> Emacs is a powerful tool, but it also demands a lot from its user. Eventually I got tired of dealing with the host of plugins and customizations that I needed to keep my system running the way I wanted. I'm at a point in my life where I would rather spend my spare time on hobbies, hanging out with family and friends, and otherwise not messing around with a patchwork of ELisp code snippets that I've cobbled together from various sources.

On the flip side, my experience with Emacs has been quite different. You don't need a ton of plugins to get the most out of it; I've been using the same configuration of under 200 lines for the past six years without encountering any breaking changes. I rely on Magit, Org-mode, Org-roam, and Org-agenda every single day.

That said, using Emacs does require some commitment to reading the documentation. While I agree that it has some outdated defaults, you only need to make those adjustments once.

The OP linked "You'll Never Think Alone"[1] is a good read.

[1] https://publiccomment.blog/p/you-ll-never-think-alone-170518...

> Obsidian: An Org-Mode replacement?

I doubt it. Obsidian is not open source, and the core is maintained by a small group of people, rather than a community. What happens when the company dies?

That said, I am willing to have more faith in Obsidian, than many other things since they are not [VC funded](https://stephango.com/vcware)

I use gptel in emacs, and keep around some of the chats and such as notes, along with my regular notes, it's all org-mode. I already used to keep around snippets copy-pasted from the web. This is knowledge management in the age of AI (except it works, it's useful and mundane and so I guess it's no longer AI, maybe I have to start using MCP agents or whatever the next partially-there thing is to be AI)

> Task-tracking and note-taking are practical and useful, but ultimately I want to treat my own thoughts as if they have value. I want to be a little more intentional and deliberate in my own thinking, and to have a space to engage in dialog with my own ideas. I want to be able to draw from my own knowledge instead of relying on AI assistants for everything. Maybe such an approach can even be complimentary to using AI tools; with the right plugins Obsidian can serve as an MCP server, which would allow tools like Claude to discover and read items in your vault. Perhaps this could offer the best of both worlds. But the key thing is that the AI is the assistant, and my thoughts and ideas remain my own.

Maybe I'm missing the author's point, as it's early here, but I don't see how your own thoughts can possibly lack value because of AI. LLMs can only summarize the documents it was trained on, so it has no way to tell you what you're thinking (like why something is wrong). The value of AI is using RAG or semantic search to make your notes more useful to you. What the author's suggesting is outside the capabilities of current LLMs. By design, AI can only be used as an assistant.

Denote with a gptel-make-tool that's able to pull relevant notes and bring it automatically into context is fantastic.

I am also worried a bit about knowledge nowadays.

With LLM-based AI, should one also store individual chats in personal knowledge system? Yeah, I believe that some my chats are quite full of relevant info, that can be used in the future.

Also what is the right general approach here - should I ask the same question several times (every time I need information) or should I just look up previous answer in my history? To be fair I dont store google results, I just search it again, but with chat the path to right answer is often more complex than spitting few words in google search input box.

I looked into Obsidian a few years ago but decided against it due to the lack of encryption and self-hosting options. Are there now any workarounds or solutions available that provide encryption and self-hosting capabilities?

AI isn’t quite good enough for organizing your notes yet. However, the biggest issue with our notes is that we make them for us, not another person, so the context is lacking for search.

The author doesn't mention what I consider the true value of writing and organizing your notes yourself: that work is the work that drives learning and understanding.

I experimented with feeding my notes into an LLM model for RAG and was underwhelmed. The resulting output was repetitive, stilted, dry, and uninspiring. I wanted it to see if it find relationships between my ideas that I had not found on my own, but was disappointed . It did not provide me any new insights into my thinking. The style of what it did write was so foreign to my own style I found myself needing to read and re-interpret what it wrote back into my own ways of thinking that it was more busywork than help.