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.
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 ?
I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.
Humans can’t read minds either, but most humans aren’t so dumb as to forget what is a normative spec and what is just their own current, evolving model of the problem space. (Though some humans certainly are…)
i've been dabbling with various assistant models and instances and find that there's an interesting "idea" that pops up from their synthesis and relevancy analysis at a decent frequency. some kind of "inverse prompting" in which the machine has an angle, perspective, opportunity (based on the context it's working with/in) and the human turns those seedlings into something useful... or else decides its weed to be discarded.
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.
Seems like the only thing left to value will be social capital. If all forms of labor are free, the only thing that matters is how many people you know, what they think of you, whether they listen to you.
Brian, CTO complains that it's so hard for him to execute against the technical strategy communicated by that smart intern on the third day of his internship two years ago. Poor Brian.
I think having AI keep it's _own_ notes in Obsidian is a good idea because it makes them convenient for you to read, but yeah you need to quarantine agent ideas from your own ideas because otherwise you get bad cito-genesis problems. https://xkcd.com/978/
While I use Claude a lot for my Omarchy plugins and Linux optimization/failure detection, I don’t use it for writing and note-taking, especially for coming up with unique ideas and driving them home by writing them through to the end.
It's so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI.
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.
Hey, love the hivemind comment to mine. Maybe we do have kind of a second brain...? /s
How do you take notes, generally speaking ?
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 ?
I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.
Probably good to establish canonical spec documents up front that it can use and maintain as an independent reference?
Doesn't need to be "up front", but you do need to curate the context.
AI can't read your mind, and it will read what you (or anyone else) wrote.
Humans can’t read minds either, but most humans aren’t so dumb as to forget what is a normative spec and what is just their own current, evolving model of the problem space. (Though some humans certainly are…)
It can't but it will try and getting it to stop is often infeasible.
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-...
I have separate directories for human only files and ai files. I’m not doing anything that matters but it works for me.
i've been dabbling with various assistant models and instances and find that there's an interesting "idea" that pops up from their synthesis and relevancy analysis at a decent frequency. some kind of "inverse prompting" in which the machine has an angle, perspective, opportunity (based on the context it's working with/in) and the human turns those seedlings into something useful... or else decides its weed to be discarded.
The prompter becomes the prompted!
What am I even here for if not to have my own ideas?
“After we started thinking for you it became our society” The Matrix 1999
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.
Seems like the only thing left to value will be social capital. If all forms of labor are free, the only thing that matters is how many people you know, what they think of you, whether they listen to you.
Brian, CTO complains that it's so hard for him to execute against the technical strategy communicated by that smart intern on the third day of his internship two years ago. Poor Brian.
This is why I never use AI for ideas. Always my own ideas.
I think having AI keep it's _own_ notes in Obsidian is a good idea because it makes them convenient for you to read, but yeah you need to quarantine agent ideas from your own ideas because otherwise you get bad cito-genesis problems. https://xkcd.com/978/
This might work to keep work separate:
https://github.com/eighttrigrams/us-vs-them
I don't understand. Are you saying that AI should write notes but then they should be excluded from the AI's context?
Two different knowledge bases. One to store AI's "learned" context, the other for you to manually edit.
While I use Claude a lot for my Omarchy plugins and Linux optimization/failure detection, I don’t use it for writing and note-taking, especially for coming up with unique ideas and driving them home by writing them through to the end.
It's so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI.
It's also hard to finish an idea that is mine.