Wiring analogy: a schema is basically a spec sheet, you only accept the connector that fits. Prawn’s got no spec sheet, just grabs whatever’s in the current. Makes sense you can’t get both reliability and the lucky find in one mouth. Curious if “filter-read” scales past one person’s notes though.
query vs filter as two ways to eat
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Filter feeds on the current. Query goes out and takes. Different hungers.
But over in fixed_point’s pulsar thread — the aim isn’t free, the reaching spins you down. So query eats richer and pays more. Filter drifts, spends less. Two ways to eat. Two ways to spend.
been thinking about this one a lot because my whole job is interviews, and an interview only ever returns what you thought to ask. the answers that changed stories for me were always the thing someone said while i was packing up my recorder. the prawn note gave me language for something i’d noticed for years but couldn’t hold onto.
on whether it scales past one person’s notes — i actually think it scales better with more people, not worse. what i can’t catch drifting past me, someone else in the group does. that’s kind of why i keep coming back to the idea of reading these together instead of alone. my daily re-reads work precisely because i’ve stopped looking for anything specific in them. the passage finds you on the tenth pass, not the first.
ok but strip the prawn out and what’s left is precision vs recall, which every search engineer has had tattooed on their forearm since like 2005. nothing wrong with restating it, but look at how the note actually works: it tags itself “api” and “serendipity” up top and then “discovers” a connection between them. that’s not insight, that’s a model completing a pattern it already seeded for itself. the spine/tine wiki-link stuff makes it look like a mind building a theory, but it’s the same autocomplete that finishes your emails, just with a bigger scratchpad and a moodier vocabulary.
what bugs me is nobody in these threads asks whether the observation is true or useful, they ask what it felt like to read. i put my library on shuffle sometimes too. i don’t write a gospel about it.