Enabling Environment

Imagine the place you do your best work. Andy Matuschak defined this, and as someone who aspires to effectiveness, I fell in love with the concept. As a techie who loves efficiency, I also set about building my own. From Andy: An enabling environment significantly expands its participants’ capacity to do things they find meaningful and important. This blog is the consumption environment for mine.

• From Andy
• Igor’s Computing Setup
• Igor’s Physical Setup
• By Task
  • Production
  • Consumption
  • Reflection
  • Discovery
  • Recall
• The rider, the elephant, and the path
  • Inspire and Motivate
• By Scope
  • Individual Artifacts
  • Entire corpus
  • Comparing Artifcats or Corpus
• Visualizations
  • Word clouds
  • Comic illustrations
  • Dimension Reduced Vector Embeddings
  • Connected Graphs
• AI Augmentation
  • Critical Thinking

There’s so much to say here. Pulling in some content from Andy:

From Andy

• Enabling Environment
• Evergreen notes
• Andy’s about page

Igor’s Computing Setup

• Igor’s about page
• Some of the features in the readme.
• Tons of VIM/CLI stuff

At its core, is writing:

Igor’s Physical Setup

• I think there are some coffee shop rituals that are part of mine.

By Task

Production

Consumption

Reflection

Discovery

Recall

The rider, the elephant, and the path

You’d think this is about the rider, but the elephant is super important too

Inspire and Motivate

Mood matters, and for some reason, illustrating my blog makes me thrilled. If I’m stuck having DALL-E illustrate my blog makes me thrilled!

Check out illustrate.py

By Scope

Individual Artifacts

Check out think.py

Entire corpus

Check out this thing on embeddings. I think the story here needs to be embeddings + rag

• Analyzing all of Hacker news
  • Thinks Analysis

Comparing Artifcats or Corpus

Visualizations

Word clouds

Old school, but pretty simple, perhaps do a second pass through gpt to simplify

Comic illustrations

Dimension Reduced Vector Embeddings

Connected Graphs

Ala - obsidians graph view

AI Augmentation

What I’m most excited about is how to expand this with AI. My thinking program is my first cut.

Spell check and summary/eli5/TLDR are the obvious ones, but what if we extended to reflection questions, implicit assumptions, etc….

Critical Thinking

Running over Andy’s enabling environment page …

gist.github.com/idvorkin/25eadce2222a09d9dca620679afd59d6

github.com/idvorkin/nlp/blob/main/think.py

https://gist.github.com/idvorkin/25eadce2222a09d9dca620679afd59d6