March 26, 2020
MarkBernstein.org
 

Suggestions

Suggestions

The latest Tinderbox brings back an idea from one of my oldest papers — the Link Apprentice. When you select a note, Tinderbox compares it to other notes in the weblog and suggests some notes to which you might link.

Right now, Tinderbox uses common language to suggest link ideas. (For wonks: it’s a modified tf-idf that looks at substring prefixes and is slightly weighted to reemphasize repetition and rare or unique words.) I’ve got plans for a better link apprentice.

In a big document like this one, the link apprentice finds some interesting links. They aren’t necessarily good ideas, and some of them are idiotic or over-simplified, but some of them are interesting.