Intellectual Junkyards(forester-notes.org) |
Intellectual Junkyards(forester-notes.org) |
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.
A nice example of a limitation that supports creativity.
jk, I agree. I use logseq synced across devices, but I barely know any of the shortcuts and never made any kind of brilliant web of personal knowledge. My notes are always available and are searchable, which is enough for those rare occasions when I need to find something obscure and for those common occasions when I want a tried and true cocktail recipe. Maybe I'll hyper-organize it one day and find a billion dollar idea lurking under the surface...but probably not.
(2) often happens after I read fiction, usually to figure out why I liked / disliked the story. These notes are mostly disposable but occasionally useful when the book comes up in conversation years later.
On the other hand, (1) is more like notes on how-tos (recipes, software setup), written with the intention of needing it again. But this is pretty infrequent, maybe a quick skim every year or two. So even these don't need to be super thorough.
> feels wrong in a way I can't articulate.
Anyways, all that to say I think the "wtf-am-i-doing-with-my-life" feeling comes from the realization that I'm wasting hours on a document that'll save future me maybe 5 minutes at best.
...Which is how I feel about NixOS after spending most of this week tinkering / tracking down documentation. Might be worth it if I had a fleet of machines to maintain but probably not worth it for my laptop + server, even if I did yearly reinstalls.
You know, that thing that they are trying to kill.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
I've been focused on creative writing, with poetry as my test case, to see what the bottlenecks are to truly amplifying myself through LLMs (as opposed to helping my boss automate away my job or spamming the Internet more efficiently).
I find that frontier LLMs are now there and now I can prompt for genuinely good poetry with LLMs. See https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/llm-poetry-and... / https://gwern.net/fiction/lab-animals and https://gwern.net/blog/2025/better-llm-writing
So maybe this year I can turn some attention back to PKMs and Quantified Self stuff...
My own Obsidian setup has improved quite a bit in the last couple months because I can just ask Claude to change one or two things about plugins I got from the store.
What I have in mind is something far more radical. There's an idea I am calling 'log-only writing' where you stop editing or rearranging your notes at all, and you switch to pure note taking and stream of conscious braindumping, and you simply have the LLM 'compile' your entire history down into whatever specific artifact you need on demand - whether that's a web of flashcards or a blog post or a long essay or whatever. See https://gwern.net/blog/2024/rss + https://gwern.net/nenex , combined with the LLM reasoning and brainstorming 'offline' using the prompts illustrated by my poems.
I've spent 20 years living in the terminal, but with claude code I'm more and more drafting markdown specs, organizing context, building custom views / plugins / etc. Obsidian is a great substrate for developing personal software.