> The notetaking people—and I say this with all the love in the world—are never, like, a researcher at the cutting edge of their field, building this vast cathedral of knowledge, note-by-note, so they can derive new insights. Never a historian who has to read tens of millions of words across thousands of sources to synthesize the life of some historical person. It’s never someone doing something hard. It’s always some blogger. Their “digital garden” is about how to keep a digital garden. It’s very solipsistic: there’s no output, no deliverables. The deliverable is you take a screenshot of your Obsidian graph and tweet about it to show off how much it looks like an incomprehensible ball of twine.
> Sometimes, tools don’t move the needle because there’s no needle to move.
It reminds me of something my old CS mentor, now elderly, had said about LLMs a few months ago: "it's a force multiplier, but there has to be some force to multiply."
This was a good read but this felt like a personal attack :)
kspetkov79•3d ago