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It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

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Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#81

Post by copperx »

sva_ wrote: post #68

The title is editorialized. It is "Keep AI Out of Your (Obsidian) Vault". For the Original title, I wish they added the qualifier "generative" for AI. You may well use e.g. embeddings to semantically search through your notes, and there are only gains in that. Having an AI write notes for you is however of course completely pointless. The act of writing notes is 80% of the reward.

> Having an AI write notes for you is however of course completely pointless. The act of writing notes is 80% of the reward.

The exception is transcriptions and summaries of transcriptions for things like lectures; I find those useful even when I know writing them myself would be better.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#82

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

theossuary wrote: post #50
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's for you to find out. When we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, people used to value strength. Today they value thought. They may value something else in the future.

We didn't automate muscles generally, only specifically. The leverage those specific situations have is so high it's worth it. Same with thinking, it's very far from automated generally. Maybe one day we'll have humanoid robots as generally physically capable, and AI as generally mentally capable, but that's a long way off. Until then there's still emmense value for humans in between the high-leverage areas, and even…

When you say a long way off, how far are you thinking, especially with self improvement on the horizon?

My bet is 3 or 4 years before the rocket really takes off, and then we start seeing capabilities improve incredibly quickly.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#83

Post by ostros »

mccoyb wrote: post #31

I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time" I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ide…

I like to to think while talking. Nowadays I don’t have always somebody to talk to so I talk to myself and record on the phone; then voice to text to obsidian.

I have a lot of interesting notes and I can also plug them to AI to get some reminders, insights etc.

But I agree with your general message - thinking is still superior

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#84

Post by recursive »

throwaway613746 wrote: post #11
synalx wrote: post #3

I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.

Anthropic hopes you just eventually give up and become completely dependent on Claude. Toss in 10 (or more) other developers with way less discipline and you will become dissillusioned with Claude's overengineered, incomprehensible, technosalad and your demise is pretty much guaranteed.

Retirement feels farther away than ever.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#85

Post by nixonaddiction »

ive never been able to use zettelkattsen. i like having daily notes instead of different notes for different ideas. its easier this way. my obsidian vault is a hybrid of diary and research and i am trying to separate the diary and research but its not easy tbh. (i suffer from a crushing urge to note that i "just ate a sandwich, was good" while liveblogging research and debugging.)

that being said, i got a big kick out of feeding my daily notes into my local model. i had some more diary-like entries that i would never share with anyone, but it was extremely funny to have my local model take a 3000 word recap of what i did in a day and summarize it like "writer reflects on their job: they worry about their performance. meals: the writer ate oatmeal, and a sandwich. family: the author contemplates their fathers absence growing up."

ive developed a really large corpus of written work over the years and am hoping to fine tune a model using my diary as the training set. i think this would yield hilarious results. keeping it all local though, i drop my passwords in there at times and i dont want that leaked.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#86

Post by recursive »

preommr wrote: post #76
synalx wrote: post #3

I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.

I've had codex delete useful (albeit not directly relevant or perhaps messy wip notes) comments, even though I explicitly have it in my agents.md not to delete comments, and ask for permission if it thinks it should. It deleted the comments, and when I asked why it did that even though I expressedly asked it not to, it responded that me prompting it in the first place explicit permission. I have no idea if that's the…

There might not be an "actual" reason that's expressible in human-comprehensible language.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#87

Post by chermi »

mccoyb wrote: post #31

I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time" I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ide…

I don't know if that's what people mean when they say second brain? My "second brain" is basically a memory expansion/thought recorder. With the understanding that the memory isn't truly integrated like regular memories, which has plusses and minuses. A lot of value for me is just getting an idea out of my head if it's in the way, even if I never revisit it. Helpful for adhd and otherwise distracted minds as long the process of recording is very cheap. Which, as you say, yields mostly garbage.

Where it works better is as a place to store more careful thoughts, and as a place to force you to express those thoughts in writing.

That is, it works best if you don't try to use it as a literal second brain, don't rely on it doing any thinking for you.

All that being said, confession time: using obsidian for 6 months as second brain among other things, i don't believe it has really helped me think other than as being a place where I also create more polished notes where I must crystallize ideas.

What it has done is enable my idea hoarding/belief there's gold in them there old thoughts, so I spend too much time checking if I already had a thought rather than just thinking. So the verdict is still out for me.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#88

Post by Izkata »

chermi wrote: post #87
mccoyb wrote: post #31

I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time" I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ide…

I don't know if that's what people mean when they say second brain? My "second brain" is basically a memory expansion/thought recorder. With the understanding that the memory isn't truly integrated like regular memories, which has plusses and minuses. A lot of value for me is just getting an idea out of my head if it's in the way, even if I never revisit it. Helpful for adhd and otherwise distracted minds as long the…

> I don't know if that's what people mean when they say second brain?

Note taking app, personal wiki, etc, broadly any central thing you store information in solely for yourself that's searchable. It's an artsy term that doesn't seem to add much of anything but confusion.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#89

Post by Jtarii »

Dependance wrote: post #32

Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ? I have a dozen ideas popping a day and nothing comes close in terms of ease than a paper notebook for capturing and some apple notes equivalent for storage. Used to have a Notion but all the "Second Brain" movement seems...fishy to me ?

Obsidian and apple notes are basically the same thing. Obsidian just has some more features.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#90

Post by layer8 »

> I’m a strong proponent of avoiding adding lots of AI-generated summaries or other on-the-fly-generated text to my vault. The reason is simple: over time, I don’t know anymore whether the content was written by me or by an AI

The reason to not add it is that the quality of summarization will likely only in prove in the future, so it’s better to do it on demand whenever needed.

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