>What's this about? Do we all secretly believe we can be truly better people if we can just get this right? Or are we just endlessly curious about what everyone

>What's this about? Do we all secretly believe we can be truly better people if we can just get this right? Or are we just endlessly curious about what everyone else does? I don't think it's just a belief as some of us have personal evidence of quality-of-life improvement from being able to easily retrieve a saved piece of knowledge. We then wonder if whatever system we happen to be using (paper notebooks, emacs Org-Mode, Evernote, plain text files, Roam, etc, etc) ... can be improved or generalized to others. Earlier in computing (i.e. 1980s DOS) the acronym "PIM" "Personal Information Manager" was the meme for note-taking. You had attempts like Borland Sidekick[1] and Lotus Agenda[2]. In the 1990s, you had PIM devices like the PalmPilot where enthusiasts tried to convince us that it was worth investing the time to learn its idiosyncratic stylus strokes to save notes.[3] Today's recurring "Show HN" of the latest note-taking software attempt is the continuation of an unsolved problem for the general population. Each of the following functions have many degrees-of-freedom: (1) saving notes in a friction-free way: local-first file or cloud? save in freeform text files (Markdown?), or JSON, or in SQLite? Or handdrawn pen input on a tablet and save the image files with OCR conversion? Sync data across all devices how? (2) organizing and retrieving notes : hierarchies? tags? graph links? mindmaps? or no friction of organizing at all and just use full-text search? We get a combinatorial explosion of tools instead of everybody converging on The One True Way. Personally, I've settled on not using dedicated note-taking software. Just use a combination of text files with a text editor and folders hierarchy in the operating system. But I acknowledge that my idiosyncratic system doesn't generalize to the population and it doesn't have simple data sync so I can't retrieve my notes on my smartphone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)#/media/File:Palm_Graffiti_gestures.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)#/media/File...