A reading IDE

[DefenderOfBasic]

I have this vague idea that, the way we currently read is the way we write code using notepad. It's really hard to code that way. Coding with IDE doesn't solve everything, but it does remove several categories of unnecessary complexity (like, your ability to program and debug a complex system should never be bottleneck on finding where the variables are defined)

similarly, I have a theory there are many such cases with reading. This is a project to try to figure out what better tools and interfaces for reading look like.

[DefenderOfBasic]

Inspiration

📖 on the activity of reading itself

• "reading and writing is not literacy. Exposition and condensation are" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/03/rediscovering-literacy/
• Andy Matuschak why books don't work
• "How to read a book" is a book that validates a lot of these theories I have https://textbookequity.org/Textbooks/HowtoReadABook.pdf
  • that reading is necessarily a [collaboration between author & reader](https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/

🔨 on the tooling side

• Stretch Text (basically this is what I want!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StretchText
• from Louis Arge, "an IDE for research papers" https://www.zotero.org/ status/1785280740151689217). That you will almost always get more out of talking to the author than just reading the book
• Roman Hauksson on "idea for a novel medium for nonfiction articles, where the content is author-curated".
  • I want this but without the "LLM generates the prose" part. I don't really want to read LLM prose, but I want to use this semantic/embedding/vector search system to dig through the material in the order that I want

[loydweldy]

I've seen something in this vein before - Check this out!

https://codepen.io/keithwyland/pen/yLyLNz

[DefenderOfBasic]

Zoomable articles

see also: https://openai.com/index/summarizing-books/

I think it would be way easier to read if I can "zoom in and out" of a book or article. Imagine it like a google maps style application

• you take the article, and you convert each paragraph into a sentence.
• then you take each ~3 paragraphs and convert them into a sentence
• then you take each chapter and convert it into a sentence etc

and then just allow me to zoom in and out like this. So I can see at a glance what the general arc looks like. And I can then zoom in.

Also notice that 🔴 summarized text is in red. I want to make it super duper clear what text is LLM generated and what is the original author's words. The zoomable text is just like a table of contents/a way to navigate

[DefenderOfBasic]

Uncover news article by asking questions

I want to do a little reading experiment. Take any news article. When you open the page, you ONLY see the title to reveal ANY text, I must ask a question

The LLM responds by highlighting the text in the article that answers your question, or says "not found"

I think this would do some incredible things:

• your reading is now guided by you, not by the author
  • (the author doesn't know you, they have no idea what you want to learn/read/in what order. you know this better than the author)
• you will realize pretty quickly if the article doesn't answer what you wanted to know
  • for ex: an article about "Trump convicted unfairly". your first question might be "what is the alleged crime?" and MAYBE THATS NOT EVEN IN THE ARTICLE??? which is fucking wild. you might otherwise read the thing, feel outraged, feel like you are informed. but you aren't. it didn't answer any of the questions you had. you didn't even get a chance to think about what you wanted to know