually a thousand different diseases with a thousand different causes and requires many different treatments. There will never be a "cure for cancer".

mrieck 6y ago

I had the same existential crisis from of all the time I waste on the internet. My solution was to make the Productivity Owl. It’s not for everyone, but if you need an extremely strict browser extension to change your browsing habits I think it’s useful. (also free and open source) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/productivity-owl/eoagmdboiealblmpaahjlhajggndaahi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/productivity-owl/e...

Glench 6y ago
Hey that's awesome! If you ever think about charging or adding paid features, check out my extension payment service https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com It's nice because it's cross-browser and you don't need to run your own server :)

phailhaus 6y ago

I'll take the exact opposite side on that one. Here's the red flag: > The knowledge base should be primarily in your head This is exactly the same thing as saying "you shouldn't need search engines, you should be able to find it yourself." But Google proved that if you can change the way people find information, you can literally change the world. It is precisely in building new tools, new fundamental primitives by which we interact with information, that we can make the biggest impact. It remains to be seen if he can execute, but the idea of decentralized, personal knowledge databases sounds like it could be one of those indispensable tools in the future.

addicted 6y ago

This is the guy who created Sparrow, which basically kicked off a revolution in mail clients, a space that was moribund until Sparrow arrived. I think he’s earned some benefit of doubt.

dikei 6y ago
Wasn't Sparrow got acquired then killed off by Google ?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

placebo 6y ago

relevant: https://youtu.be/WqoYoXY-RC0?t=114 https://youtu.be/WqoYoXY-RC0?t=114

baxtr 6y ago

That’s a key insight for all of us. The internet contains just too much stuff that is interesting. We will never able to consume all of it. So you have to restrain yourself eventually.

throwaway2245 6y ago

> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head. Making it easier to store and recall useful information, without using your brain, is a good thing that has fuelled progress in recent decades. The impermanence of the internet requires you to store useful information in your brain (you can't guarantee that it will be stored for when you need it), when really it would be better stored externally. The fact that the internet is impermanent encourages you to treat it as something you need to siphon information from (jam all the data into your head), rather than a safe store that you can depend on.