51–60 of 92 posts
I started my personal knowledge base in the days of Mac OS 8 and still use it. Classic Mac OS with it's spacial finder and 1-to-1 file and window mapping works so well for my brain I still use it today for things I want to save and refer to.
I use & subscribe to AIs, but my personal knowledge is kept in the system I can use like the back of my hand, which happened to be the Macintosh Finder for me.
The more deeply you think, you train your brain harder, but also improve the utility of the AI systems themselves because you can prompt better.
I think the key to ensuring you don't lose your own ability to think is to just delay the onset of using AI when solving a problem. The more deeply you think, you train your brain harder, but also improve the utility of the AI systems themselves because you can prompt better.
I've been using pen & paper lately. The context switch between digital and analog is compelling. There is something satisfying about throwing a piece of physical paper away after pushing your commits. I tend to hoard information, so having a medium that is highly constrained keeps me honest with what I hold onto over time. Not being able to do full text search over my notes means I prefer to keep no more than ~one le…
> Emacs is a powerful tool, but it also demands a lot from its user. Eventually I got tired of dealing with the host of plugins and customizations that I needed to keep my system running the way I wanted. I'm at a point in my life where I would rather spend my spare time on hobbies, hanging out with family and friends, and otherwise not messing around with a patchwork of ELisp code snippets that I've cobbled together…
The trick is to stick to as few packages and as little configuration as possible. And when opting to install a package, sticking to something popular and well maintained. This leads to a small and robust setup with little churn. Most built-in packages work out of the box. Most defaults make a lot of sense. Emacs is really tidy these days compared to where it was one decade ago. Package management has been key facilitating this.
Personally, I use major packages like AUCTeX, Org, Magit, or gptel with little to no customization and I avoid installing lesser known packages that build on top of them as I have found this to be a major source of fragility. You can get a lot of functionality from a boring 50 LOC .emacs/init.el that consists of a few straightforward use-package directives.
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“Some years ago” isn’t a Moby Dick-ism, it’s perfectly normal English to open an anecdote with.
'some years ago I went through a phase' in an introduction is plausibly a moby dick reference
"I went through a phase that I imagine many software developers go through at least once in their careers—a period of intense fascination with Emacs..."
What is this widespread overt fascination with the tools one use? I've always been aware of a tradeoff between why one uses a tool and any tendency to fascinate on the tool or process of using a tool. The use, the purpose, the goal outside and originally to want any tool has always been my preference. To see the forest when among trees, to see a purpose and path through. Not to navel gaze at the existence of tools in preference to using them beyond pontificating their existence. This then extends to shaking my head at the swelled population of developer influencers that over fascinate on tools, appearing to do that in preference of anything else.
This confuses a tool with knowledge itself. smh.
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I believe it's now free for commercial use. https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/
The money is not the problem - you want the source code so that if the company disappears, you can still maintain the software. I would prefer to buy from those commercial players that have a clause in their license saying upon sunsetting the commercial offering or closure of the company the source code becomes open source. In the absence of such a clause, I prefer open source solutions. [RMS was right saying "Free a…
But yeah, your vision is the next best thing I like to day dream about sadly.
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My primary concern is the lack of encryption for the notes. This absence of encryption leaves them exposed and vulnerable. Relying on third-party services like Dropbox, iCloud, or similar platforms to sync notes across devices only heightens the potential for data exposure. There is also a Obsidian forum thread about that [1]. I believe the primary issue with nearly all note-taking tools is the lack of genuine encryp…
This is such a trivial problem to solve. Full disk encryption, or something like https://github.com/tejado/obsidian-gpgCrypt
The goal to index your obsidian and also persist anything from llm chats, and browsing history.
To your own sqlite database so you can still own your data across providers.
I’m sure someone with much more time than me will win with a better version of it