This is why I never really understood obsidian, it's just paying for someone else to do what you should already have done?
Even the author's statement is kind of bizarre to me. Obsidian pretty much gets out of your way and you can start writing immediately. The WYSIWYG nature means you don't even really need to be thinking about markdown syntax that much. Obsidian is a tool for people who actually like to write.
I don't know what universe the author is living in, has anyone else realized "everyone around them stopped using Chrome"?
Maybe it's the same universe in which capital letters were never invented.
This is a very technical/programmer sample, so leading indicator at best, but it seems like "best on platform" is making at least a minor comeback.
Five years ago that same kind of a sample was all Chrome and the Firefox weirdo. Now I'm the Firefox weirdo.
Even people who are above it all are in itself identifying with that mentality in itself. It’s inescapable. You are part of some tribe whether you care to admit it or not. And your usage of tools goes beyond just utility and speaks to an identity.
I agree though that tools can cause some affinity. If I see people using neovim, I would be curious what plugins they use.
the nerd snipping cat nip of micro optimizations of a dev setup is too great.
Slightly different, but the most wizardly dev I know runs arch on 10 year old thinkpad. Uses the little nub mouse and everything.
He says stuff like “you can save a ton of memory if you don’t need file indexing”
I hope computing gets to the point where taste matters. It still feels like the lowest common denominator rules, that hyper-massified same-tool-for-everyone computing is where we have been latched up for most of a decade now. That it takes scale to survive and only by making the most universal of products do we get to scale.
I really want to believe that taste & discernment & distinction may rise again. That there is some kind of demand-side desire, some reward, for having taste, for modelling good hip interesting.
It feels faded, worn but I still think it's mostly that we have failed to rebuild cool, lost our own cool, that has made Tim O'Reilly's "follow the alpha geeks" mantra lose its luster. Folks seem empowered in little narrow verticals & to be doing well with for example mentioned here Notion or Obsidian, but it's software lifecycle within a very small segment. It doesn't affect the rest of most of those user's computing life. That's just not sufficiently cool, not broadscale enough to fully be a believable follows le lifestyle.
I do observe their workflow and tools as some sort of vibe check every few years, don't agree on everything; they don't seem to favor solutions that seek to remain stable over time, but also aren't full tinkerer experimental. They also avoid the design-experimental part, kind of like the weird yet productive nadir, like tools that resemble the AmigaOS times.
The Obsidian comparison was a cheap shot, compare to Vim? Come on. I wonder where does this person stand on other stuff like Vivaldi or Brave. Or notetaking apps like Affine or Anytype. Or Reflect, Recall, Rewind. Or Screenpipe. Whatever.
It wasn't just frustrating, it was terribly repetitive. It's not ~~just~~ the content of the post, it's the way that it's written. And the AI authorship disclaimer? Missing. (Not that that would've made the contents much better, but it would've made it a bit more palatable and feel less sneaky.)
The sentence structures I mentioned in my earlier comment are what are often associated with AI. Once you start noticing them, you'll find them a lot on online content. Lmk if you want to learn more, there's a YouTube video on identifying AI comments. I had independent found many of them myself, which would be very unlikely if these were genuinely not ai language traits.
It's a button, conveniently placed on any standard keyboard, that temporarily capitalizes the letters you type whilst holding it down.
I think it's gonna change the world. Would you be interested in an early release preview?
GMoromisato•7mo ago
I'm old enough to remember the Mac vs. PC cultural divide, with the ubiquitous ads of the hip/cool "I'm a Mac" dude teasing the corporate "I'm a PC" guy.
And before that there was the stereotype of the young, fast-and-loose, self-taught PC programmer battling against the stodgy mainframe empire of IBM.
With a little bit of searching I found plenty of examples of cultural divides centered on tools:
1920s-1950s: Stanley vs. Craftsman
1900s-1940s: Yankee vs. Generic
1910s-1930s: Atlas vs. Independent
1800s-1900s: American vs. British Toolmaking
My point--if there is one--is that this is not a new phenomenon that emerged from notetaking software. This is likely a deep feature of human nature.
benreesman•7mo ago
A critical feature of the (trivially superior) hacker culture from back then was that we did pass such judgements. Not always with complete consensus (vi/emacs), but pretty often (Windows sucks).
GMoromisato•7mo ago
The ability to organize into groups with a common purpose is, I think, the key evolutionary leap that allowed us to outcompete every other species on Earth. And having shared idols and taboos, whether religious or software-based, is the primary instinct for keeping the group together.
When someone says that Obsidian is better than Notion, they are merely following a million-year-old instinct embedded deep in our hardware.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
somenameforme•7mo ago
But it makes perfect sense if we go the other way, and consider that society was not the product of people coming together but people being assimilated. Chimps, for instance, have reasonable enough intelligence to come together into fairly decent sized groups for mutual benefit. But these group sizes peak out at around 150 chimps which is definitely, also in humans, around the peak size before you start getting into major social issues of scale.
And the interesting thing is that those chimps will then go to war against other chimp groups, and take the spoils - including the other group's women. Yet they lack that additional higher level thought to think 'Hey we've completely conquered and dominated these guys who were also doing okay on their own. What if we now forced them to work for us?' And not only work for us, but now you've got a way bigger pack ready to go conquer, and assimilate, other packs even more reliably.
The missing link, to me, is a chimp Genghis Khan.