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Intellectual Junkyards

forester-notes.org

69 pointsysangkok19 comments

My notes are never long-form, and I envy people whose notes look publication-ready. I think in lists and mnemonics.

My work involves so much context-switching that I ended up building a weird system just to keep continuity. It’s basically an outliner inspired by MaxThink for DOS. At its core, it’s text plus structure: a tree you can revisit non-sequentially, with time anchors when they matter. It helps me survive interruptions and gaps without losing decisions, context, or long-running threads, and it helps me correlate my digital notes with my paper notebooks.

To support the “thinking” part, it also has some goodies for shuffling, sorting, splitting, and joining lists in place to help with ideation. I’m working on the fourth incarnation now.

I recorded a demo a few months ago to share with a friend. It’s not my best recording because I was recovering from hand surgery so typing was weird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9HX3G69Xdo

I may open-source it once I’ve worked the bugs out.

I think self-cataloging is fundamentally masturbatory. On its face, there's nothing wrong with keeping notes or searchable records. But letting the record become the goal - organizing, re-organizing, polishing, theorizing - feels wrong in a way I can't articulate.

Maybe if you organized your notes you could articulate your thoughts better!

jk, I agree. I use logseq synced across devices, but I barely know any of the shortcuts and never made any kind of brilliant web of personal knowledge. My notes are always available and are searchable, which is enough for those rare occasions when I need to find something obscure and for those common occasions when I want a tried and true cocktail recipe. Maybe I'll hyper-organize it one day and find a billion dollar idea lurking under the surface...but probably not.

IME there's two main reasons to keep notes: (1) to save time in the future or (2) to force myself to think about something.

(2) often happens after I read fiction, usually to figure out why I liked / disliked the story. These notes are mostly disposable but occasionally useful when the book comes up in conversation years later.

On the other hand, (1) is more like notes on how-tos (recipes, software setup), written with the intention of needing it again. But this is pretty infrequent, maybe a quick skim every year or two. So even these don't need to be super thorough.

> feels wrong in a way I can't articulate.

Anyways, all that to say I think the "wtf-am-i-doing-with-my-life" feeling comes from the realization that I'm wasting hours on a document that'll save future me maybe 5 minutes at best.

...Which is how I feel about NixOS after spending most of this week tinkering / tracking down documentation. Might be worth it if I had a fleet of machines to maintain but probably not worth it for my laptop + server, even if I did yearly reinstalls.

Self-cataloging can be become a method of procrastination. But that doesn't mean that there is no value to be found in methods like Zettelkasten. The activity of looking through your own Zettelkasten has the potential of creating associations and sparking ideas. That can be very valuable and requires some care of your notes. But trying to find the perfect taxonomy for your own notes is foolish mistake. The technical limitations of the original Zettelkasten, makes refactoring the notes to the current approximation of the perfect taxonomy such a huge task, that it is usually avoided.

A nice example of a limitation that supports creativity.

This goes over my head a bit, but I suppose they are discussing the concept of something like a personal wiki; if so, https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html is my favourite.

I'm also not sure if I fully get what the author is going on about, but at least part of it seems to be "don't over-taxonomize and over-architect your note-taking and knowledge management systems, locking yourself into an inflexible format/schema too early just kills it in the long run."

If I'm correct that that's part of the thrust of the article (and I may not be), then I definitely agree with the author. The first time I tried to use Obsidian I burned out because I went all-in on the bi-di linking, tagging, knowledge graph, etc., and it quickly killed my motivation. Now I just dump text in and rely on search to find what I need, only adding links in retrospect once they are needed, and now I actually use it and get value from it.

I had this same issue early on when trying to adopt Obsidian. I was overwhelmed by all the "systems" and I was worried I was creating a headache for myself later on. Now I just focus on dumping text in, using search, and linking only as needed. Basically don't overdo it.

>Now I just dump text in and rely on search to find what I need

This is basically what I ended up with as well. They key for me to make it work easier than anything else, is before I leave the note, pausing a moment to ask myself “if I was trying find this among my other notes, what keywords/tags would I try to search for”, and add those to a comment and/or the filename to make it more unique.

Yes, and PKMs in general. Like labeling your emails by topic in Gmail. The problem is that the 'toil' keeps piling up, while the value gained is increasingly hard to see.

I have a little rant about it - "‘Tools for thought’ winds up being a lie: there’s tools, but not much additional thought." https://gwern.net/blog/2024/tools-for-thought-failure https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoqFpaorNHsWxRzvz/what-comes...

(My answer, of course, is that almost all of this scutwork is well within the capabilities of a frontier LLM today. We just need to apply them.)

Have you seen any good open source projects using llms to do the scutwork for this kind of PKMs?

No, but I haven't been following the space. (I suspect that with Claude Code-level coding agents, you should be able to do something amazing that thoroughly obsoletes Obsidian/Roam/org-mode, but I don't actually know of anything.)

I've been focused on creative writing, with poetry as my test case, to see what the bottlenecks are to truly amplifying myself through LLMs (as opposed to helping my boss automate away my job or spamming the Internet more efficiently).

I find that frontier LLMs are now there and now I can prompt for genuinely good poetry with LLMs. See https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/llm-poetry-and... / https://gwern.net/fiction/lab-animals and https://gwern.net/blog/2025/better-llm-writing

So maybe this year I can turn some attention back to PKMs and Quantified Self stuff...

I haven't tried using agents to make a full editor, but Claude Code and Gemini CLI are actually quite good at writing Obsidian plugins, or modifying existing ones. You can start with an existing one that's 90% of what you want (which tends to be the case with note-taking/PKM systems: people are so idiosyncratic that solutions built by others almost work, but not quite) and tweak it to be exactly right for you.

My own Obsidian setup has improved quite a bit in the last couple months because I can just ask Claude to change one or two things about plugins I got from the store.

This is the way. If you symlink the .claude directory (so Obsidian can see the files) then you can also super easily add and manage claude skills.

I've spent 20 years living in the terminal, but with claude code I'm more and more drafting markdown specs, organizing context, building custom views / plugins / etc. Obsidian is a great substrate for developing personal software.

Writing or tweaking plugins is great, but it's not a paradigm shift (and risks a lot more toil because now you have to be your own PM or deal with patches/merges, on top of being a reference librarian and copyeditor etc). I feel like if you have a quasi-superintelligence in a box which can run your PKM for you, and you were designing from the ground up with this in mind, that Claude Code is only going to et much better & cheaper, you would not be settling for 'write or modify an Obsidian plugin'. You would get something much different. But 'write a plugin' is basically at 'horseless carriage' level for me.

What I have in mind is something far more radical. There's an idea I am calling 'log-only writing' where you stop editing or rearranging your notes at all, and you switch to pure note taking and stream of conscious braindumping, and you simply have the LLM 'compile' your entire history down into whatever specific artifact you need on demand - whether that's a web of flashcards or a blog post or a long essay or whatever. See https://gwern.net/blog/2024/rss + https://gwern.net/nenex , combined with the LLM reasoning and brainstorming 'offline' using the prompts illustrated by my poems.

That's fair, I guess when I hear "radical overhaul" when discussing PKMs I immediately start worrying about the overload and burnout that doomed my first attempts at Obsidian (see my sibling comment), whereas right now I have a system that works very well for me, especially now that I can just ask Claude to scan the whole directory if I want to ask it questions. But if you do come up with some new blue-sky vision for PKMs, I'd love to at least take a look.

The forester-notes.org page is not a traditional blog or essay. It’s a hypertext note node.

Nice use of XML/XSL in the browser.

You know, that thing that they are trying to kill.

As someone who thought they used obsidian somewhat well, I feel like a caveman/casual after reading that.

I mean that as praise, it reeled me in as both a puzzle (what am I even reading right now) and a conclusion (the bleeding edge of obsidianmd space is like XKCD straws).

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