Place for Everything
by Judith Flanders · first published 2020
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You can read about many of these historical methods of organization in Judith Flanders' A Place for Everything: The Curious history of Alphabetical Order - https://www.amazon.com/Place-Everything-Curious-History-Alph..., and The Library of Alexander: Center of Learning in the Ancient World by Roy MacLeod - https://www.amazon.com/Library-Alexandria-Learning-Ancient-R...
on “The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information” ↗…fundamental technologies like ... the alphabet! And remember, not all languages are alphabetic. And embeddings aren't alphabetic and don't share the same constraints. I recommend Judith Flanders' "A Place for Everything" as a both a history and survey of the constraints in sorting and organising information in an alphabetic language. It's also a fun read! tl;dr why would we want an LLM do something as inefficiently…
on “The Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval” ↗A recent 99% Invisible episode on alphabetical order was pretty fascinating. It's based on Judith Flanders's new book about alphabetical order, A Place for Everything. Among things I hadn't considered is how in Chinese "alphabetical order" is based on the number of strokes in the character. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/ Two other goods…
on “Ask HN: Favorite Podcast Episode of 2021?” ↗