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I Deleted My Second Brain
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)
·joanwestenberg.com·
I Deleted My Second Brain
offscript
offscript
·offscript.cc·
offscript
Fact vs. freakout on the SCOTUS universal injunctions ruling.
Fact vs. freakout on the SCOTUS universal injunctions ruling.
Trump is trying something blatantly unconstitutional that I’m confident the Supreme Court will not allow, though it is allowing this administration to use a little court gamesmanship to fight the fights they can win. Basically, the administration is not asking whether they overstepped the line but whether the courts are using the right tools to pull them back. I understand why this is happening, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating (or alarming) that it's working.
The majority found a reasonable answer, which seems to limit universal injunctions without stopping them altogether. In the immediate term, the majority opinion left open the possibility that federal judges can issue universal injunctions when their absence would create what Justice Brett Kavanaugh called “an unworkable or intolerable patchwork” across states (such as, conveniently, with birthright citizenship)
The court further clarified that it still sees other kinds of challenges, like class-action lawsuits, as appropriate ways to trigger universal injunctions in the future. These lawsuits have more procedural hurdles to clear, but they’re still quite common, and until the 21st century were the most common way to trigger the kind of universal injunction we are discussing now.
Kavanaugh said that the Supreme Court could pick up some of the authority it limited to district courts by hearing more direct appeals for universal injunctions itself. Specifically, Kavanaugh said that when the Supreme Court is asked to intervene, it “should not and cannot hide in the tall grass,” but must “grant or deny” relief as a form of nationwide guidance until the issue is resolved
The Supreme Court did not say federal courts can’t issue these injunctions, it said “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” In other words, courts likely don't have this power, which is granted by Congress.
The court has narrowed, but not stripped, the power of U.S. district courts to issue universal injunctions. It has not unleashed presidential lawlessness, and in the future, its decision will benefit a lot of the people who are screaming from the rooftops now about unchecked executive power.
·readtangle.com·
Fact vs. freakout on the SCOTUS universal injunctions ruling.
Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation | Riccardo Mori
Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation | Riccardo Mori
We have been secretly, for the last 18 months, been designing a completely new user interface. And that user interface builds on Apple’s legacy and carries it into the next century. And we call that new user interface Aqua, because it’s liquid. One of the design goals was that when you saw it you wanted to lick it. But it’s important to remember that this part came several minutes after outlining Mac OS X’s underlying architecture. Jobs began talking about Mac OS X by stating its goals, then the architecture used to attain those goals, and then there was a mention of how the new OS looked.
Sure, a lot has changed in the technology landscape over the past twenty years, but the Mac OS X introduction in 2000 is almost disarming in how clearly and precisely focused it is. It is framed in such a way that you understand Jobs is talking about a new powerful tool. Sure, it also looks cool, but it feels as if it’s simply a consequence of a grander scheme. A tool can be powerful in itself, but making it attractive and user-friendly is a crucial extension of its power.
But over the years (and to be fair, this started to happen when Jobs was still CEO), I’ve noticed that, iteration after iteration, the focus of each introduction of a new version of Mac OS X shifted towards more superficial features and the general look of the system. As if users were more interested in stopping and admiring just how gorgeous Mac OS looks, rather than having a versatile, robust and reliable foundation with which to operate their computers and be productive.
What some geeks may be shocked to know is that most regular people don’t really care about these changes in the way an application or operating system looks. What matters to them is continuity and reliability. Again, this isn’t being change-averse. Regular users typically welcome change if it brings something interesting to the table and, most of all, if it improves functionality in meaningful ways. Like saving mouse clicks or making a multi-step workflow more intuitive and streamlined.
But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides when I need something out of the way? Maybe I like to see it all the time) — that’s not progress. It’s change for change’s sake. It’s rearranging the shelves in your supermarket in a way that seems cool and marketable to you but leaves your customers baffled and bewildered.
This yearly cycle forces Apple engineers — and worse, Apple designers — to come up with ‘new stuff’, and this diverts focus from fixing underlying bugs and UI friction that inevitably accumulate over time.
Microsoft may leave entire layers of legacy code in Windows, turning Windows into a mastodontic operating system with a clean surface and decades of baggage underneath. Apple has been cleaning and rearranging the surface for a while now, and has been getting rid of so much baggage that they went to the other extreme. They’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and Mac OS’s user interface has become more brittle after all the changes and inconsistent applications of those Human Interface Guidelines that have informed good UI design in Apple software for so long.
Meanwhile the system hasn’t really gone anywhere. On mobile, iOS started out excitingly, and admittedly still seems to be moving in an evolving trajectory, but on the iPad’s front there has been a lot of wheel reinventing to make the device behave more like a traditional computer, instead of embarking both the device and its operating system in a journey of revolution and redefinition of the tablet experience in order to truly start a ‘Post-PC era’.
An operating system is something that shouldn’t be treated as an ‘app’, or as something people should stop and admire for its æsthetic elegance, or a product whose updates should be marketed as if it’s the next iPhone iteration. An operating system is something that needs a separate, tailored development cycle. Something that needs time so that you can devise an evolution plan about it; so that you can keep working on its robustness by correcting bugs that have been unaddressed for years, and present features that really improve workflows and productivity while building organically on what came before. This way, user-facing UI changes will look reasonable, predictable, intuitive, easily assimilable, and not just arbitrary, cosmetic, and of questionable usefulness.
·morrick.me·
Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation | Riccardo Mori
More stray observations — on Liquid Glass, on Apple’s lack of direction, then zooming out, on technological progress | Riccardo Mori
More stray observations — on Liquid Glass, on Apple’s lack of direction, then zooming out, on technological progress | Riccardo Mori
This Apple has been dismantling Mac OS, as if it’s a foreign tool to them. They’ve bashed its UI around. And they seem to have done that not for the purpose of improving it, but simply for the purpose of changing it; adapting it to their (mostly misguided) idea of unifying the interface of different devices to bring it down to the simplest common denominator.
f we look at Mac OS as a metro railway line, it’s like Apple has stopped extending it and creating new stations. What they’ve been doing for a while now has been routine maintenance, and giving the stations a fresh coat of paint every year. Only basic and cosmetic concerns, yet sometimes mixing things up to show that more work has gone into it, a process that invariably results in inexplicable and arbitrary choices like moving station entrances around, shutting down facilities, making the train timetables less legible, making the passages that lead to emergency exits more convoluted and longer to traverse, and so on — hopefully you know what I mean here.
When you self-impose timelines and cadences that are essentially marketing-driven and do not really reflect technological research and development, then you become prisoner in a prison of your own making. Your goal and your priorities start becoming narrower in scope. You reduce your freedom of movement because you stop thinking in terms of creating the next technological breakthrough or innovative device; you just look at the calendar and you have to come up with something by end of next trimester, while you also have to take care of fixing bugs that are the result of the previous rush job… which keep accumulating on top of the bugs of the rush job that came before, and so forth.
From what I’ve understood by examining the evolution of computer science and computer history, scientists and technologists of past decades seemed to have an approach that could be described as, ‘ideas & concepts first, technology later’. Many figures in the history of computing are rightly considered visionaries because they had visions — sometimes very detailed ones — of what they wanted computers to become, of applications where computers could make a difference, of ways in which a computer could improve a process, or could help solve a real problem.
What I’m seeing today is more like the opposite approach — ‘technology first, ideas & concepts later’: a laser focus on profit-driven technological advancements to hopefully extract some good ideas and use cases from.
Where there are some ideas, or sparks, they seem hopelessly limited in scope or unimaginatively iterative, short-sightedly anchored to the previous incarnation or design. The questions are something like, How can we make this look better, sleeker, more polished?
Steve Jobs once said, There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will. If I may take that image, I’d say that today a lot of tech companies seem more concerned with the skating itself and with continuing to hit the puck in profitable ways.
·morrick.me·
More stray observations — on Liquid Glass, on Apple’s lack of direction, then zooming out, on technological progress | Riccardo Mori
Rose-Gold-Tinted Liquid Glasses
Rose-Gold-Tinted Liquid Glasses
In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for.
I am exhausted from hearing that Steve Jobs has been apparently rolling in his grave at the sole discretion of whoever didn’t have their expectations of Apple met. Instead of remarking that he would be displeased, maybe it’s better to mark his death as a point in time when things would invariably shift.
It is macOS that is the backbone of the company. Despite years of all the wishing and promising that another device will one day capture the market computers have a hold on, my Mac is still the only device that can make something for all those other devices. In that alone, it feels like Mac should be the one leading everything else. Not following behind. Yet, it’s the visual style from iOS and now visionOS that are dictating the visual style of macOS. It does not feel like a breath of fresh air as much as another nail in the coffin.
Liquid Glass and the general implementation of it will not meaningfully change during the beta phase of the “26” release cycle. They’re not going to backtrack. And they’re not going to address long-standing concerns all of a sudden. The general adoption of this may test the patience of an already weary community of developers who feel tired of toiling away on trivial changes such as this. As I said, I don’t think there is any meaningful benefit to it, and designers and developers may themselves feel that as they implement it.
Over the years, it feels harder and harder to relate with the general atmosphere Apple surrounds itself in. It wasn’t always this pristine. Everyone who presented wasn’t always so stylish. Not everyone used to talk like this. What is that, by the way? Why does everyone sound like a voice assistant?
Apple didn’t used to craft a narrative around every decision in order to justify it. I feel like their presentations are burdened by reason and rationale, and their individual WWDC sessions feel increasingly pretentious like each of them are gods coming down to share their wisdom with us plebs.
It’d be nice if they were knocked off their pedestal, because I think they’re better when they’re trying to outdo someone else rather than themselves.
·lmnt.me·
Rose-Gold-Tinted Liquid Glasses
More assorted notes on Liquid Glass
More assorted notes on Liquid Glass
I’m pretty sure that if you were to interview one of the designers at Apple responsible for this icon devolution, they would say something about reducing icons to their essence. To me, this looks more like squeezing all life out of them. Icons in Mac OS X used to be inventive, well crafted, distinctive, with a touch of fun and personality. Mac OS X’s user interface was sober, utilitarian, intuitive, peppered by descriptive icons that made the user experience fun without signalling ‘this is a kid’s toy’.
Not only is this the recipe for blandness, it’s also borderline contradictory. Like, Make a unique dish using a minimal number of simple ingredients. While it’s possible to make a few different dishes using just two or three things, you touch the ceiling of uniqueness and variety pretty damn soon.
The language in the current guidelines for app icons isn’t much different. It also reflects Apple’s current philosophy of ‘keeping it simple’ which, out of context, could be valid design advice — you’re designing icons with small-ish dimensions, not full-page detailed illustrations for a book, so striving for simplicity isn’t a bad thing. And yet — and I might be wrong here — I keep reading between the lines and feel that these guidelines are more concerned with ensuring that developers maintain the same level of blandness and unimaginativeness of Apple’s own redesigned app icons:
·morrick.me·
More assorted notes on Liquid Glass
A political shockwave in New York City.
A political shockwave in New York City.
Of all the words I just wrote to describe Mamdani, the most important one is this: authentic. I have spilled a lot of ink criticizing progressives for their bad ideas, purity politics, intolerance, and groupthink. Mamdani is unabashedly progressive, but he somehow avoids seeming preachy — he is not insufferably condescending, he doesn’t lecture about language use, and he doesn’t practice purity politics. He focused entirely on persuasion — pitching people outside the progressive base that he’s right about kitchen-table issues, and the old Democratic guard is wrong. In short: He’s a great politician.
He’s already abandoned one of his more controversial positions, promising to “work with the police” to reduce their burden by hiring more cops as well as more social workers rather than “defunding the police.”
·readtangle.com·
A political shockwave in New York City.
Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults
Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults

We examine the causal effect of health insurance on mortality using the universe of low-income adults, a dataset of 37 million individuals identified by linking the 2010 Census to administrative tax data. Our methodology leverages state-level variation in the timing and adoption of Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and earlier waivers and adheres to a preregistered analysis plan, a rarely used approach in observational studies in economics. We find that expansions increased Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points and reduced the mortality of the low-income adult population by 2.5 percent, suggesting a 21 percent reduction in the mortality hazard of new enrollees. Mortality reductions accrued not only to older age cohorts, but also to younger adults, who accounted for nearly half of life-years saved due to their longer remaining lifespans and large share of the low-income adult population. These expansions appear to be cost-effective, with direct budgetary costs of $5.4 million per life saved and $179,000 per life-year saved falling well below valuations commonly found in the literature. Our findings suggest that lack of health insurance explains about five to twenty percent of the mortality disparity between high- and low-income Americans. We contribute to a growing body of evidence that health insurance improves health and demonstrate that Medicaid’s life-saving effects extend across a broader swath of the low-income population than previously understood.

·nber.org·
Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults
Family Values
Family Values
Many complex products often present all features at once, including crypto wallets. Everything is right there, all the time, whether you need it or not. We wanted to take a different approach where the fundamentals would be at your fingertips, but everything else would appear as it became most relevant to you.
We decided to focus on fluidity after observing how static transitions can disrupt the user’s sense of flow and orientation. Staticity can also leave a product feeling lifeless, which we didn’t want. A lifeless product feels like a dead product, and a dead product feels uncared for.
Family's dynamic tray system comprises components housed within trays that can effortlessly expand, contract, and adapt in response to a user’s actions. Trays can appear on the fly and function as a condensed version of the app, with a specific set of constraints and capabilities.
The tray system follows certain rules to function in a way that feels natural. Trays are initiated by the user by tapping buttons, icons, or opening push notifications. They can manifest either as standalone entities on top of any app content, or emerge from within other components like buttons.
To prevent any confusion during transitions, each subsequent tray is designed to vary in height. This makes the progression or change unmistakably clear. This constraint occasionally requires us to rewrite content or tweak the design of a tray slightly to make a transition apparent.
Every tray is equipped with a title that succinctly captures its function or contents, alongside an icon. This icon serves a dual purpose: it allows users to dismiss the tray if it's the initial one shown, or navigate back through a sequence of trays that have been presented one-by-one.
Each tray displayed is typically dedicated to a singular piece of content — like educational text explaining a feature — or a primary action, such as completing a checklist before a transaction.
When deciding whether to implement a tray or full screen flow, we decided to utilise trays for transient actions that don't need to be permanently on display within the app. This can be especially helpful for confirmation steps and warnings, which appear in the right place at the right time.
Trays can also function as the starting point for more elaborate flows that ultimately transition to a full screen format.
One advantage of leveraging trays over full screen flows is the preservation of context. Unlike full screen transitions that can displace users from where they just were, trays overlay content directly onto the current interface.
The compact nature of trays signals to users that each task is approachable. It encourages engagement without the intimidation of a full screen commitment.
Users are guided through actions with the reassurance that they're not veering off course, but rather diving deeper into their current context. This simplifies the user's journey and reinforces the fluidity and coherence of the overall experience.
Imagine seeing parts of a room through an open doorway. From a few metres away, you’re able to catch a glimpse of what’s inside. As you approach and enter, the space and its contents are gradually revealed. Each action by the user makes the interface unfold and evolve, much like walking through a series of interconnected rooms. As a user, I get to see where I’m going as I go there. It’s this dynamic that allows Family to remain simple and keep complexity out of sight and out of mind until required.
Our second principle builds upon similar themes to our dynamic tray system and pushes the concept even further. It envisions the entire app as a constantly evolving space, where any element can theoretically transform into another, given there's a strong enough rationale for the transition.
Similar to our tray system, we aim for a sense of dimensionality throughout the app. Our goal is to create a coherent journey that users are able to follow easily. Every movement feels like a logical step forward to resemble what we experience in physical spaces.
For example, switching tabs in Family includes a flash of directional motion. If you tap on a tab on the left, the transition moves left, and vice versa for the right. This creates a subtle yet helpful sense of space and movement. We fly instead of teleport.
Let’s take the transformation of a chevron in a multi-step flow; something that would typically be static. In Family, we saw an opportunity when transitioning between screens for a simple but effective animation — from an to a . This tiny detail, coupled with the broader view transition, clarifies the navigation action taken. Details such as this contribute to a sense of fluidity throughout the app and quickly compound over time. 1x 0.5x
A pet peeve of mine is when a component already visible on the screen unnecessarily duplicates itself during an animation. If a component occupies a space and will persist in the next phase of the user's journey, it should remain consistent.
This concept of fluidity goes hand in hand with our dynamic tray system. We’re able to create interactions of trays morphing into full screen views, buttons gliding across trays, buttons morphing into trays and back again, and so on. Every interaction feeds into the next.
These interactions aren't easy to create, but the seamless transitions within Family are more than just technical achievements. They're a manifestation of our respect for the user's sense of space and movement within the app.
In contrast, when my banking app displays a glitchy animation while accessing my checking account, it erodes my trust. It makes me question whether the app truly understands what I'm trying to do or if it can execute my actions accurately. With Family, the consistent, smooth interactions communicate a clear message: "I know exactly what you need — let me get that for you…"
Mastering delight is mastering selective emphasis. It’s about knowing where, when, and how to apply magical moments intentionally across a product.
We don’t intentionally diminish moments of delight in our less common features — we try to insert delight with varying degrees of ‘intensity’.
We leverage the element of surprise in a few places, such as on the QR code screen in Family. The feature is used just enough to make an easter egg placed here enjoyable rather than annoying. In this instance, the magical moment is hidden in plain sight. When the user taps on the QR code, it triggers a gentle ripple effect.
For features encountered less often, the opportunity to inject delight significantly enhances the user experience. For frequently used features, the value of adding further delight gradually diminishes. While our frequently used features are always crafted to be inherently delightful, it's often the delight in the less utilised features that leave a more lasting impression.
No matter the context, the ‘specialness of a moment' generally decreases with repeated encounters. Eating your favourite candy will get progressively less enjoyable with each piece, etc. (unless they are Nerds Gummy Clusters) Let’s take a very commonly used feature as an example of where doing too much would quickly diminish potential delight. As mentioned earlier, sending tokens is a core feature and something many users do daily. It’s therefore important for it to be efficient and enjoyable, without being overbearing. Our approach here was to focus on the little things. In this case, the commas when inputting a number shift visually from place to place as the number is inputted.
When adding tokens or collectibles to the trash, they visually tumble into a skeuomorphic trash can. Completing the action plays a satisfying sound effect.
Activating stealth mode is accompanied by a gentle shimmer effect when active. This effect signals that although your holdings' values are concealed, they continue to update discreetly in the background.
In all of these features, we're not just trying to entertain the user4. These moments are our way of valuing and rewarding the user's time and emotional investment in Family. They transform something mundane into something memorable.
The true value of Family lies in making every day interactions with the wallet a little easier, a little more seamless, and a lot more enjoyable. This philosophy shapes every aspect of the product.
·benji.org·
Family Values
May 2025 | Maggie Appleton
May 2025 | Maggie Appleton
Being on the other side, I now realise there was no calculation or algorithm or pro/con list or financial spreadsheet that could have helped me understand what it would feel like. Nothing that would do justice to the emotional weight of holding your sleeping baby that you made with your own body. Of watching them grin back at you with uncomplicated joy. Of realising you’ll get to watch them grow into a full person; one that is – at least genetically – half you and half the person you love most in the world. Of watching them trip out as they realise they have hands.
I can now say with certainty I am evolutionarily wired for this. Perhaps not everyone is. But everything in me is designed to feel existential delight at each little fart, squeak, grunt, and sneeze that comes out of this child. Delight that is unrivalled by any successful day at work, fully shipped feature, long cathartic run, or Sunday morning buttery croissant – the banal highlights of my past life. When I think back to my pre-baby self, trying to calculate herself into a clear decision, I wish I could let her feel for one minute what it’s like to hold him. And tell her I can’t believe I ever considered depriving myself of this.
·maggieappleton.com·
May 2025 | Maggie Appleton
Giannandrea Downplays The Significance Of AI Chatbots — Benjamin Mayo
Giannandrea Downplays The Significance Of AI Chatbots — Benjamin Mayo
Chatbots present an open-ended textbox and leave everything else up to you. Until we get to the era of mind-reading, user interface elements are going to win out over textboxes. It doesn’t necessarily mean human curation. Maybe AI models will end up building the perfect custom UI for each situation. However, the technology behind chatbots does not feel antecedent. It feels like the future. And a text field lets real people access that futuristic technology (the underlying power of the LLM) right now.
The term chatbot implies ideas of para-social conversations and pleasantries with robots. ChatGPT will certainly confabulate to infinity and simulate human-like interactions, if you approach it that way, but it isn’t really where most users are finding value in the product.
It makes Apple seem way behind on AI — even more behind than they are — when in lieu of a chatbot, they seemingly employ that argument to justify shipping nothing at all. Apple exacerbated this issue further by shipping UI that looked an awful lot like a chatbot app, with the new Type to Siri UI under the Apple Intelligence umbrella, despite not actually shipping anything like that.
·bzamayo.com·
Giannandrea Downplays The Significance Of AI Chatbots — Benjamin Mayo