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- Hacker News
- Yeah I've just gone back to hand coding everything and pretend AI doesn't exist. Seriously. It doesn't have any measurable impact on my productivity (since there's no meaningful way to measure it), and is slowly restoring my blunted research and reading ability. I don't need extra dimensions of tasks like deleting hallucinations, and get to have 100% personal agency (other than when collaborating with colleagues of course).by afarviral
- My second brain is 500 open tabs of Notepad++by r0b05
- Letting AI to read private thoughs is like giving public entities ability to read mind. In global scale, this is ideal tool for social engineering.by t0bia_s
- One of my main reasons for writing notes is that I learn while writing: the act of dumping information into textual format lets me re-think though all of it. Sometimes I pause and realise that I need to better understand something in order to put it into words. To explain a certain amount, I need to understand a wee bit more than that.
Having an AI write notes would only produce text, but the actual notes are mostly a side effect — an important one, but not the most important one in note taking.
I think hard about related notes, and peek at them when linking, sometimes finding interesting one-off connections. This makes me think further and sometimes expand the topics. Automated linking would not make me think, it wouldn't make me learn. It would just produce yet another pile of information that's already available online anyway.
by WhyNotHugo - ive never been able to use zettelkattsen. i like having daily notes instead of different notes for different ideas. its easier this way. my obsidian vault is a hybrid of diary and research and i am trying to separate the diary and research but its not easy tbh. (i suffer from a crushing urge to note that i "just ate a sandwich, was good" while liveblogging research and debugging.)
that being said, i got a big kick out of feeding my daily notes into my local model. i had some more diary-like entries that i would never share with anyone, but it was extremely funny to have my local model take a 3000 word recap of what i did in a day and summarize it like "writer reflects on their job: they worry about their performance. meals: the writer ate oatmeal, and a sandwich. family: the author contemplates their fathers absence growing up."
ive developed a really large corpus of written work over the years and am hoping to fine tune a model using my diary as the training set. i think this would yield hilarious results. keeping it all local though, i drop my passwords in there at times and i dont want that leaked.
- What am I even here for if not to have my own ideas?by gdulli
- I’ll have ideas on my own time. On the clock, I’m happy to delegate that when appropriate.by brightstep
- You can become a harness, like a lot of us.by megous
- I think the temptation for most people is not to offload your idea generation to AI, but to offload your storage and/or retrieval processes to AI.by Zambyte
- That's for you to find out. When we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, people used to value strength. Today they value thought. They may value something else in the future.by a2ff6eeb0
- “After we started thinking for you it became our society” The Matrix 1999by datakan
- There was a related study posted awhile ago:
> When people think AI did the creative work, task meaning and effort decline
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-people-think-ai-did-...
- > It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI
Yes! And that's because you can't really delegate ownership/authorship to AI (at today's capability levels). Coding agents might have been RL'd out the wazoo to write code to solve well defined problems, but given a situation the onus of making sense of the ambiguity and identifying the problem -- and even crafting a skeleton for an acceptable solution keeping in mind tradeoffs -- needs to be done by a human taking ownership.
I wrote about this recently from a slightly different angle [1], but the core idea is the same -- which is why it is hard to take over an idea mooted by AI. Before even writing/implementing, the AI has internally resolved ambiguity with several decisions which are arbitrary, and match neither your mental model nor the actual ground reality (which you need to spend time understanding in order to productively interpret).
[1] https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...
by ssivark - You really put my thoughts into words, thank you!by fortzi
- I like your idea of conversational tempo, it feels a little like a 'thinking' slider applied to a plan mode (how much back and forth vs. "rigor" you want at a given moment).
Might be a good candidate for a pi extension.
by jesse_ash - 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 ?by Dependance
- There's also an article from this same site about that: https://www.ssp.sh/brain/digital-vs-paper
IMO it's way better to do what you think is good, whether that's Obsidian, notebooks, or something else
by fsnovask - Self soothing behavior. Helps quell the anxiety derived from the dopamine threadmill of modern digital media.
We're all becoming mental hoarders and discussing our piles of though junk in our digital storage units.
by huurtehoog - Obsidian and apple notes are basically the same thing. Obsidian just has some more features.by Jtarii
- 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.by beart
- 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" :)
by spacechild1 - > 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.
by pragma_x - 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.
- 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.by _def
- Ironically, this is why one of the best ways to manage upwards is to prompt managers into coming up with your idea as if it were their own: they’re dramatically more likely to execute and deliver on it. Of course, this also obviously leads to undue credit given for coming up the idea, which is certainly a core problem with AI as well, but it’s still charming to watch managerial psych being rediscovered by this new generation of managers.by altairprime
- Nothing beats the feeling of having a proposed idea dismissed just to have the higher ups “come up” with it some time later. Don’t even dream about getting a footnote mention.by Cameri
- I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time"
I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ideas. 99% of them are garbage.
Before AI, a conversation with colleagues would help me weed out the garbage, and possibly give me a new perspective ("here's something surprising about what you just said!")
Now, AI plays a helpful role in helping me weed out the garbage for the subset of ideas that I can test empirically -- and sometimes it does give me a new perspective, but with significantly more noise than my colleagues, who would take me right to the point that would be useful for me to see.
I've never felt like I needed a second brain ... because if I had such a thing, I think I would be keeping the 99% garbage around -- instead I just let biology GC it.
by mccoyb - I like to to think while talking. Nowadays I don’t have always somebody to talk to so I talk to myself and record on the phone; then voice to text to obsidian.
I have a lot of interesting notes and I can also plug them to AI to get some reminders, insights etc.
But I agree with your general message - thinking is still superior
by ostros - A key part of maintaining a second brain is revisiting and pruning it. Much like a todo list, without that practice it absolutely just accumulates bunk.by mmargenot
- The whole idea of second brain is simply cringe. I know using this word itself is cringe but it's the most accurate one for how I feel.
While it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with AI, the trend of glue AI onto everything certainly didn't help.
For you guys' 5 min of entertainment: https://youtu.be/6NukGtwJb7Y?t=256
by raincole