>I wish there were a tool that could just record everything [...] if you "know" everything, then notes serve no purpose.
I guess the completeness of your proposed "auto-memorize-everything" solution depends on what style of notes a person writes.
A lot of my notes are annotations or personal commentary that don't exist in the sources of the url text or video.
Here's an example of that type of notes I often take... E.g. I found some links that explain how one can grok "Docker" by going through the learning exercise of re-inventing it from basic os features with homemade scripts. But I wrote my own personal notes (in "##")about the limitations of the explanations in the urls:
## these tutorials explain the verb (runtime) but not noun (artifacts of image file)
https://github.com/p8952/bocker/blob/master/bocker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fi7uSYlOdc
Because content cannot meta-analyze itself and enumerate all the ideas and concepts that are not embedded in its own text, it means a hypothetical indexing engine that converted the 2 links above to searchable data still would not retrieve the extra meta information I wrote. A lot of good notes are generated from your own brain.
EDIT add to categorize different types of "notes" to aid discussion:
(1) notes as memorization aid such as copying facts: a user writes a note that says "1 inch equals 25.4 millimeters" after seeing it on a webpage or something. So the "universal-record-and-index-everything" would help make these type of notes obsolete because one could just skip writing that note down and just recall it later by searching for "inch to mm conversion" in the digital archive
(2) notes as synthesizing/interpreting/connecting/commenting the content. These type of idiosyncratic notes generated by the user's brain often don't exist on the internet so they cannot be replaced by a universal recording tool.
Of course the best option is doing BOTH things: indexing the context automatically via a modern personal search engine that accepts all kind of media and does vector
/ full text and relation indexing, plus the information wroten by the user
I guess the completeness of your proposed "auto-memorize-everything" solution depends on what style of notes a person writes.
A lot of my notes are annotations or personal commentary that don't exist in the sources of the url text or video.
Here's an example of that type of notes I often take... E.g. I found some links that explain how one can grok "Docker" by going through the learning exercise of re-inventing it from basic os features with homemade scripts. But I wrote my own personal notes (in "##")about the limitations of the explanations in the urls:
Because content cannot meta-analyze itself and enumerate all the ideas and concepts that are not embedded in its own text, it means a hypothetical indexing engine that converted the 2 links above to searchable data still would not retrieve the extra meta information I wrote. A lot of good notes are generated from your own brain.EDIT add to categorize different types of "notes" to aid discussion:
(1) notes as memorization aid such as copying facts: a user writes a note that says "1 inch equals 25.4 millimeters" after seeing it on a webpage or something. So the "universal-record-and-index-everything" would help make these type of notes obsolete because one could just skip writing that note down and just recall it later by searching for "inch to mm conversion" in the digital archive
(2) notes as synthesizing/interpreting/connecting/commenting the content. These type of idiosyncratic notes generated by the user's brain often don't exist on the internet so they cannot be replaced by a universal recording tool.