Show HN: Odin – the integration of LLMs with Obsidian note taking

I think so, yeah. Kepano (CEO of Obsidian, the company) has stated that they're waiting for the technology to progress to where models can be run locally.

Anything goes with third party plugins of course

EDIT: Jumping to timestamp 50:08 is a good summarisation of their thoughts from the man himself: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TkNTuFF2t-c

Personally, I'm interested in this sort of functionality because I would like my notes to be densely cross-referenced whenever possible, automatically and intelligently.

And obsidian has lots of other great features, so I think it is an attractive option even for people who don’t really care about the ‘local’ angle.

I'm curious if you had any preference or reason why you went with foam.

And why has a project that claims to offer new views, no example of those views? No screenshots, video, whatever to explain what it really sells.

I use my PKM to connect the ideas I've read about over time. When I come across a topic again, I can quickly review what I've learned about it in the past, and how it connects, sometimes in obscure ways, to other things that have crossed my radar.

This helps me come up with a wider variety of ideas for how to solve problems in front of me, or new connections to draw on or people to contact for feedback.

I don't care about any one topic enough to devote the necessary time to writing a book about it, but that doesn't mean the system as a whole doesn't provide me a whole lot of value.

Maybe this is just a misunderstanding between the specialist mind and generalist minds. The variety of things I can speak about and connect together intelligently is the value I bring to a company or a conversation, not the extraordinary depth I can go to on any one individual topic. I suspect there are a lot more generalists like me using PKM software like Obsidian than there are specialists.

My Obsidian vault is full of things like lists of hiking trails I want to check out, information on workshop dust collection, and notes on car shopping. Why would you expect that I’m trying to write a book about it?

Your definition of what "actually matters" seems to be different than mine.

For me, Obsidian is a place to dump thoughts, keep ideas for later, and a scratchpad. It lets me clear my mind of all of the random things that pop up so I can focus more on the tasks at hand. It might sound silly but writing out all the things I’ve been thinking about does wonders for freeing up mental bandwidth, which in my experience is critical for being productive — it’s a lot harder to maintain focus when you’ve got a bunch of different thoughts vying for processing power.

I might not revisit all of my notes, but that’s fine. They’re there when/if I decide to turn them into projects.

I don’t go too far on the organizational or bells and whistles aspects though, the extent of that is folders and the odd tag here and there, because neither really matters much so long as I can find my writings easily.

At some point I switched to treating notes as a pipeline - that is, if theres nothing coming out the other end (e.g. a document, a checklist I actually follow, an email, a reminder, a blog post, a jira ticket, etc.) then the activity is pointless.

Doing this meant it actually does bring value now.

LLMs seem like a singularly pointless addition in that respect, though.

I’ve also published (and maintain) several websites using special tags and Hugo tools that compile to HTML markup complete with the requisite hyperlinks and attachments.

I don’t like Obsidian much, personally. I love to customize my tools just enough to get them out of the way.

Notes on the system: https://csh.rit.edu/~rg/productivity/20221109203834/

Example site: https://csh.rit.edu/~rg/alphasmart-3000/

I would do the opposite -- talk to people who clearly have a need for corralling large amounts of information (authors, phd students), and take a a look at what tools they used. It might not be Obsidian or LogSeq specifically, but I'm sure they have some very specific system that works for them... even if its a just a bunch of google docs.

Those are two very different things.

One thing that was interesting to me was that he kept a list of amusing anecdotes. The guy was trying to move up in life, so he was doing his best to network with the wealthy elite of his town. He had a personal database of jokes and amusing stories that he could bring up, I guess hoping to gain favor or friendship with the right people.

I've thought about this kind of activity a lot. Not all writing is meant to be for distribution. This guy wasn't writing to compile a tell-all exposé of his tiny provincial town. He was writing entirely for his own selfish benefit.

As curious as it may sound, I can totally understand wanting to hook up an AI to this kind of personal database. Something to make my anecdotes a bit more funny. Or to connect rumors in a way to give me the best gossip.

It reminds me of how VIP type people often have some intern or research assistant who feeds them personal details of the people they are going to meet, so the VIP can warmly ask "How is your daughter Sally?" when shaking hands with someone who is actually a stranger to them.

Not all knowledge is a product. If you see knowledge as a service then these kind of tools make a bit more sense.

Is external visibility of some output or work product the sole marker of true utility of these tools if one is to avoid the judgement of intellectual procrastination? I’d rather think that’s not the case.

I use Obsidian with a partner to organize an archive that’s used to publish a website, a substack and a podcast. I am familiar with the YouTube obsidian note taking subculture and it’s pretty mega, but online-everything is a poor measure of the real thing in life. Just as Twitter isn’t reality, etc etc….

That's a very limited choice of options. Or poor phrasing.

> I received two responses of people who actually produced something.

So the others ignored it?

> The vast majority, it seems, are professional note-taking junkies.

I'm not sure if this is poorly phrased or an insult. And what does professional mean? Most of what I manage with Obsidian are private data, nothing work-related.

> People in the Obsidian forum spend their lives fooling around with metadata conventions and "tagging" and "wikilinks"

That's the point of a forum. Talking. Fooling around. How many will you see there talking about the boring stuff? How they use Obsidian for managing contacts, their mealplans, the other boring notes. Probably not many. You will also see the small number of shining characters and fancy solutions, but not much about casual thing people also do.

I feel like you're giving a very specific use case for production to a tool that isn't really geared for that thing. If I was going to write a book, and I may one day, I don't know whether Obsidian is the tool I'd use or if I'd be better off using tools that are designed for it?

I'm not sure but it sounds like you're scoffing at that. To me it sounds like the solution to people spending too much time tagging and linking their notes.

And also determining that if you can’t see value in “note taking”, there is none.

The piece your analysis grossly overlooks is the ability to handle many more things at once using a pkm as second brain.

It’s unfortunate you may not have enough experience with GTD and what it has evolved into.

If you approached this post again with an open mind and heart and said you expected a lot of authors and instead people seem to manage knowledge .. why, and how are people using it for value.. it might be a conversation.

It is entirely possible to publish knowledge products at any time.

In the working world they might include meeting agendas, notes, okr reports, emails and updates to projects.

All can be both specific and esoteric knowledge but many orders of magnitude better organized than their peers.

Frankly, I could do with far fewer "published knowledge products" doing the rounds, and I'm glad that most users are using it as intended, not to get some absurd "published writer" badge to flash to the easily impressed.

My humble 2 cents.

I know the sample size is small but I got similar response with Notion 2 years ago. I use Apple Notes personal note taking and plain markdown with an SSG for publishing blog posts and work. No books yet but I have published over 150+ posts in the past 3 years:

markdown files: https://github.com/rednafi/rednafi.com/tree/main/content published work: https://rednafi.com

Also, another tool written in JavaScript on my machine, I'll pass!

IMHO people taking notes for personal reasons (or building personal knowledge bases just as external memory for their personal expertise) far outnumber people who do that with the intent to compile those notes in some knowledge product for others.

Sure, some people take notes for a book or build a knowledge base that they'll summarize for others in a course or essay(s). But people with such intent are few, so these aren't the central applications of such tools, the stereotypical knowledge workers - like lawyers, doctors, engineers - all mostly apply their knowledge (including digital notes) not to produce or publish something but rather to solve a problem or provide an informed answer, and equating all this "non-producing" knowledge work to intellectual procrastination is quite insulting.

Among other things, I use them for developing design documents, both for my own use and for wider distribution. Often I’ll do the initial work in one and then convert to a pdf, word or google doc, or wiki pages for consumption by others.

I also use them just to track work that I’ve done, which helps a lot with context switching between projects.

I used to just use mostly plain text files to do this, but these tools provide a lot of additional features that make it easier to create and manage useful notes.