johansan/notebook-navigator: Replace the default file explorer in Obsidian with a clean two-pane interface featuring folder tree, tag browsing, file previews, keyboard navigation, drag-and-drop, pinned notes, and customizable display options.
BYOM (Bring Your Own Memory) - by David Hoang
Apple introduced Focus modes in iOS 15 as an evolution of Do Not Disturb, letting users filter notifications and even customize Home Screens by context (Work, Personal, Sleep). In iOS 16, Focus became smarter with Lock Screen pairings and filters across apps like Mail, Calendar, and Safari. iOS 17 refined this with more granular notification controls. Taken together, Focus has evolved from muting distractions to a full context-aware filtering system, a model that shows how AI memory could also be partitioned and personalized by mode rather than being “on” or “off.”
That same framing will be essential for AI memory. Not “on” or “off,” but a filter: what memory is relevant in this context? That same framing will be essential for AI memory. Not “on” or “off,” but a filter: what memory is relevant in this context?
One way to achieve this is through a memory interpreter—a layer that sits between your raw personal history and the work context you’re stepping into. Imagine you’ve been doing deep personal research on a topic—reading, journaling, exploring ideas in your own voice. When you shift into a professional setting, the interpreter could filter that knowledge, stripping away casual notes, personal anecdotes, or tone, while surfacing only the relevant facts and references in a format appropriate for work.
In practice, it would act like a translator, allowing the richness of your personal exploration to inform your professional contributions without oversharing or leaking unintended details. It’s not about fusing personal and work memory, but about controlled permeability
I Deleted My Second Brain
For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
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. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.
The modern PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) movement traces its roots through para-academic obsessions with systems theory, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, and the Silicon Valley mythology of productivity as life. 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 library Borges might envy.
n “The Library of Babel,” he imagines an infinite library containing every possible book. Among its volumes are both perfect truth and perfect gibberish. The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. The map swallows the territory.
The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.
Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder.
Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders.
Merlin Donald, in his theory of cognitive evolution, argues that human intelligence emerged not from static memory storage but from external symbolic representation: tools like language, gesture, and writing that allowed us to rehearse, share, and restructure thought. Culture became a collective memory system - not to archive knowledge, but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked.
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.
I basically agree with all of this but don't think any of this changes that the systems are what you make of them—the idea behind evergreen note taking and "tending to your notes" involves [effortful engagement](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Understanding_requires_effortful_engagement)
Niche Internet#tools/knowledge-tools#knowledge-work#companies/obsidian#opinion#blog#personal systems#digital gardens#knowledge#mental health#lifestyleOn PRDs
TruckSmarter operates without traditional product managers by empowering operators and builders to write Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) themselves, which requires a disciplined approach to documenting functional requirements that align stakeholders, guide development teams, and coordinate organizational changes.
Paul Graham on Good Writing
I think if you pointed to a random paragraph in anything written by anyone and told them to make it slightly shorter (or longer), they'd probably be able to come up with something better.
The best analogy for this phenomenon is when you shake a bin full of different objects. The shakes are arbitrary motions. Or more precisely, they're not calculated to make any two specific objects fit more closely together. And yet repeated shaking inevitably makes the objects discover brilliantly clever ways of packing themselves. Gravity won't let them become less tightly packed, so any change has to be a change for the better.
If you have to rewrite an awkward passage, you'll never do it in a way that makes it less true. You couldn't bear it, any more than gravity could bear things floating upward. So any change in the ideas has to be a change for the better.
Writing that sounds good is more likely to be right for the same reason that a well-shaken bin is more likely to be tightly packed. But there's something else going on as well. Sounding good isn't just a random external force that leaves the ideas in an essay better off. It actually helps you to get them right.
the easier the essay is to read, the easier it is to notice if something catches
the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications
when an essay sounds good, it's not merely because it has a pleasing rhythm, but because it has its natural one. Which means you can use getting the rhythm right as a heuristic for getting the ideas right. And not just in principle: good writers do both simultaneously as a matter of course. Often I don't even distinguish between the two problems. I just think Ugh, this doesn't sound right; what do I mean to say here?
The sound of writing turns out to be more like the shape of a plane than the color of a car. If it looks good, as Kelly Johnson used to say, it will fly well.
It's only when you're writing to develop ideas that there's such a close connection between the two senses of doing it well
The way to write something beautiful and false is to begin by making yourself almost believe it. So just like someone writing something beautiful and true, you're presenting a perfectly-formed train of thought. The difference is the point where it attaches to the world. You're saying something that would be true if certain false premises were.
So it's not quite right to say that better sounding writing is more likely to be true. Better sounding writing is more likely to be internally consistent. If the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth converge.
ideas are tree-shaped and essays are linear. You inevitably run into difficulties when you try to cram the former into the latter. Frankly it's suprising how much you can get away with. But even so you sometimes have to resort to an endnote.
Obviously if you shake the bin hard enough the objects in it can become less tightly packed. And similarly, if you imposed some huge external constraint on your writing, like using alternating one and two syllable words, the ideas would start to suffer
There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things. It might seem as if these two kinds of good would be unrelated, like the speed of a car and the color it's painted. And yet I don't think they are. I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.
So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true. Let's examine it. How can this possibly be true?
You can't simultaneously optimize two unrelated things; when you push one far enough, you always end up sacrificing the other. And yet no matter how hard I push, I never find myself having to choose between the sentence that sounds best and the one that expresses an idea best. If I did, it would be frivolous to care how sentences sound. But in practice it feels the opposite of frivolous. Fixing sentences that sound bad seems to help get the ideas right.
LN 040: The venerable hyperlink
We take the hyperlink for granted now, but this changed the form of humanity’s recorded information and texts from long, linear sequences to a graph, through which readers can take any path they choose.
Little glimpses in modern OSs are almost always welcome surprises: the contact card you can open from a messages chat; the meeting link in a calendar event; or even simply linking to a webpage from an email, or a document hosted online. Most recently, Apple added reminders to the calendar: if you set a date or time on a reminder in the Reminders app, you’ll also see it in your calendar on the correct date or at the correct time, where you can mark it as complete without switching apps. When things are nicely integrated across apps, it often feels like magic — but only because we’ve structured operating systems in such a way that each individual integration across apps must be custom-built for each case. For an OS that supports deep linking of all its things, such integrations would be an inherent aspect of its design.
Elicit: The AI Research Assistant
Future-proofing Your Knowledge in the Age of Information Overload
Reason for using Obsidian: > In the age of information overload and increasing censorship, it is crucial to future-proof your knowledge by creating a personal memex or knowledge management system. A memex, as envisioned by Vannevar Bush, is a device that stores and retrieves vast amounts of information, supplementing human memory. By building a digital memex, you can own your data, access it offline, quickly capture information, sync across devices, and easily search and interconnect knowledge. This system enhances working memory, reduces cognitive overload, and allows you to monetize what you know in the knowledge economy. Obsidian, an open-source application, is an ideal tool for creating a personal knowledge management system due to its flexibility, bi-directional linking, and integrations with other productivity apps.
A memex is a hypothetical device described by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 article “As We May Think”. It stands for "memory extension" and is considered a precursor to the concept of hypertext and the World Wide Web. The memex was envisioned as a mechanical device that could store and retrieve vast amounts of information by interconnecting documents, books, communications, records, annotations, and personal notes. It aimed to supplement human memory and facilitate information organization and retrieval.
All information should be easily searchable and interconnected to optimize resurfacing of knowledge with “exceeding speed and flexibility”.
Because of the information overload we experience every day in the digital world, we tend to forget where to find information we encountered even within the same day of seeing it. This is a problem everyone experiences to varying degrees.
Building a PKM system allows you to outsource valuable information into a centralized location, reducing cognitive overload.
Generating the notes in Markdown makes them future-proof. Even if Obsidian dies and for some reason you can no longer download the application, you’ll still be able to read, write and edit your notes with literally any computer.
Personal toolkit: A framework for personal knowledge management tools
LinkedIn is not a social or professional network, it's a learning network
Maybe one frame is through taking control of your own personal development and learning: after all “learning is the one thing your employer can’t take away from you”
Over the years we’ve seen the rise of bro-etry and cringe “thought leadership” and crying CEOs. When I scroll my feed I have to sidestep the clearly threadboi and #personalbrand engagement-farming posts and try and focus on the real content.
Networking is useful, but distasteful to many. Instead, participating in self-directed learning communities is networking
“Don’t become a marketing manager, become someone who knows how to run user research”