5 ms·

just in time for new year resolutioners. If only I could get back all the time I've wasted trying to build my "second brain", goofing around building some kind

just in time for new year resolutioners. If only I could get back all the time I've wasted trying to build my "second brain", goofing around building some kind of connected graph nonsese. I cringe at all the time spent doing that nonsense deluding myself that it the way I am going to get organized and finally turn my life of procrastination and ennui around . Now I spend most of my day chatting with chatgpt for work and personal life. If it could remember and build my second brain for me that would be amazing. I really dont think any of these tools like notion, obsidian are really practical or aligned to way our brain works.

FireInsight 3y ago
Yeah, I agree. All this note-taking is not about storing information for me. It's just planning private projects, writing long-form posts, and journaling. Mostly dumping down thoughts.
ParetoOptimal 3y ago
It can work, but only if you also make your second brain about building small habits. For instance, my food recipes are there. If I didn't establish a habit of "search notes for recipes" when I think "what should I eat" those notes would have much less value. As for chatgpt doing this for you, I'm interested too. Give MemGPT or khoj a try.
- apwell23 3y ago
  Storing recipes is great example of why this doesn't work. I never have exact list of ingredients, equipment, energy level for a recepie. I now just ask chatgpt that I have x,y and z in my fridge and I want to use to use oven and vitamix and that i am tired. It concocts a recipe for me that i can tune further. I have customgpt with promt about my food preferences, allergies, style of cooking, cooking equiment ect. Most of the stuff I cook aren't unique recipes that need to store in obsidian.
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    > Storing recipes is great example of why this doesn't work. I never have exact list of ingredients, equipment, energy level for a recepie. Really? My fridge typically has the same things I've found. Regarding energy level I have a different node called "low-energy recipes" the other recipes are linked from. > I now just ask chatgpt that I have x,y and z in my fridge and I want to use to use oven and vitamix and that i am tired. It concocts a recipe for me that i can tune further. I've done that, but there are tradeoffs in quality and depending on how you view LLM's.. confidence in the end result. > Most of the stuff I cook aren't unique recipes that need to store in obsidian. It depends on your memory... I forget certain steps of recipes I've cooked for years sometimes. Knowing I have things just there at my grasp puts things on easy mode.
- benhurmarcel 3y ago
  It seems to me that any notes app works for storing recipes. I have a recipes folder in Apple Notes, which doesn’t use any special feature.
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    Yeah, you can replicate how i use it for recipes with notes + tags. However sometimes tags are meaningful enough they should have their own page. And I'd like to know the surrounding context around the creation of that page, which I can do because the first link to it was from my org roam daily. Or I want to know which friend shared the recipe with me. Maybe those examples can answer the unspoken "why not simpler notes?" question.
pprotas 3y ago
You don't hear this take often, but I fully agree. I tried the second brain stuff myself. I attempted to create a personal wiki with all the software engineering knowledge I would come across. Knowledge about programming languages, networking, security, hardware... All of it was neatly organized in my wiki with interconnected notes. Whenever I learned something new about a topic, I would go back to that note and add it in. And then... then what? It turned out that I never reached out to any of these notes. Most of the useful knowledge is already right there, in my brain. I don't need a second brain for that. The knowledge that I used less frequently was easily refreshed by a quick Google search or ChatGPT. I didn't need to keep this knowledge in any form of personal wiki. Turns out that this personal wiki simply added more overhead to my day, since now anything I would learn would have to be written in a note. But what was really the point of this writing if it was never read? Right now I don't really keep any notes anymore, but I am not sure that this is the solution, either. As with all things, balance is probably the answer to all this note-taking; you probably want to keep notes of _some_ things, but you probably don't need to have a wiki with all of your knowledge, either.
- kergonath 3y ago
  > And then... then what? It turned out that I never reached out to any of these notes. Most of the useful knowledge is already right there, in my brain. I don't need a second brain for that. This sort of approach shines when you need to mobilise knowledge that fell out of your immediately accessible memory, e.g. 6 months after having done something for the last time. It’s not very well suited to fields that move too fast and where you never need to look back, because by then the knowledge is outdated and you need to find new solutions anyway. For me, it’s great because I have a handful of long-running projects concurrently and I switch between them every 3-4 month. Being able to easily mobilise project-specific knowledge after having spent enough time doing something else that I forgot the details is very useful. To be honest, I would love a LLM that I could use to extract information from my old pile of notes and my pile of scientific papers. I don’t think it would make notes useless, though. On the contrary it would make them much more valuable.
- machomaster 3y ago
  The biggest benefit one gets from notes comes from the mere fact of writing (not reading), when one has to think, write, paraphrase, edit what and how to write, and how this new info connects to the existing knowledge.
bernie_mann 3y ago
My take is don't curate notes to excess or as its own end. Take notes to the extent that it's useful and (like email) don't over-invest in backlinking, tagging, and categorization -- search is a helluva drug. I find a lightly structured process for how I capture notes on upcoming trips (mostly during the planning phase), content I might consume later, bookmarks, books or courses I want to record some notes on, topics I can truly foresee wanting to come back to, and so in. I also normed into doing a weekly note where I capture a few notes a day that I'll want to refer back to, and track what I'm focused on that week. The dominant theme for me is a little goes a long way, and my goal is to be more productive in terms of writing and recall, not to be encyclopedic. This is absolutely ymmv, horses-for-courses think, I'm almost certain. But it's useful to know that there are many useful stops along the continuum as you're triangulating towards yours (imo). Also, Obsidian is excellent software -- for me it's supplanted Ulysses/Bear, bookmark managers and web clippers, and todo managers. The plugin ecosystem is the deal, even as Stephano and team keep improving the core. I think it's reached enough users at this point, that even if they pivoted to a less non-evil heading, it seems like someone would come in behind them and offer an alternative for your folders and folders of md.
- kergonath 3y ago
  > it seems like someone would come in behind them and offer an alternative for your folders and folders of md. That’s a killer feature for me. I’ve seen way too many applications that went bust or that stopped being developed, I really don’t want to deal with extracting stuff from yet another proprietary database.

FireInsight 3y ago

Yeah, I agree. All this note-taking is not about storing information for me. It's just planning private projects, writing long-form posts, and journaling. Mostly dumping down thoughts.

ParetoOptimal 3y ago

It can work, but only if you also make your second brain about building small habits. For instance, my food recipes are there. If I didn't establish a habit of "search notes for recipes" when I think "what should I eat" those notes would have much less value. As for chatgpt doing this for you, I'm interested too. Give MemGPT or khoj a try.

apwell23 3y ago
Storing recipes is great example of why this doesn't work. I never have exact list of ingredients, equipment, energy level for a recepie. I now just ask chatgpt that I have x,y and z in my fridge and I want to use to use oven and vitamix and that i am tired. It concocts a recipe for me that i can tune further. I have customgpt with promt about my food preferences, allergies, style of cooking, cooking equiment ect. Most of the stuff I cook aren't unique recipes that need to store in obsidian.
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  > Storing recipes is great example of why this doesn't work. I never have exact list of ingredients, equipment, energy level for a recepie. Really? My fridge typically has the same things I've found. Regarding energy level I have a different node called "low-energy recipes" the other recipes are linked from. > I now just ask chatgpt that I have x,y and z in my fridge and I want to use to use oven and vitamix and that i am tired. It concocts a recipe for me that i can tune further. I've done that, but there are tradeoffs in quality and depending on how you view LLM's.. confidence in the end result. > Most of the stuff I cook aren't unique recipes that need to store in obsidian. It depends on your memory... I forget certain steps of recipes I've cooked for years sometimes. Knowing I have things just there at my grasp puts things on easy mode.
benhurmarcel 3y ago
It seems to me that any notes app works for storing recipes. I have a recipes folder in Apple Notes, which doesn’t use any special feature.
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  Yeah, you can replicate how i use it for recipes with notes + tags. However sometimes tags are meaningful enough they should have their own page. And I'd like to know the surrounding context around the creation of that page, which I can do because the first link to it was from my org roam daily. Or I want to know which friend shared the recipe with me. Maybe those examples can answer the unspoken "why not simpler notes?" question.

pprotas 3y ago

You don't hear this take often, but I fully agree. I tried the second brain stuff myself. I attempted to create a personal wiki with all the software engineering knowledge I would come across. Knowledge about programming languages, networking, security, hardware... All of it was neatly organized in my wiki with interconnected notes. Whenever I learned something new about a topic, I would go back to that note and add it in. And then... then what? It turned out that I never reached out to any of these notes. Most of the useful knowledge is already right there, in my brain. I don't need a second brain for that. The knowledge that I used less frequently was easily refreshed by a quick Google search or ChatGPT. I didn't need to keep this knowledge in any form of personal wiki. Turns out that this personal wiki simply added more overhead to my day, since now anything I would learn would have to be written in a note. But what was really the point of this writing if it was never read? Right now I don't really keep any notes anymore, but I am not sure that this is the solution, either. As with all things, balance is probably the answer to all this note-taking; you probably want to keep notes of _some_ things, but you probably don't need to have a wiki with all of your knowledge, either.

kergonath 3y ago
> And then... then what? It turned out that I never reached out to any of these notes. Most of the useful knowledge is already right there, in my brain. I don't need a second brain for that. This sort of approach shines when you need to mobilise knowledge that fell out of your immediately accessible memory, e.g. 6 months after having done something for the last time. It’s not very well suited to fields that move too fast and where you never need to look back, because by then the knowledge is outdated and you need to find new solutions anyway. For me, it’s great because I have a handful of long-running projects concurrently and I switch between them every 3-4 month. Being able to easily mobilise project-specific knowledge after having spent enough time doing something else that I forgot the details is very useful. To be honest, I would love a LLM that I could use to extract information from my old pile of notes and my pile of scientific papers. I don’t think it would make notes useless, though. On the contrary it would make them much more valuable.
machomaster 3y ago
The biggest benefit one gets from notes comes from the mere fact of writing (not reading), when one has to think, write, paraphrase, edit what and how to write, and how this new info connects to the existing knowledge.

bernie_mann 3y ago

My take is don't curate notes to excess or as its own end. Take notes to the extent that it's useful and (like email) don't over-invest in backlinking, tagging, and categorization -- search is a helluva drug. I find a lightly structured process for how I capture notes on upcoming trips (mostly during the planning phase), content I might consume later, bookmarks, books or courses I want to record some notes on, topics I can truly foresee wanting to come back to, and so in. I also normed into doing a weekly note where I capture a few notes a day that I'll want to refer back to, and track what I'm focused on that week. The dominant theme for me is a little goes a long way, and my goal is to be more productive in terms of writing and recall, not to be encyclopedic. This is absolutely ymmv, horses-for-courses think, I'm almost certain. But it's useful to know that there are many useful stops along the continuum as you're triangulating towards yours (imo). Also, Obsidian is excellent software -- for me it's supplanted Ulysses/Bear, bookmark managers and web clippers, and todo managers. The plugin ecosystem is the deal, even as Stephano and team keep improving the core. I think it's reached enough users at this point, that even if they pivoted to a less non-evil heading, it seems like someone would come in behind them and offer an alternative for your folders and folders of md.

kergonath 3y ago
> it seems like someone would come in behind them and offer an alternative for your folders and folders of md. That’s a killer feature for me. I’ve seen way too many applications that went bust or that stopped being developed, I really don’t want to deal with extracting stuff from yet another proprietary database.