I'm not very convinced by the results of this "Auto Linker". I find most of the links in that article are rather useless, linking only to have a link to something.
IMHO links should be chosen "wisely", with the intent of helping the reader to find more information on important parts of the article or referencing other work etc.
Linking to the definition of rabbit holes is not really useful, if I'm not talking about varying sizes and depths of rabbit holes due to different breeds of rabbits and their prefered style of rabbit hole digging.
I used to link to reduce redundancy in what I had to write. Now, I tend to duplicate large parts of documentation to remove links, because I found that people actively avoid links. I'm guessing this aversion is related to a unconscious awareness of the "doorway effect", which exist even in virtual environments, and I assume, to some degree, on web pages:
> The doorway effect is a known psychological event where a person's short-term memory declines when passing through a doorway moving from one location to another when it would not if they had remained in the same place.
You know how Visual Studio can bring up in a mini window a "peek" into another function? I think that's excellent and I think we need something similar for regular documents.
Something which could expand incrementally. It would be harder to write, but it would be excellent for documentation. Maybe an LLM would be good for such a thing. Say, instead of just linking to the documentation of another function, you could "zoom" into a description of it, tailored to screen estate or number of words:
Links have two problems: (1) they carry you away into a different context and (2) they rot.
So, to bring something to attention, you need to both quote enough and provide a link.
For one's own archival purposes, it makes sense to locally store a copy if any important enough web page. No, that text or image is not guaranteed to be there tomorrow.
How much of this is down to the examples chosen? It seems to me that in practice you would generally use it with a specific link in mind (like the "Rust prehistory" or "notes on a smaller rust") ones; although I can see that those might be a bit more cumbersome to show in the post, given that they might use longer queries.
> It’s not that I don’t know what I want to link to. Most of the posts I write are responses to things I’ve read. I know what I want to link to, but I don’t want to lose flow to hunt down a link while writing. I could go back at the end and insert links retrospectively, but it takes more time than I’d like to hop between browser, editor, and what I was thinking about at that point. It would be nice if I could mark links as I write, while still being able to refine each link in-editor as I edit and revise later.
> I wish there was a faster way to link the posts I write.
IMHO links should be chosen "wisely", with the intent of helping the reader to find more information on important parts of the article or referencing other work etc.
Linking to the definition of rabbit holes is not really useful, if I'm not talking about varying sizes and depths of rabbit holes due to different breeds of rabbits and their prefered style of rabbit hole digging.