Love Letter to Obsidian | Hacker News Reader

Love Letter to Obsidian

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Not a dig at Obsidian or Karpathy here, but I have a controversial opinion about productivity apps (particularly pickiness over note taking apps/systems).

The worst, least effective guys I've ever worked for were the loudest "productivity method / app / system" hardos I've worked with/for in 20 years. I don't know which direction the causation goes 1) guys who know they are ineffective search out an app that will magically solve it or 2) obsession with method/app causes some amount of the ineffectiveness?

Obsidian had the misfortune of coming highly recommended by most of these guys. I assume there are far more effective people quietly using the app who represent 90% of the user base. All this is to say, don't go too far down the rabbit hole with any of this stuff.

I felt this one.

The #productivity and #obsidian channels on company work slacks have always been the same people who other people joke (behind their back of course) about as nobody understands how the hell they have so much free time to talk about productivity all day. It’s always this group of bunch of vocal, combative, and narcissistic chatters who seem to round the bunch up.

Personally? I just want to get work done and not really talk about getting work done while at work. I’ll save my mindnode tree for deciding how I want to build my backyard shed.

A prior shop had a CTO like this.

That shop is soon to outsource their entire tech org after years of poor delivery.

Not saying there's causation. But not saying there's not..

Conversely, writing a basic intro to the many is something the author seems to do regularly.

In this case, obsidian/logseq/etc can increase working capacity or just be another series of rabbit holes.

Tools don’t make anything happen without use, those who improve their use of tooling as they produce often unlock advantages that elude others.

If the people quietly using it well explained what worked for them, maybe it would provide balance to the noise.

Comments like this don’t tend to constructively move anything forward. And that might work for some as a different form of noise instead of sharing what works for you.

I jumped into Obsidian without looking at all those fancy systems people do and it's been great so far.

I just focus on writing and linking notes and only ever customize and install plugins if there's something I really need but can't do out of the box.

I greatly admire fancy note taking systems, but I just can't seem to stick to them, so I just try to write my silly little notes without thinking too much about organizing them.

Yes, I think any tool that works for an individual is the right tool.

I find the people that get the most obsessed with complex note taking systems are the same that will spend half of sprint meetings arguing about the nuance of hierarchical organization in Jira of initiative/milestone/epic/story/task rather than the actual details of the features/software we are delivering to users.

Could be ADHD traits, to be honest. (Just a suggestion. I know I'm always looking for a silver productivity bullet).

This is a pretty good description from my observation. High overlap with Inbox Zero fans.

I went down the GTD/Zettelkasten rathole some years ago, and discovered Obsidian during that time. I subsequently determined that GTD and Zettelkasten are solutions to problems I don’t have…but I’m still using Obsidian, and for all sorts of things. It isn’t a magic bullet, but it’s become essential to many, many things I do: Study notes I’ll want to return to. Development notes for a current application. Background notes for a work of fiction I’ve been writing. Etc., etc., etc.

The key to it is that (A) the files are mine; (B) I can easily link them together in ways that make sense to me; and (C) they are readable. Obsidian ties it all together and makes working with my notes a breeze; and when Obsidian fades away my files are still there.

Been a programmer since the 80’s. I’ve seen a lot of applications come and go, leaving unreadable files behind. Not going to do that any more.

> Your notes are simple plain-text markdown files stored locally on your computer

That’s true, but with the canvas feature they broke the promise of your notes just being directories of markdown files and attachments. I really, really like Obsidian for its core functionality and I worry that they are going to keep adding features and end up ruining it.

For me, the best news would be them announcing it is feature complete and switch the project into maintenance mode. Bug fixes, performance improvements, and platform updates.

The Canvas feature is a custom file format, but they published the format here: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/canva...

If Obsidian goes under or you want to migrate at least your data isn't lost.

The challenge with Canvas is that there is no standard format for this type of data. As @milch mentioned Obsidian's .canvas format is simple JSON, that is stored locally. Like .md files, they are individual .canvas files in folders on your device. It remains to be seen whether .canvas can stand the test of time, but at least the data is in a format that will make it easy to convert to and from, and is relatively human-readable given the constraints of having to store positional data. There are efforts to grow the adoption .canvas, but like Markdown it will take time for that ecosystem to develop.

Would love to migrate from Evernote to Obsidian. But one part of what I use Evernote for is dumping PDFs in there for later reference (invoices, letters, etc.) and having the OCR do its magic for them to be discoverable again even without me having to tag or name things. Many of them are emailed in from various sources. Anyone doing something like that with Obsidian?

No, it cannot be done and it has become apparent to me that nobody cares.

They expect all these obvious features that could benefit most users to be attained by a user-maintained git repo that you run with root permissions. It's a shit show.

He's articulated something I've been trying to put into words for a long time. It seems like with every app I use, I'm being asked to sign-in, sell my data, collaborate in real time with other users, and be in awe at the cutting edge AI experience.

The word you're looking for is "SaaS". Renting software instead of owning it, storing data on someone else's storage and paying every month for the privilege.

I love reading these sort of posts while I check their work history. Talk about not practicing what you preach.

what do you refer to?

Our comments rhyme I think...

Except I think endisneigh is being sarcastic. https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy; https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrej-karpathy-9a650716/;

I don’t think so. Karpathy is incredibly productive, I’m assuming they’re referring to obsidian being open but Karpathy having worked for OpenAI on closed source AI.

Love Obsidian. Yes, it causes you to tinker a lot, because it’s so flexible, but you can mold it to do most things and you own your data. Really hard to beat that.

Most recent discovery is pdf files can be viewed & sync'ed using obsidian now. Papers that I thought were interesting reads now get added to an obsidian folder from my phone, replacing an ugly workflow involving email.

Other useful trick is a cron job that stashes everything into a fossil repo as an ad hoc backup plus distribution to other machines that aren't running obsidian.

As a researcher, my workflow is Quarto+ R studio + Zotero + Pen and paper (And MS Word for my supervisor). I tried many productivity apps, but there weren't for me. I realize that I spent most of my time in Zotero and R studio. So naturally it clicked. Now I'm trying to optimize the time spent to make the process seamless and faster.

https://prose.sh was inspired by obsidian. It’s not a note taking app, but ensuring the user’s markdown is local first was a big motivating factor.

So many blog platforms have to build export functionality and it felt totally unnecessary especially considering many are all markdown anyway.

Looks fascinating. Great that it's free for personal use. Except that not being able to use it on my phone and desktop without paying $100 per year is way too expensive for personal use. Give me a personal sync for $3 per month for two devices and I'd definitely be tempted.

You can sync using git or any folder sharing service like Dropbox

Oh! It would be nice if they said that!

Will definitely take a look then.

Thank you!

It's probably useful to read this page first, particularly if you're in the Apple ecosystem: https://help.obsidian.md/Getting+started/Sync+your+notes+acr...

Put my archives on Google Drive and then mount the drive on my phone. This keeps everything in-sync between my laptop and phone obsidian instances

> without paying $100 per year

There was a way! https://github.com/acheong08/obi-sync

From what I understand, the author played cat and mouse with them until he gave up. Obsidian repeatedly “patched” the “vulnerabilities” that allowed you to modify the sync server address across 3 different versions.

A non-commercial self hosted sync solution/license would be great for people who can set it up, and probably wouldn't hurt sales for people who don't have the skills or don't want to set it up.

The data is stored as plain text files on your device so there are several free options you can use depending on your combination of operating systems and devices. iCloud, Git, Syncthing, and many community plugins.

I would imagine Obsidian offers better conflict resolution than general-purpose syncs, since they can safely assume certain things (like if you add two lines to different parts of the same file, Obsidian can safely assume you want those changes silently merged, but a general purpose service might report it as a conflict).

No idea in practice, though. Just speculating.

I'm patiently waiting for the planned database tables [1] (or the similar plugins to mature). However, even if this is implemented correctly, it is still going to be on a page, not block level (query/attribute/two-way links...). That is why I will probably stick with outliners.

Or, I may give Siyuan [2] a second chance. I'm actually referring to this now because they just released 3.0 with those local notion-style DB tables. Think Anytype but with an Obsidian feel, and it works on the block level!

[1] https://obsidian.md/roadmap/

[2] https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan

The sheer lack of solutions handling images in any thoughtful way makes it just unusable for anyone who needs to include images in their notes.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

Wait til he discovers org-mode.

Obsidian can be set up as basically a modern day org-mode for folks that are unfamiliar with Emacs. Which is most people.

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