We're already seeing repercussions from an economy that has been retooled not to actually produce anything of value, but to produce more air to fill up the largest economic bubble in the history of the world.
National debt through the roof, inflation through the roof, PHD and research programs gutted, non-ai startups dead and unfunded for the last 4 years. These are just a few things that have been sacrificed on the altar of this bubble - there's far more I haven't recounted.
We're already in a widespread long term economic collapse, but the delusion just hasn't broken yet.
I've never been a good note taker. In the things I think about, when I'm really invested in something, I have to reverse engineer it to experience the why.
Reverse engineering can take several forms for me: it started with writing parts of systems from scratch, and now (due to academic training) it oftens looks like "thinking about how to explain the system to a group of colleagues", which is one degree of separation from writing the system from scratch, but is much faster - and seems to work well when working with LM agents on code (because you have to confront your ignorance)
part of the training in academia is how to know when you don't understood the thing, so this ends up working well for me now.
One trick: you can force yourself to understand something better by making a presentation and imagining you're going to be grilled by someone smarter than you. This is kind of the feeling of pressure that academic paper reviews give (in an ideal world) and it translates when you think about explaining something to someone else.
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 ?
Taking the notes (and being able to read them again if I want) is all I need from my "second Brain". This perfectly can be pieces of paper, as long as i can carry them around with me. More realistically some digital notes software fulfills that requirement.
I use Obsidian but I don't follow the whole "second brain" thing, I just organize my notes by directories. You can use Obsidian however you want and adapt to the way your actual brain works. The "second brain" thing doesn't work for everyone. Even taking digital notes doesn't work for everyone (for example, it looks like you prefer paper notes).
If you haven't tried Obsidian at all I think you should give it a shot and write notes without following any system in particular. If you've tried it and you still prefer paper notes and the occasional apple note, then perhaps Obsidian isn't necessary for the way you take and organize notes.
> Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ?
My handwriting has degraded from consistent keyboard use over the last 30 years. Obisidan has replaced my paper notebooks, mostly because of this. However, it is handy to be able to mesh those notes with hyperlinks, LLM output snippets, quotes from other sources, embedded images, etc. Doing all of those other things would be laborious to impossible with paper.
I just use Obsidian as a glorified notebook. I've been using paper notebooks, but I tend to lose them... With Obsidian I just push my files to git and never worry again. Since the files are just markdown, there's no lock-in.
What I also really like about notetaking apps is that I can organize my notes hierarchically, move things around and make cross references.
I still regularly sketch ideas on paper, but once I have something that's worth keeping, I write it down in Obsidian.
I'm also skeptical about this "Second Brain" thing. People make videos on YT about how they have been enlightened by Obsidian and then try to sell you their online course. To me it seems like notetaking for its own sake. You could call it "idea maxxing" :)
I just want something that I can use to record notes, with good backups, and a format that doesn't lock me in. Obsidian offers that. It has a pretty decent mobile app and desktop app, in terms of the actual editing. And if I do want to do something advanced, like automatically generate a daily note for recording what I worked on today, it can do that. You can do all these things with other programs, or even just raw files, but Obsidian adds just enough to make it easy.
I agree with you and the upper comment. The destruction of the old self is in not feeding it. You starve the "bad taste" inside of you by only ingesting what the "good taste" inside of you likes. Kind of like good gut bacteria ?
visibilitychange API, and websites are allowed to modify their own title and favicon programatically.
Favicon can be part of the DOM ever since icons via ~~meta~~ link tags were introduced, because they can be more hi-res than the default favicon.ico file.
I've never thought about the ability to swap it dynamically though, although I've seen some site do that before.
What is the benefit ?
Sharing thoughts to the external world would be like going to a bakery and walking out with flour and eggs.
Isn't the act of talking/writing part of the thinking ? Am I just going to share intrusive thoughts and half-baked ideas to my CIA agent now ?
It’s fairly common for gifted people to struggle to communicate when they’ve made a multi-step inference in their heads. Whether this technology actually allows them to express themselves at the speed of (excited, fully focused) thought or not, I can see how the possibility of achieving that is exciting.
Military sci-fi is full of mind-machine interfacing like this. There’s definitely value in being able to interface directly with a machine instead of having to push buttons or read outputs.
The problem is that anything based on LLM architecture is not going to be fast or accurate enough to allow someone to, say, fly a fighter jet with this interface.
What an article.
Hard to think it was written takes out fingers 86 years ago...?
Really makes me think that the so-called goal of life circles around those points. I can totally imagine a third-place solely dedicated to curiosity. Hard to bring such places into existence with the capitalist hell-hole we're in, but when there is a will...
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