3 ms·

This 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 ht

This 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 https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html is my favourite.

Analemma_ 9mo ago
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.
- techwizrd 9mo ago
  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.
- Modified3019 9mo ago
  >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.
gwern 9mo ago
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://gwern.net/blog/2024/tools-for-thought-failure https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoqFpaorNHsWxRzvz/what-comes-after-roam-s-renaissance 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.)
- clueless 9mo ago
  Have you seen any good open source projects using llms to do the scutwork for this kind of PKMs?
  - gwern 9mo ago
    No, but I haven't been following the space. (I suspect that with Claude Code-level coding agents, you should be able to do something amazing that thoroughly obsoletes Obsidian/Roam/org-mode, but I don't actually know of anything.) 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-the-greatness-question https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/llm-poetry-and... / https://gwern.net/fiction/lab-animals https://gwern.net/fiction/lab-animals and https://gwern.net/blog/2025/better-llm-writing https://gwern.net/blog/2025/better-llm-writing So maybe this year I can turn some attention back to PKMs and Quantified Self stuff...
    - Analemma_ 9mo ago
      I haven't tried using agents to make a full editor, but Claude Code and Gemini CLI are actually quite good at writing Obsidian plugins, or modifying existing ones. You can start with an existing one that's 90% of what you want (which tends to be the case with note-taking/PKM systems: people are so idiosyncratic that solutions built by others almost work, but not quite) and tweak it to be exactly right for you. 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.
voxleone 9mo ago
The forester-notes.org page is not a traditional blog or essay. It’s a hypertext note node.

Analemma_ 9mo ago

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.

techwizrd 9mo ago
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.
Modified3019 9mo ago
>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.

gwern 9mo ago

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://gwern.net/blog/2024/tools-for-thought-failure https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoqFpaorNHsWxRzvz/what-comes-after-roam-s-renaissance 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.)

clueless 9mo ago
Have you seen any good open source projects using llms to do the scutwork for this kind of PKMs?
- gwern 9mo ago
  No, but I haven't been following the space. (I suspect that with Claude Code-level coding agents, you should be able to do something amazing that thoroughly obsoletes Obsidian/Roam/org-mode, but I don't actually know of anything.) 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-the-greatness-question https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/llm-poetry-and... / https://gwern.net/fiction/lab-animals https://gwern.net/fiction/lab-animals and https://gwern.net/blog/2025/better-llm-writing https://gwern.net/blog/2025/better-llm-writing So maybe this year I can turn some attention back to PKMs and Quantified Self stuff...
  - Analemma_ 9mo ago
    I haven't tried using agents to make a full editor, but Claude Code and Gemini CLI are actually quite good at writing Obsidian plugins, or modifying existing ones. You can start with an existing one that's 90% of what you want (which tends to be the case with note-taking/PKM systems: people are so idiosyncratic that solutions built by others almost work, but not quite) and tweak it to be exactly right for you. 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.

voxleone 9mo ago

The forester-notes.org page is not a traditional blog or essay. It’s a hypertext note node.