Don't mean at all to discredit what the author's done - it's their life and seems to have been helpful to them and for that I'm very glad.
But this would make me so sad -
Its not that the notes are useful but every few months I love nostalgia tripping on old notes. Like looking at old photos but instead of places and people its thoughts. Like, "oh yeah, I did care about that back then!"
That's what I feel after finding "Desktop" backup folders from years ago after refreshing my Windows installations. Each computer had their unique desktop and documents folder with bunch of software, games, half written plugins / codes.
I know what you mean. It's not just notes. I had shelves full of trinkets and books that I never looked at. I threw them all way to "unclutter my life". I realize now, even though I never picked them up or read the books they triggered memories. When I bought them, what I was into at the time, things like that. I don't know how much I wish I still had them all.
I'm going though something kind of similar now in that there are several boxes of stuff of mine in my parent's storage. I haven't looked in them in 20+ years. I basically told them to just chuck them in the trash. I haven't seen them, I don't want to see them. If I see them I'll just end up keeping them for another 20+ years without looking at them.
Yes, they will trigger memories. Things I made in high school, elementary school, college, etc.... There's at least 3 journals. But, do I really care? If they had just thrown them away with out telling me or if the storage and burnt down I'd have no idea what was in them and I certainly don't miss the contents or even think about them except when my parents mention, "you know, we still have your boxes in our storage"
I don't know how to choose between keeping them and getting rid of a pile of trash haha. I'm choosing to throw them away. I'd prefer not to know what's in them so I don't know what I don't know. I guess partly I just want to detach from the past. Others certainly make different choices.
I always used and use paper notes. Computer files are mostly downloads, and saved articles for better search (ahem) than DDG or Google because their results are almost entirely name matches with movies or shit to buy.
And stuff disappears. Hopefully saved at IA, but not always.
That said, I have all my old note books with great ideas :-) whose time may come yet, etc.
The only notes I tossed were from years just prior to a divorce. Nothing useful, just griping. The other ideas are still interesting to review.
For example, lists of questions for games, and unusual names, such as Ebenezer and Florence, aka Ebb and Flo.
Photos are always saved, including ones I scanned from parents' prints and daughter's growing up prints. (Film days) A few old slides have been scanned, but I keep the originals. One more adapter ring, and those will also be scanned. My brother and I have Dad's original paintings and good quality photos (from the digital camera age) for showing off.
Like the same person would write completely opposite in the same style ten years ago, but now that PKM are all the rage they need to reassert themselves as “not-like-the-other” by burning everything to the ground?
And instead of just logging off, the dramatic deletion. He frames this as the end of a phase but I suspect he's still in the middle of something. I wish him luck and strength.
Throwing notes away is not growing. Growing is understanding that inanimate things don't have control over your life.
This whole "philosophical" article that basically says "I've removed my notes because they were giving me anxiety" is a confirmation that this is just yet another phase in author's life.
You don’t get to define that. The author does, it’s their life.
The action taken here was not just the deletion, it was the reflecting, the identification of a problem, the thinking of a solution, the courage to follow through with something irreversible, the willingness to try something.
Do you know that this person was writing the opposite ten years ago? And even if they did, people can’t try something and then change their mind? Is that worthy of ridicule now?
Frankly, making fun of someone for being “hipster” says more about the person doing the comment than the target of it. It’s a basic, meaningless insult.
I don't take long-term notes at all, only quick notes on paper of thing I need to do. I tried to collect all thoughts, notes etc. but I would never read them again. Most of it would be outdated anyways. So I understand that these kind of notes might feel like ballast and might be a reason to not be able to close with things.
Everything that is worth keeping is on my website as properliy written posts which I enjoy to re-read from time to time. You could also look at it this way: anything that doesn't make it onto the website - i.e. is published - isn't worth saving either.
the thing with such a system is keeping it up to date
you have to spend SO MUCH time writing notes... and since you might put in everything you've thought to do, in there, you also have to go back and read it again, to find it?
seems like a very time consuming process
i personally write down details for a few topics, in my notes, and then i tend to forget the small details, and use my brain to remember the big scope(s). then i can return to my notes for tiny details later, if needed.
most of the time though, i tend to never return.
and so i ended up just not writing notes anymore. it ends up being too much to look through, or too much to be worth the time.
gotta find that sweet spot i guess, but thats not easy either.
I can’t count the number of times my notes have saved me or my team some serious grief. I don’t have to keep everything in my head. I can offload my brain into notes.
Godspeed, but there’s no way I’d give any of that up.
Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as notes.
I'm not big on note taking myself, but when I do, the things I capture is very different from the version I put into the official documentation.
There is a good article: A rational design process, how and why to fake it.[1] Basically how we reach our goal and how we present them are two different things. The personal notes have the details on failures, wrong turns and alternative ideas, the official documentation won't have that.
> Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as notes.
To build upon this point, there's a problem that writing docs is a thankless job: those who benefit from it do so silently, whereas those who selflessly shared notes later can find themselves involved in issues they have no involvement.
Confluence search is very good.... At finding stuff in PDFs. Search in Confluence is bonkers. Super easy to locate term, know to only exist in one document, and Confluence will return that one PDF that someone uploaded, which for some reason also have that term. It's odd that the search is so poor at searching Confluence pages, yet so good at searching PDFs.
Because it's less friction to put it there? Because only he can find it in the sparse context it lives in? Because he can use it then for multiple projects, and might he change, multiple companies? Because that way it's his and not the companies? Imagine leaving a job and all you learned stays at that job instead of with you?
Because then it spares you the maintenance of bullshit? The moment you put something public, there are 10 wise-asses that will start bikeshedding about MD flavor, where to put it, who maintains it, can we automate it, can you update this, can we expand it, etc.
I started doing this, because my company goes through too many re-orgs and tool changes. If I capture it in my personal notes, I don't have to worry about re-doing everything when the org changes, or losing something I may need if I'm moves away from the area where those notes were kept.
I'd love to have a universal shared notes system for the whole team, but it's proven unrealistic when seeing how things work over decades.
With my former team I wrote 90% of the documentation. A while after I left they had to migrate their docs to a new system, and used it as an opportunity to clean up. I went back to try and reference a 20 page doc I wrote, going very in depth on a topic during a period where I was deep into it. Gone. I wish I had kept my own copies instead of relying on the shared platform. There was still a lot of good and relevant information in that document, but the people going through it lacked the knowledge and context to see it. There have been many examples like this.
There are also things that don't seem like they deserve a note in a formal system. One day thing X broke and we found out we had to talk to person Y to fix it. No one else thought to write it down, but I did. It broke again yesterday, and I was able to quickly bring up the name of who to talk to, while everyone else just tried to remember and hunted through their chat history. Search of my local notes (in Obsidian) works much better than Confluence. The low friction also means it's easy to drop stuff in, even if it might not be that useful. The friction on Confluence is higher. I tried keeping all my notes in there once, so I could easily share them with others if/when needed, but it was too much effort, and only a matter of time before it goes away and we move to something else (that's happening to some degree right now).
Where do people draw the line between a PKM (which is yours) and team documentation (which belongs, presumably to your team to which you have a transient relationship with)?
personal notes become cryptic team notes when you leave. If something ought to be team knowledge before that, it needs to get translated into a form that more people can easily read.
I use org-roam for looking up a topic, adding a note, and then forgetting about it.
Yeah I might link one topic to another, but it's so seldom used because if I did it properly I'd have to link everything to everything else or create some maddening time-consuming thought hierarchy, like I believe the poster did.
I also dont use my notes to think... they just exist to roughly categorize my updates on a project or topic, and once that project is over I seldom look at it again, or, I simply archive it.
Having this virtual briefcase full of hastily tagged and indexed notes sounds chaotic, but it is immensely useful in unburdening my brain and uncluttering my desktop (firefox has maybe 5 tabs open).
I dont understand the need for thorough organization and consistent structure. Nor do I understand cradling every thought or whim like it's untapped genius.
Life is seldom like this, and an impossible ideal to enact. Linnaeus himself must have questioned his sanity when he saw a Platypus.
Linking notes enables note-taking to become a full-time hobby. It’s effortless to waste hours in Notion, Obsidian, Vimwiki, etc. creating MOCs, unused links, nice little home pages, and creating and recreating structures and systems.
I switched to a directory of unlinked, tagged notes and I’ve yet to have an issue just searching for a specific note. I spend a fraction of the time I used to thinking about notes at all.
Everyone has different needs and things that work for them, but some of these productivity gurus have 100,000s atomic notes, each note being like a single quote from a book, and you realize that taking and organizing notes is the only thing they do.
I was elated when obsidian came out, because it brought to reality exactly what I thought I had wanted for a few years prior - ability to link, especially graphically, all of my notes.
But I quickly realised what you described - it's a futile effort to maintain such a thing, and that the only people who do it are absolute slaves to the systems they've created.
Worse, they surely don't really generate truly unique insights from it all because the insights don't really come from addition and interconnection, but instead from subtraction and refinement. The cultivation of wisdom, in other words - which is the opposite of accumulation. I've seen various versions of this chart and I think it summarizes the situation well - though I'd go further and be culling the noise from it all. https://magniapartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Magnia...
I still use obisidan, as it's just great software. And mybnotes could absolutely benefit from better structure and discipline in filing them - I do almost none of what I mentioned above. Though, perhaps I'm just mentally doing the culling and just focusing on what actually matters. Full text search usually finds me what I need quickly enough.
I would have zipped it and put it into long term storage. Now that I can run llms locally and train them with my notes, I’d never have to organize or revisit old notes and could still get value out of them.
If it wasn't for the compulsive authoring, storing, organizing, accessing, discarding, archiving, indexing and retrieving of notes and related data I wouldn't know what a computer was good for.
But the whole "second brain" trend always made my stomach turn and the surrounding culture of productivity/personal knowledge management is a tarpit.
I keep mine but archived as git history. I don't return to it but in critical moment I can come back to some obscure information I recorded years ago - useful for legal or insurance.
And my "second brain" is just handful list of current stuff, some home technical or financial details my family would need in case I am in coma, etc. I would call it Snapshot of Presence notes.
I’m debating whether nested folders should be used at all in my PKMs. I’m starting to think everything should be in the root folder. Less likely to render searchability incomplete due to some function or widget breaking.
> I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize
I resonate with this a lot. But in the opposite way of what the author implies here.
Since I've start 'reading to extract', my attention span improved a lot. I feel my reading pattern is like that of the pre-social-media self again. Simply knowing that I'm going to write some notes down makes reading a much more engaging experience for me.
By the way, this is what I wrote into Obsidian after reading this article:
> [url]: The author deleted their Obsidian database of 10,000 notes. I do not agree on this approach, but they raised some interesting issues. Quote:
> > The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold.
> > That self never arrived.
> I am probably making the same mistake, and should be reviewing my notes more often. Perhaps I can delete some outdated ones every once in a while, instead of deleting the whole database like the author did?
My personal website acts as my second brain in the sense that it helps me remember important events in my life and tracks my personal projects. I started it around 1995.
That is pretty impressive. I skimmed through the site, and was wondering what your thought process was when putting your life in the open vs. keeping it on a local disk?
Good question. Through the years, I have become more restrictive about what I write especially with respect to others. I am aware of the fact that I am more open to share about my personal life than many people around me. Maybe it is related to fact that I want to have some, hopefully positive, effect on the world. (Maybe one day in the future it might become material for some historic research.)
There is also a lot, I do not share. I keep a personal diary and since 2010, I am recording my daily activities in Moleskin daily planners (the only planners I have found that have the same space for Saturdays and Sundays as for working days).
Of course if you store “7000 notes” in a PKM you should expect most of them to be useless, unless you’re doing science and most of them are literature notes or something (remember the guy who “invented” zettelkasten worked as a researcher). Ordinary mortals can get by with a lot less.
I have maybe a few hundred notes on the handful of topics that matter to me and that’s it.
This resonates with me, I’ve never considered knowledge as something you can live.
But comparing it with photography, it influences how you experience the world. Sometimes it makes you feel like an outsider documenting instead of being in the moment.
I always cringe a bit when people take endless videos of fireworks or concerts. There is a fine line between wanting te remember a feeling or moment and just brainlessly recording.
I’m wouldn’t be surprised if this second brain movement is similarly lacking its connection with “reality” and when lacking clear intention.
I used Obsidian 2 yrs. ago for almost 2 weeks and I quit. I did not know why - until this post. I felt missing s.th. or left myself behind by not using s PKMs. Now I feel calm after reading this post. It seems that my subconsciousness alredy knew, that (to me) a PKM would never reach a break even point...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I 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.
> 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.
You 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 :)
Should 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
No, it did not mostly refer to to-do lists. At least that's not what I understood.
It was an example, yes. But he also referred to Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, a huge collection of notes, systematically interconnected, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann#Note-taking_sys.... Looks like the author followed a similar approach in Obsidian, a tool to store markdown notes in an interconnected manner.
He wrote: "Roam Research turned bidirectional links into a cult. Obsidian let the cult go off-grid. The lore deepened. You weren’t taking notes. You were building a lattice of meaning. ... A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on."
But it didn't work out: "the insight was never lived. It was stored. ... In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. ... The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold.
That self never arrived."
Hence, what he mostly wrote down were thoughts, ideas, quotes, hoping that insights and value will come from this huge collection. Turns out, it wasn't so easy for him. I believe he'll need more focus, more curation, a more targeted and heartfelt approach.
Well, it sounds like it did work out back then for Niklas Luhmann. He said that all his famous publications wouldn't have been possible without his structured note taking approach. His 90,000 cards were digitized and are now available online, see https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel...
I 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
I 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.
LTO-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.
Tape media doesn't last forever. I suppose that tapes specifically meant for archiving are better, but I have old audio tapes from the 1970s and 80s that are just falling apart.
Mylar audio tape of that vintage had longevity problems. I remember reading about an audio archive that thought they had done the right thing by preserving onto high quality tape of the time and then they found their archives disintegrating. I think they got lucky and moved things to new media before losing everything.
This is always the risk. Longevity testing is often done at high temperatures or other artificial means but cannot exactly simulate 30-50 years of storage. If something is important, it's best to use two different media, and check them over the years.
It is a question of failure mode. If your hard drive motor dies, if the heads fail, if the electronics fail, if the sealing fail (in some cases it can be repaired by specialists but that's not easy and much more expensive than a tape reader)... lots of things can go wrong that are not related with the media itself. The advantage of tape is that the device that reads it is separate from the mechanically simple tape. It comes at a cost but that's for hedging against a different risk.
Personally, 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.
Somewhat 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
I 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.
What 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
I noticed this too, just recently, with their voice update. I was asking about the war and she just sounded bored. Very inappropriate for the subject matter
This article is visibly, annoyingly, distractingly in threes.
> It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
> but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked.
> A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions...
> A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it...
> There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts
> The belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it. That by storing a thought, you have understood it. That by filing a fact, you have earned the right to deploy it.
> ...the fear of losing track, of forgetting, of not being caught up.
> Nietzsche burned early drafts. Michelangelo destroyed sketches. Leonardo left thousands of pages unfinished.
I'm starting to notice this style a lot. Apparently there's a formal term for it, but I didn't begin to notice it until I started using ChatGPT regularly.
Granted, there are people who didn't notice the utility of the em dash until it became apparent in ChatGPT's responses, but aside from either device there is a certain vibe I'm starting to pick up from a lot of writing online that mirrors AI writing although you can't just call it that, especially if people enjoy it.
A kind of abstract solipsism that only resonates unless you consent to a platonic relationship with the author through their writing. About as close as you can get to reading something written with the aid of AI, I'd imagine.
I choose to think optimistically, in the same way as I did when smartphones put a camera in everyone’s pocket: suddenly, “bokeh” is a term with purchase in the mainstream! “Portrait mode” for every adorable baby pic! A ring light in every makeshift bedroom-dresser studio!
Everybody’s participating now, and taking pride in using more of the visual language of photography for themselves. That makes us all richer!
Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?
> Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?
I think you raise a valid point, but I would argue that in your photography example, the content is very much still human - portrait mode and ring lights are tools that improve the output but a human framed the picture, and pressed the button.
LLM generated writing doesn't quite feel the same for me, the words are the content but they lack human touch, context, intention. The equivalent would be the photographer uploading their photo to ChatGPT and asking it to regenerate the image. The output wouldn't feel right, it is more like losing something than gaining.
I feel that your optimism is great but that the example you provided is not the same.
Everyone had the ability to write before chatgpt, they had the ability to get their thoughts across if they so wished, whereas with photography it lessened the burden of having to buy an entirely seperate device.
if I move myself into the shoes of a photographer or someone with an affinity towards photographing I kind of get that when taking pictures is a big part of your life the camera starts to get ingrained with that but for others it wasnt just a step from camera to more frictionless camera it was a step from nothing to camera.
Whereas everyone has a brain to think things and to try to communicate what they are thinking and feeling, large language models did not enable that, they did however enable lazy people to swap out the work with a robots response or malicious people to spam the internet
That quote doesn’t apply at all. Verbose writing doesn’t immediately indicate a lack of skill, otherwise every fiction book would’ve been reduced to a pamphlet of a summary.
If you are writing to explain, being concise is a useful asset. If you are writing to entertain, or for pleasure, verbosity and flair can be better.
I don’t get the feeling the author is trying to convince anyone of doing anything. They are sharing their experience, probably writing for themselves above everyone else. They should do it however they prefer.
I was replying specifically to the statement that writing verbosely is a form of "skilled writing", which I don't agree with. Simply being verbose does not make your writing any better.
> Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. (4, though I suppose you could argue it's 1 + 3)
> But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. (2, albeit with a 3 inside)
> Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories. (2)
> The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. (2 with a 3 inside again)
> It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose. (4, 2, 2)
I think the author (either in person, or via some LLM that did much of the actual writing) is just fond of this sort of rhetorical repetition, and it happens that if you're doing that then 3 is often the best number. (Because 2 may not be enough to establish the rhythm, and 4 may be enough to feel overdone.)
I do think there's too much of it here, and specifically too many threes, but I think the underlying fault is "too much parallelism" and the too-many-threes are a symptom.
I'm fascinated by all these comments I see on HN and elsewhere where people will deny that a blatantly LLM-written article was not LLM-written, including cases where people praise it for not being LLM-written (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44384138 ). Like, leave aside the issue of whether it's a good or bad thing (I've been doing generative text NNs since 2015, so I'm mostly for it, when done well), I'm just interested in the inability to notice.
Skimming your comments, you, for example, do not seem to be illiterate or a bad writer at all despite being ESL (although you overuse the double-sentence structure in your comments), but you describe this as being 'stream of consciousness' (it is not even close to that, look at an actual example like Joyce) and seem to think it is fine.
So I'm puzzled how. Why isn't it obvious to you that the style is so mode-collapsed ( https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-lear... )? Do you also not notice how all the ChatGPT images are cat-urine yellow? (I've been asking people in person whether they have noticed this in the Bay Area and I'd say <20% of enthusiastic generative AI users have noticed.) What are you thinking when you read OP? Does it all just round off to 'content', and you don't notice the repetition because you treat it all as a single author? Are you just skimming and not reading it?
Sometimes I remember a particular line from a particular article and wish I had kept the links.
But I have learnt that things should go away permanently and it's normal to never get to read it again. "Life is like that"
I had around 3.8k collected over the span of 4 years
> But what got me sober, what got me through the first one, two, three hard years - none of it was in those notes.
> It hit me: what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next.
Where was it, or, what was it that did?
I believe the author when they went through their system of notes and effectively found nothing that contributed to the most important parts of themselves, but I was also sort of waiting for the alternative answer that I thought was supposed to be coming...
The main problem of notes is that most tools are bad, Emacs/org-mode outshine the others, still having it's own hiccups (for instance a very limited transclusion support so far with org-transclusion and delve at the best).
Nevertheless for me it's my main digital life, I have all in notes (org-mode) and the result is another level of computer help in my physical life!
360 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadBut this would make me so sad -
Its not that the notes are useful but every few months I love nostalgia tripping on old notes. Like looking at old photos but instead of places and people its thoughts. Like, "oh yeah, I did care about that back then!"
I'm going though something kind of similar now in that there are several boxes of stuff of mine in my parent's storage. I haven't looked in them in 20+ years. I basically told them to just chuck them in the trash. I haven't seen them, I don't want to see them. If I see them I'll just end up keeping them for another 20+ years without looking at them.
Yes, they will trigger memories. Things I made in high school, elementary school, college, etc.... There's at least 3 journals. But, do I really care? If they had just thrown them away with out telling me or if the storage and burnt down I'd have no idea what was in them and I certainly don't miss the contents or even think about them except when my parents mention, "you know, we still have your boxes in our storage"
I don't know how to choose between keeping them and getting rid of a pile of trash haha. I'm choosing to throw them away. I'd prefer not to know what's in them so I don't know what I don't know. I guess partly I just want to detach from the past. Others certainly make different choices.
Balanced amount of personal and family archive is nice when revisited.
Many years ago I realised I never do that. I find no enjoyment in going through old photos, so I stopped taking and storing them.
But like you, I don’t discredit the people who do it. More power to you if it makes you happy.
And stuff disappears. Hopefully saved at IA, but not always.
That said, I have all my old note books with great ideas :-) whose time may come yet, etc.
The only notes I tossed were from years just prior to a divorce. Nothing useful, just griping. The other ideas are still interesting to review.
For example, lists of questions for games, and unusual names, such as Ebenezer and Florence, aka Ebb and Flo.
Photos are always saved, including ones I scanned from parents' prints and daughter's growing up prints. (Film days) A few old slides have been scanned, but I keep the originals. One more adapter ring, and those will also be scanned. My brother and I have Dad's original paintings and good quality photos (from the digital camera age) for showing off.
The former is likely a mental burden, the latter not?
Like the same person would write completely opposite in the same style ten years ago, but now that PKM are all the rage they need to reassert themselves as “not-like-the-other” by burning everything to the ground?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name)
I myself threw out about 3000 notes last year
This whole "philosophical" article that basically says "I've removed my notes because they were giving me anxiety" is a confirmation that this is just yet another phase in author's life.
You don’t get to define that. The author does, it’s their life.
The action taken here was not just the deletion, it was the reflecting, the identification of a problem, the thinking of a solution, the courage to follow through with something irreversible, the willingness to try something.
Do you know that this person was writing the opposite ten years ago? And even if they did, people can’t try something and then change their mind? Is that worthy of ridicule now?
Frankly, making fun of someone for being “hipster” says more about the person doing the comment than the target of it. It’s a basic, meaningless insult.
Everything that is worth keeping is on my website as properliy written posts which I enjoy to re-read from time to time. You could also look at it this way: anything that doesn't make it onto the website - i.e. is published - isn't worth saving either.
you have to spend SO MUCH time writing notes... and since you might put in everything you've thought to do, in there, you also have to go back and read it again, to find it?
seems like a very time consuming process
i personally write down details for a few topics, in my notes, and then i tend to forget the small details, and use my brain to remember the big scope(s). then i can return to my notes for tiny details later, if needed.
most of the time though, i tend to never return.
and so i ended up just not writing notes anymore. it ends up being too much to look through, or too much to be worth the time.
gotta find that sweet spot i guess, but thats not easy either.
Godspeed, but there’s no way I’d give any of that up.
I'm not big on note taking myself, but when I do, the things I capture is very different from the version I put into the official documentation.
There is a good article: A rational design process, how and why to fake it.[1] Basically how we reach our goal and how we present them are two different things. The personal notes have the details on failures, wrong turns and alternative ideas, the official documentation won't have that.
1) https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/david-parnas/fake...
To build upon this point, there's a problem that writing docs is a thankless job: those who benefit from it do so silently, whereas those who selflessly shared notes later can find themselves involved in issues they have no involvement.
It's a lose-lose situation.
Abraham Lincoln
> An infrastructure engineer, programmer and BJJ guy. In a past life, I worked on interesting aircraft in the military.
a) how can you tell some random note you took today is critical project documentation?
b) why do you believe people read through project documentation?
I'd love to have a universal shared notes system for the whole team, but it's proven unrealistic when seeing how things work over decades.
With my former team I wrote 90% of the documentation. A while after I left they had to migrate their docs to a new system, and used it as an opportunity to clean up. I went back to try and reference a 20 page doc I wrote, going very in depth on a topic during a period where I was deep into it. Gone. I wish I had kept my own copies instead of relying on the shared platform. There was still a lot of good and relevant information in that document, but the people going through it lacked the knowledge and context to see it. There have been many examples like this.
There are also things that don't seem like they deserve a note in a formal system. One day thing X broke and we found out we had to talk to person Y to fix it. No one else thought to write it down, but I did. It broke again yesterday, and I was able to quickly bring up the name of who to talk to, while everyone else just tried to remember and hunted through their chat history. Search of my local notes (in Obsidian) works much better than Confluence. The low friction also means it's easy to drop stuff in, even if it might not be that useful. The friction on Confluence is higher. I tried keeping all my notes in there once, so I could easily share them with others if/when needed, but it was too much effort, and only a matter of time before it goes away and we move to something else (that's happening to some degree right now).
Yeah I might link one topic to another, but it's so seldom used because if I did it properly I'd have to link everything to everything else or create some maddening time-consuming thought hierarchy, like I believe the poster did.
I also dont use my notes to think... they just exist to roughly categorize my updates on a project or topic, and once that project is over I seldom look at it again, or, I simply archive it.
Having this virtual briefcase full of hastily tagged and indexed notes sounds chaotic, but it is immensely useful in unburdening my brain and uncluttering my desktop (firefox has maybe 5 tabs open).
I dont understand the need for thorough organization and consistent structure. Nor do I understand cradling every thought or whim like it's untapped genius.
Life is seldom like this, and an impossible ideal to enact. Linnaeus himself must have questioned his sanity when he saw a Platypus.
I switched to a directory of unlinked, tagged notes and I’ve yet to have an issue just searching for a specific note. I spend a fraction of the time I used to thinking about notes at all.
Everyone has different needs and things that work for them, but some of these productivity gurus have 100,000s atomic notes, each note being like a single quote from a book, and you realize that taking and organizing notes is the only thing they do.
But I quickly realised what you described - it's a futile effort to maintain such a thing, and that the only people who do it are absolute slaves to the systems they've created.
Worse, they surely don't really generate truly unique insights from it all because the insights don't really come from addition and interconnection, but instead from subtraction and refinement. The cultivation of wisdom, in other words - which is the opposite of accumulation. I've seen various versions of this chart and I think it summarizes the situation well - though I'd go further and be culling the noise from it all. https://magniapartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Magnia...
I still use obisidan, as it's just great software. And mybnotes could absolutely benefit from better structure and discipline in filing them - I do almost none of what I mentioned above. Though, perhaps I'm just mentally doing the culling and just focusing on what actually matters. Full text search usually finds me what I need quickly enough.
But the whole "second brain" trend always made my stomach turn and the surrounding culture of productivity/personal knowledge management is a tarpit.
And my "second brain" is just handful list of current stuff, some home technical or financial details my family would need in case I am in coma, etc. I would call it Snapshot of Presence notes.
I’m debating whether nested folders should be used at all in my PKMs. I’m starting to think everything should be in the root folder. Less likely to render searchability incomplete due to some function or widget breaking.
[1] https://johnnydecimal.com/
I resonate with this a lot. But in the opposite way of what the author implies here.
Since I've start 'reading to extract', my attention span improved a lot. I feel my reading pattern is like that of the pre-social-media self again. Simply knowing that I'm going to write some notes down makes reading a much more engaging experience for me.
By the way, this is what I wrote into Obsidian after reading this article:
> [url]: The author deleted their Obsidian database of 10,000 notes. I do not agree on this approach, but they raised some interesting issues. Quote:
> > The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold.
> > That self never arrived.
> I am probably making the same mistake, and should be reviewing my notes more often. Perhaps I can delete some outdated ones every once in a while, instead of deleting the whole database like the author did?
There is also a lot, I do not share. I keep a personal diary and since 2010, I am recording my daily activities in Moleskin daily planners (the only planners I have found that have the same space for Saturdays and Sundays as for working days).
I have maybe a few hundred notes on the handful of topics that matter to me and that’s it.
But comparing it with photography, it influences how you experience the world. Sometimes it makes you feel like an outsider documenting instead of being in the moment.
I always cringe a bit when people take endless videos of fireworks or concerts. There is a fine line between wanting te remember a feeling or moment and just brainlessly recording.
I’m wouldn’t be surprised if this second brain movement is similarly lacking its connection with “reality” and when lacking clear intention.
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.
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.
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.
The author mentions being sober for 6 years. Chances are she's not terribly interested in meeting her past self.
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.
It was an example, yes. But he also referred to Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, a huge collection of notes, systematically interconnected, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann#Note-taking_sys.... Looks like the author followed a similar approach in Obsidian, a tool to store markdown notes in an interconnected manner.
He wrote: "Roam Research turned bidirectional links into a cult. Obsidian let the cult go off-grid. The lore deepened. You weren’t taking notes. You were building a lattice of meaning. ... A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on."
But it didn't work out: "the insight was never lived. It was stored. ... In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. ... The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold. That self never arrived."
Hence, what he mostly wrote down were thoughts, ideas, quotes, hoping that insights and value will come from this huge collection. Turns out, it wasn't so easy for him. I believe he'll need more focus, more curation, a more targeted and heartfelt approach.
Well, it sounds like it did work out back then for Niklas Luhmann. He said that all his famous publications wouldn't have been possible without his structured note taking approach. His 90,000 cards were digitized and are now available online, see https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel...
So what I recoomend is put on a hd and hide it some where. Go check it in 15 years
but I still don't understand what supposedly makes it more reliable long-term as storage.
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.
This is always the risk. Longevity testing is often done at high temperatures or other artificial means but cannot exactly simulate 30-50 years of storage. If something is important, it's best to use two different media, and check them over the years.
How do you get yourself to rotate back in?
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.
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
OpenAI is not good at matching form to function in text or voice.
"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.
> It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
> but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked.
> A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions...
> A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it...
> There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts
> The belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it. That by storing a thought, you have understood it. That by filing a fact, you have earned the right to deploy it.
> ...the fear of losing track, of forgetting, of not being caught up.
> Nietzsche burned early drafts. Michelangelo destroyed sketches. Leonardo left thousands of pages unfinished.
Granted, there are people who didn't notice the utility of the em dash until it became apparent in ChatGPT's responses, but aside from either device there is a certain vibe I'm starting to pick up from a lot of writing online that mirrors AI writing although you can't just call it that, especially if people enjoy it.
A kind of abstract solipsism that only resonates unless you consent to a platonic relationship with the author through their writing. About as close as you can get to reading something written with the aid of AI, I'd imagine.
Everybody’s participating now, and taking pride in using more of the visual language of photography for themselves. That makes us all richer!
Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?
That is yet be proven, comrade.
LLM generated writing doesn't quite feel the same for me, the words are the content but they lack human touch, context, intention. The equivalent would be the photographer uploading their photo to ChatGPT and asking it to regenerate the image. The output wouldn't feel right, it is more like losing something than gaining.
Everyone had the ability to write before chatgpt, they had the ability to get their thoughts across if they so wished, whereas with photography it lessened the burden of having to buy an entirely seperate device.
if I move myself into the shoes of a photographer or someone with an affinity towards photographing I kind of get that when taking pictures is a big part of your life the camera starts to get ingrained with that but for others it wasnt just a step from camera to more frictionless camera it was a step from nothing to camera.
Whereas everyone has a brain to think things and to try to communicate what they are thinking and feeling, large language models did not enable that, they did however enable lazy people to swap out the work with a robots response or malicious people to spam the internet
We taught them.
One irony now being that that form of skilled writing is inevitably and sometimes falsely accused of being machine-written.
It takes much more skill to write concise than verbose.
If you are writing to explain, being concise is a useful asset. If you are writing to entertain, or for pleasure, verbosity and flair can be better.
I don’t get the feeling the author is trying to convince anyone of doing anything. They are sharing their experience, probably writing for themselves above everyone else. They should do it however they prefer.
> Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. (4, though I suppose you could argue it's 1 + 3)
> But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. (2, albeit with a 3 inside)
> Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories. (2)
> The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. (2 with a 3 inside again)
> It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose. (4, 2, 2)
I think the author (either in person, or via some LLM that did much of the actual writing) is just fond of this sort of rhetorical repetition, and it happens that if you're doing that then 3 is often the best number. (Because 2 may not be enough to establish the rhythm, and 4 may be enough to feel overdone.)
I do think there's too much of it here, and specifically too many threes, but I think the underlying fault is "too much parallelism" and the too-many-threes are a symptom.
To me it's more of a stream of consciousness style of writing.
Skimming your comments, you, for example, do not seem to be illiterate or a bad writer at all despite being ESL (although you overuse the double-sentence structure in your comments), but you describe this as being 'stream of consciousness' (it is not even close to that, look at an actual example like Joyce) and seem to think it is fine.
So I'm puzzled how. Why isn't it obvious to you that the style is so mode-collapsed ( https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-lear... )? Do you also not notice how all the ChatGPT images are cat-urine yellow? (I've been asking people in person whether they have noticed this in the Bay Area and I'd say <20% of enthusiastic generative AI users have noticed.) What are you thinking when you read OP? Does it all just round off to 'content', and you don't notice the repetition because you treat it all as a single author? Are you just skimming and not reading it?
SCNR
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)
I had around 3.8k collected over the span of 4 years
> It hit me: what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next.
Where was it, or, what was it that did?
I believe the author when they went through their system of notes and effectively found nothing that contributed to the most important parts of themselves, but I was also sort of waiting for the alternative answer that I thought was supposed to be coming...
Nevertheless for me it's my main digital life, I have all in notes (org-mode) and the result is another level of computer help in my physical life!