index of misc tools I have used recently, I’d love to see others’ contributions—if this has significant harmful human capability externalities let me know:
basic:
linked notes: https://logseq.com/ - alternatives I considered included obsidian, roamresearch, athensresearch, many others; logseq is FOSS, agpl, works with local markdown directories, is clojure, is a solid roam clone with smoother ui, did I mention free
desktop voice control: https://talonvoice.com/ - patreon-funded freeware. voice control engine for devs. configured with nice code. easier install than last one I used (caster+{dragon,kaldi}); better command accuracy than whisper, solid if janky help menu, , good default configurations available, dev is working on whisper integration. you don’t need to be unable to use your hands to benefit, i switch back and forth. needs a solid mic, though—generally humans and ai agree about what’s hard to hear, so if it works to talk to humans, it’ll work ok for this.
https://kagi.com/ and https://teclis.com/ - search that doesn’t suck at finding bespoke and high quality websites, I have them bound to both “kagi hunt”, “teclis hunt” on my talon voice commands, as well as “k” and “t” in my chrome search bar (these two are basically the only winners out of search engines with their own indexes, imo)
https://www.semanticscholar.org/ - paper search and related papers discovery, I love love love the related papers it offers after you’ve added papers to library
https://www.summarize.tech/ - youtube video summarizer, good for checking if I want to watch something or helping me explain to others why I think something was worth the watch. I wish I had something like this for text, probably not hard to do; doesn’t PEGASUS beat gpt3 summary anyway?
https://web.hypothes.is/ - overlay tool for publicly adding annotations to any site, somewhat popular to annotate ml pds and there are such interesting networks of people labeling each other’s stuff that you can browse on the site. can be imported to logseq through a plugin, though it doesn’t batch import all hypothesis annotations at the moment. I was using it heavily for a while, might do so again; it’s nice being able to take notes in browser and import them to logseq later, and it’s nice that it’s easy-ish to share them with others. I wish it were easier.
newly discovered or rediscovered while browsing my behavior to find what tools I’ve used recently:
https://app.scraft.ai/ - LLM writing framework for question answering to write essays? language engine probably gpt3 but not confirmed—looks like a fairly well thought out workflow, the ui asks you questions to prompt you as the primary interaction method
https://www.genei.io/ - LLM research summarizer—been meaning to try it more deeply, apparently it summarizes papers more thoroughly than elicit; no trial or free version though
https://iris.ai/ - similar, looks like it has a free version, seems like an interesting variation of paper discovery
https://researchrabbitapp.com/ seems really cool and I tried it, seems like it might be missing a lot of papers, but otherwise very good for finding key work in a field. probably better to just open lots of tabs browsing works citing this one (“citations”) and works cited by this one (“references”) using semanticscholar. eg, things citing “concrete problems in ai safety”
given the way shortforms aren’t very well surfaced anywhere, should this have been a blog post?
index of misc tools I have used recently, I’d love to see others’ contributions—
if this has significant harmful human capability externalities let me know:basic:
linked notes: https://logseq.com/ - alternatives I considered included obsidian, roamresearch, athensresearch, many others; logseq is FOSS, agpl, works with local markdown directories, is clojure, is a solid roam clone with smoother ui, did I mention free
desktop voice control: https://talonvoice.com/ - patreon-funded freeware. voice control engine for devs. configured with nice code. easier install than last one I used (caster+{dragon,kaldi}); better command accuracy than whisper, solid if janky help menu, , good default configurations available, dev is working on whisper integration. you don’t need to be unable to use your hands to benefit, i switch back and forth. needs a solid mic, though—generally humans and ai agree about what’s hard to hear, so if it works to talk to humans, it’ll work ok for this.
https://elicit.org/ scholar search and preset prompts for gpt3
https://kagi.com/ and https://teclis.com/ - search that doesn’t suck at finding bespoke and high quality websites, I have them bound to both “kagi hunt”, “teclis hunt” on my talon voice commands, as well as “k” and “t” in my chrome search bar (these two are basically the only winners out of search engines with their own indexes, imo)
https://millionshort.com—another search engine for finding less well known stuff
https://www.semanticscholar.org/ - paper search and related papers discovery, I love love love the related papers it offers after you’ve added papers to library
https://www.summarize.tech/ - youtube video summarizer, good for checking if I want to watch something or helping me explain to others why I think something was worth the watch. I wish I had something like this for text, probably not hard to do; doesn’t PEGASUS beat gpt3 summary anyway?
https://hovancik.net/stretchly/ - break timer to avoid overusing computer, I’m still searching for what settings are comfy tho
https://web.hypothes.is/ - overlay tool for publicly adding annotations to any site, somewhat popular to annotate ml pds and there are such interesting networks of people labeling each other’s stuff that you can browse on the site. can be imported to logseq through a plugin, though it doesn’t batch import all hypothesis annotations at the moment. I was using it heavily for a while, might do so again; it’s nice being able to take notes in browser and import them to logseq later, and it’s nice that it’s easy-ish to share them with others. I wish it were easier.
newly discovered or rediscovered while browsing my behavior to find what tools I’ve used recently:
https://app.scraft.ai/ - LLM writing framework for question answering to write essays? language engine probably gpt3 but not confirmed—looks like a fairly well thought out workflow, the ui asks you questions to prompt you as the primary interaction method
https://www.genei.io/ - LLM research summarizer—been meaning to try it more deeply, apparently it summarizes papers more thoroughly than elicit; no trial or free version though
https://iris.ai/ - similar, looks like it has a free version, seems like an interesting variation of paper discovery
https://researchrabbitapp.com/ seems really cool and I tried it, seems like it might be missing a lot of papers, but otherwise very good for finding key work in a field. probably better to just open lots of tabs browsing works citing this one (“citations”) and works cited by this one (“references”) using semanticscholar. eg, things citing “concrete problems in ai safety”
given the way shortforms aren’t very well surfaced anywhere, should this have been a blog post?