Intellectual Junkyards
forester-notes.org
Intellectual Junkyards
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Re: Intellectual Junkyards
#2This goes over my head a bit, but I suppose they are discussing the concept of something like a personal wiki; if so, https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html is my favourite.
Re: Intellectual Junkyards
#3This goes over my head a bit, but I suppose they are discussing the concept of something like a personal wiki; if so, https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html is my favourite.
I'm also not sure if I fully get what the author is going on about, but at least part of it seems to be "don't over-taxonomize and over-architect your note-taking and knowledge management systems, locking yourself into an inflexible format/schema too early just kills it in the long run."
If I'm correct that that's part of the thrust of the article (and I may not be), then I definitely agree with the author. The first time I tried to use Obsidian I burned out because I went all-in on the bi-di linking, tagging, knowledge graph, etc., and it quickly killed my motivation. Now I just dump text in and rely on search to find what I need, only adding links in retrospect once they are needed, and now I actually use it and get value from it.
Re: Intellectual Junkyards
#4This goes over my head a bit, but I suppose they are discussing the concept of something like a personal wiki; if so, https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html is my favourite.
I'm also not sure if I fully get what the author is going on about, but at least part of it seems to be "don't over-taxonomize and over-architect your note-taking and knowledge management systems, locking yourself into an inflexible format/schema too early just kills it in the long run." If I'm correct that that's part of the thrust of the article (and I may not be), then I definitely agree with the author. The first…
I had this same issue early on when trying to adopt Obsidian. I was overwhelmed by all the "systems" and I was worried I was creating a headache for myself later on. Now I just focus on dumping text in, using search, and linking only as needed. Basically don't overdo it.
Re: Intellectual Junkyards
#5This goes over my head a bit, but I suppose they are discussing the concept of something like a personal wiki; if so, https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html is my favourite.
Yes, and PKMs in general. Like labeling your emails by topic in Gmail. The problem is that the 'toil' keeps piling up, while the value gained is increasingly hard to see.
I have a little rant about it - "‘Tools for thought’ winds up being a lie: there’s tools, but not much additional thought." https://gwern.net/blog/2024/tools-for-thought-failure https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoqFpaorNHsWxRzvz/what-comes...
(My answer, of course, is that almost all of this scutwork is well within the capabilities of a frontier LLM today. We just need to apply them.)
Re: Intellectual Junkyards
#6This goes over my head a bit, but I suppose they are discussing the concept of something like a personal wiki; if so, https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html is my favourite.
I'm also not sure if I fully get what the author is going on about, but at least part of it seems to be "don't over-taxonomize and over-architect your note-taking and knowledge management systems, locking yourself into an inflexible format/schema too early just kills it in the long run." If I'm correct that that's part of the thrust of the article (and I may not be), then I definitely agree with the author. The first…
>Now I just dump text in and rely on search to find what I need
This is basically what I ended up with as well. They key for me to make it work easier than anything else, is before I leave the note, pausing a moment to ask myself “if I was trying find this among my other notes, what keywords/tags would I try to search for”, and add those to a comment and/or the filename to make it more unique.
Re: Intellectual Junkyards
#7This goes over my head a bit, but I suppose they are discussing the concept of something like a personal wiki; if so, https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html is my favourite.
Yes, and PKMs in general. Like labeling your emails by topic in Gmail. The problem is that the 'toil' keeps piling up, while the value gained is increasingly hard to see. I have a little rant about it - "‘Tools for thought’ winds up being a lie: there’s tools, but not much additional thought." https://gwern.net/blog/2024/tools-for-thought-failure https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoqFpaorNHsWxRzvz/what-comes... (My ans…
Have you seen any good open source projects using llms to do the scutwork for this kind of PKMs?
Re: Intellectual Junkyards
#8I think self-cataloging is fundamentally masturbatory. On its face, there's nothing wrong with keeping notes or searchable records. But letting the record become the goal - organizing, re-organizing, polishing, theorizing - feels wrong in a way I can't articulate.
Re: Intellectual Junkyards
#9My notes are never long-form, and I envy people whose notes look publication-ready. I think in lists and mnemonics.
My work involves so much context-switching that I ended up building a weird system just to keep continuity. It’s basically an outliner inspired by MaxThink for DOS. At its core, it’s text plus structure: a tree you can revisit non-sequentially, with time anchors when they matter. It helps me survive interruptions and gaps without losing decisions, context, or long-running threads, and it helps me correlate my digital notes with my paper notebooks.
To support the “thinking” part, it also has some goodies for shuffling, sorting, splitting, and joining lists in place to help with ideation. I’m working on the fourth incarnation now.
I recorded a demo a few months ago to share with a friend. It’s not my best recording because I was recovering from hand surgery so typing was weird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9HX3G69Xdo
I may open-source it once I’ve worked the bugs out.
Re: Intellectual Junkyards
#10As someone who thought they used obsidian somewhat well, I feel like a caveman/casual after reading that.
I mean that as praise, it reeled me in as both a puzzle (what am I even reading right now) and a conclusion (the bleeding edge of obsidianmd space is like XKCD straws).