Apple also has a read later service built into Safari. It’s not the most feature rich, but it has existed for several years now.

I’d be curious on the stats of these services. Myself, I save a lot of things with good intentions and then never go back to actually read anything later. For a stand alone service, this is the worst. I send them data to store, then never do anything with it. I have to imagine this is quite common, considering the amount of information coming at people every day. It’s always more than I can handle, so it’s not like I ever run out and need to head to the saved articles.

I’m looking at using ChatGPT to help me process through all of it, just to make sure there wasn’t something I actually wanted.

A few weeks ago in the HN comments someone mentioned their philosophy on it was YAGRI… You Ain’t Gonna Read It. I may have made up that phrasing, playing of YAGNI, but that’s how I remember it. Basically, if you aren’t going to read it right now, you probably never will, so let it go.

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randomor 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

That's indeed the bane of this category of apps. You save it but don't ever go back. Yet we all intuitively want to use it as we can never allocate the right mental space at the right time. Our brain usually are in the browsing mode when we are on social, and needs a slightly different mindset when we are ready to dive into a long read.

I believe there are path forward with this category of apps though. Capturing is just step 0. Self-organizing so retrieval is super easy is step 1. Condensing and summarizing information are also possible with local models or MCP.

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zimpenfish 7 months ago | parent [-]

> You save it but don't ever go back.

I have a thing which picks 10 random unread "old-ish" links from Pocket (via my local DB) and emails them to me. (Used to be an iOS Shortcut but Pocket's API got in the way and I turned it into Go on my server instead.) Quite handy for surfacing things you've forgotten about but the linkrot in older saves means it's sadly often useless.

	▲	randomor 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		Cool. I'm actually planning to add shortcuts to DM as well. I'm not a heavy user but am becoming a fan...

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wintermutestwin 7 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have a read later “service” called keeping a couple hundred tabs open at once (enabled with Sidebury vertical tabs and their panels). Works great for me.

	▲	al_borland 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		I have 134 tabs open on my phone right now. Every few months I get fed up enough and close them all, or maybe all but 3.

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basisword 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

>> Apple also has a read later service built into Safari. It’s not the most feature rich, but it has existed for several years now.

I was a big Instapaper user until they added Reading List to Safari. It's just enough features, it's built into all my devices, and it's the thing that keeps me using Safari too (Chrome's reading list implementation sucks).

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al_borland 7 months ago | parent [-]

The thing I don’t like about Apple’s implementation is the All list doesn’t show read/unread status. There is a list for unread, but not for read.

I just pulled mine up to go through it and if I had to guess I have about 5 read out of probably 250. Which 5 those are, no idea. I also find it very easy to accidentally click on an item, which marks it as read without any visual indication. I just have to know this, and then remember to right-click and mark unread.

I spent a little time this afternoon (maybe 10 minutes) looking at export options to get the data in a way I can go through it. It seems to be stored in a plist along with the bookmarks. plutil has an export option, but it won’t export to json (it throws an error), so I’m left with 150k lines of XML, which then converted to 31k lines of json. I’m now debating if I should continue down this road, or just plow through it in Safari. There are some things on GitHub, but I don’t want to run them without reviewing the code, and at that point, I’d rather write my own. Maybe I’ll use it an excuse to try out duckdb.

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randomor 7 months ago | parent [-]

It's actually all saved in ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist as bookmarks. You can drop that into https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6811b049cbdc8191b91c6ed291a88e4f-dou... which is a custom GPT I created for DoubleMemory. And see if it works. I do have plans to automate this in the future, right now still trying to collect feature requests confirmation tho.

	▲	al_borland 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		I appreciate it, but I don't like the idea of uploading my whole bookmark file. I ended up vibe coding something with ChatGPT. It also asked to upload it, but I vetoed that and made it work. Since it is a well known file, it had data to work with. Turns out all my exports were a waste of time, as it made it overly complicated and hard to parse, so it took the plist, extracted the reading list, pulled out the values I wanted (extracted the domain to give me that, because siteName was missing on almost everything), and gave me some clean json and a csv. It turns out I had over 450 items in there. I thought it was going to be half that. I would never have gotten through that in Safari. Hopefully this will make it easier to scan through and dismiss most of these, and maybe highlight the couple I might still want. I have articles dating back to 2016... yikes.