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I understand what the author deleted and why. I would never delete my own archive of notes, because it contains a different kind of information: howtos for thi
by barrkel 1y ago
I understand what the author deleted and why.
I would never delete my own archive of notes, because it contains a different kind of information: howtos for things I do infrequently, current state for personal projects I rotate in and out of over years, maintenance logs for my vehicles, identification details for every important account (account numbers, insurance expiry details etc).
When I'm doing something complex, I narrate what I'm doing in my notes. Most of these logs are write only. They can help as a kind of written rubber duck. And about 1 in 100 turn out to be extremely useful when I want to remember how I did something 10 years ago.
I use the same app (of my own design) with a different storage at work, and there I use it to remind myself what I did for performance reviews. Every edit is logged with a timestamp and I have a different tool which puts all the edits into chronological order.
For the author, their system served as a way of dealing with anxiety over self-improvement, it seems. But it turned into an anxiety of its own when the weight of unexplored ambition became manifest. It wasn't really a second brain IMO.
- tommica 1y agoI'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point. I have a project/idea journal that I've had for over 10 years, and going through it sometimes is really fun. I remember being so proud about my code-generation tool that allowed me to quickly start a new html+css project that I was doing that work as a freelancer. Seeing that page in my journal brings up a smile.
- diggan 1y ago> I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point. Yeah, my "second-brain" doubles as a journal too, and I have written notebooks from when I first arrived in my "real home country" with basically nothing, and it's always a pleasure to go back to read through and realize (again) how different my life is now. It's really easy to lose track of our own progress day-to-day, and being able to analyze your past perspectives and situations is like a hack to instant happiness.
- chuckadams 1y ago> I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point. The author mentions being sober for 6 years. Chances are she's not terribly interested in meeting her past self.
- wonger_ 1y agoSometimes it's nice to remind yourself how far you've come.
- jhbadger 1y agoI have an archive of all my email going back to 1992. (Granted, this is more accessible prior to 2000 or so when things went unnecessarily to HTML). It is a wonderful resource, not only for practical reasons but also it's like my own personal Pepys diary -- I can tell you what I was doing in 1992 and later on any date. I love reading it, even if I encounter sad messages from mentors who have since passed or significant others decades since the breakup.
- motorest 1y ago> I would never delete my own archive of notes, because it contains a different kind of information: howtos for things I do infrequently, current state for personal projects I rotate in and out of over years, maintenance logs for my vehicles, identification details for every important account (account numbers, insurance expiry details etc). It struck me as odd how the blog post waxed lyrical about "second brains" but the description of the notes seemed to point at mostly to-do lists. That's not what I would call a second brain. The definition of "second brain" is in line with the old tradition of engineering logs, where engineers write down things they did, measurements they took, and observations they did. On the other hand, to-do lists is just work you assign to yourself. No wonder those notes caused anxiety. I would also be anxious if I was faced with a log with 7-years worth of chores that are both late and stale. Logs are logs. You write down what you feel is important, and forget about them. After some time, you can delete them without a second thought. You write down stuff today because you feel it will help you in the future. If what you wrote down today is not a present from your past to your present, and instead is causing you grief, then just remove it from your notes. As all things in life, you need to preserve the things that cause joy and push away those that cause grief. Your second brain is no different.
- alfiedotwtf 1y agoYou can delete all the TODO lists in the world, but those hundreds of domain names that were registered because of a new brilliant idea but weren’t touched after you finished designing the logo still have another two and a half years before they expire :)
- freetinker 1y agoUnderrated comment.
- 3abiton 1y agoOuch, that hit a nerve.
- moneywaters 1y agoShould some one buy domain for a website that will aggregate and display the graveyard of buried project that never advanced beyond domain and logo ? maybe IdeaGraveyard.dev ? haha
- TacticalCoder 1y ago[dead]
- keysdev 1y agoI recently recovered about 3TB of data from over 15 years ago. It was just on a hard drive with a friend that we thought was lost. I dont really miss the data, but oh it was nice to see some old photos and notes!! So what I recoomend is put on a hd and hide it some where. Go check it in 15 years
- thfuran 1y agoAn HDD (or tape if you really want want it to stick around), not an SSD.
- zahlman 1y agoTIL that tape storage exists with density competitive with HDDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open but I still don't understand what supposedly makes it more reliable long-term as storage.
- datameta 1y agoI believe it is cost per unit density that allows magnetic tape to be more suitable for archival storage than HDD, which surpasses it in I/O speeds. Magnetic tape storage is still usually in RAID-like configurations and while tape only survives for 15-30 years, data survival by migration is typically done well before medium degradation.
- kstrauser 1y agoLTO-9 drives are expensive, but the media is around $90 for an 18TB (pre-compression) tape. That’s a pretty good price if you make lots of backups for work. They also offer append-only mode, which is awesome for archives where you want it to be essentially impossible to delete a backup without physical access. But the tape itself has a great reputation for being physically robust. There are fewer parts to break than in an HDD, too. If your tape drive dies, you can replace it and keep using the same media. That’d be like having hard drive platters you could swap into another HDD later on.
- zahlman 1y ago> current state for personal projects I rotate in and out of over years How do you get yourself to rotate back in?
- kaashif 1y agoPersonally, I don't "get myself" to do anything, I just do it for fun. The usual cycle is that I start hacking on some fun thing like an implementation of rules for a board game or trying to work out how some library I use works. Eventually I write down where I am then stop, maybe because I got bored or it was too hard. Then I forget that the project was hard, become convinced that it was easy, then spend an evening hacking away again. It's just leisure. Like putting a bookmark in a novel.
- michaelbarton 1y agoSomewhat related I have a little script that shows me three notes at random everyday. If they’re stale or no longer needed I delete the note. This helps keep it relatively fresh over time. I have a tag “#noreview” for notes that are evergreen that don’t need to be reviewed. Example of that might which bus to take from Heathrow when visiting friends in London
- ZunarJ5 1y agoI also follow this philosophy. I also have an anxious brain, though. To manage the clutter, I zip up old notes & projects by date and put them in an archive folder. They're always there if I need to reference them, but I have a clean workspace too. I include file trees in those archives for easy reference. Very easy to script with a cron job.
- Willingham 1y agoI took some blurbs from your comment and added it to my…life/career notes. (:
- BrtByte 1y agoWhat you've built sounds more like an external memory prosthetic than a second brain - grounded, functional, and geared toward real-world utility, not aspirational insight-hoarding. I think that's the key difference: your system serves your life, not the other way around
- dawnofdusk 1y agoThis comment you wrote sounds a lot like an LLM, FYI. Not saying you are
- Capricorn2481 1y agoI've used AI a lot and completely disagree.
- bckr 1y agoIt’s the last sentence that makes it sound like Claude, to me
- jokab 1y agoAs a non native English speaker, this would be a compliment.
- rpdillon 1y agoFar too dense and insightful for an LLM, in my opinion.
- barrkel 1y agoThat voice - antithesis - is straight out of ChatGPT, like the sibling comment says.
- dhdaadhd 1y agoIt’s funny how ChatGPT writes like a first-year in an MFA writing program. Its style is often too elegant for its substance. OpenAI is not good at matching form to function in text or voice.
- jokab 1y ago> For the author, their system served as a way of dealing with anxiety over self-improvement, it seems. "Capture what resonates.." is my take away from reading "Building a Second Brain" by Tiago Forte if I'm consciously looking something that resonates with me for everything that I consume, i'd be anxious too.