Capture: notion and twitter have been best, obsidian and regular markdown have been worst.
Notion is good because of how they support a calendar view where you can put documents in a day's cell, and then see a list view that's just a stack of those notes. I keep a daily diary or youarehere type doc, where I'll have checklists and notes on small things that don't merit changes to a dedicated page. There's arguably a "retrieval" breakdown in that I don't really go back through these to update them or collate them into bigger pages.
Twitter is good because it's low friction and I can just go off, which is fun, and because they have decent search, so I can quote-tweet a related thing and sort of thread the graph together. If you're talking about BASB you're probably familiar with this corner of twitter. visakanv etc. This method works well if you use it enough to be able to recall your other notes. I think there's something special about the twitter format here too: it discourages whole-page thoughts in favor of sequential pithy bits, which i think are easier to both link and recall.
Execution: I would like a chat frontend (signal/SMS/etc) where I can just talk to my projects, ask the status of things, get suggestions, etc. Push based, rather than pull based, execution.
Active project context: I've dropped todoist-like things since they're limited in what they can express, and notion/markdown can do todolists etc. I tend to have lists in markdown style that live in two places: my daily diary/todo docs, and the actual projects themselves. This is messy and it would be lovely if notion or similar had the concept of a "todo block" and could collate all of them into a single view where I could understand association, prune and dedupe, etc. Even better if there's an agent that does or suggests cleanup whenever a new block enters.
Larger projects will get docs of their own, lots of sprawl and notes etc, and then some formalization around a spec or something. I move these to an archive folder when I'm done with the notes and the final document is fleshed out, but I'd love an agent review that makes sure I'm not leaving things on the cutting board, and that I've handled all the todos etc in my notes pages.
I don't use bidirectional linking/tagging enough, but I really should, since I want to be able to coin keywords for particular concepts inline, and then be able to access their overview and see everything that mentions them in a graphlike way.
Calendar is definitely a much used component day to day. For planning, etc. But it's not a source of truth. Everything on a calendar should just be a proxy/link to a more robust doc.
Hard nos: My take on privacy policies for things like this is "show me your incentives and I'll show you your outcomes". That is to say, any company that can survive an attempt to profit from data fuckery will do so. Your data retention policy should include technically unambiguous red lines that are not to be crossed, and define specific per-user monetary payout in the event that a breach occurs, to include clauses that cause user payout to occur before eg preferred stockholders get liquidation preference and drain the possible payout pool. Routine third party audits of how user data is handled/retained/distributed etc. I recognize that this is a bit unhinged, but that's what signaling credibility looks like. A company says "we won't sell your data" and I say "or what" and there's hemming and hawing because nothing will happen to them. If the answer is "this company dies on the spot and our investors get completely fucked", now we can talk.
I think AI service pricing applies here: generally, if it seems neat I could be in for $20 easy, and if it's genuinely game changing, $200/mo is completely reasonable to ask.
re Migration cost: I expect to be able to get 100% of my data in a reasonable non-proprietary format. If that's some blend of markdown, json, sqlite, whatever, fine.
But the bottom line for me, where does my second brain break down the most? It doesn't talk back to me. I want it to understand what I've got going on, and my idiosyncracies. I want to present it with new information and have it be like "oh, this relates to X" or, periodically, to pop up with something like "I'm noticing this correlation / related idea in areas X, Y, Z... does that resonate? Is there something here?" Again, push vs pull. My second brain should be a proactive chatbot. "Noise" is so often thought about in terms of frequency, but it's really about insight quality. If my response to 80% of push notis is "damn, good call" then you can send one every 5 minutes.
I also hear no mention of one's personal life. I don't really make the distinction. It's all in there. I should be able to bitch to this chatbot about my manager, have it know about that background, and riff with me to navigate hard convos. I should be able to talk to it about side projects I have going on, and let it thread those into my calendar. Etc. Notion is already an adequate second brain for work. Nobody has yet built an adequate second brain for the home. My house, my relationship(s), my side projects, my own diarying and self reflection... these are the contents of my brain that matter.
Email in bio if you want to talk. I'm a design technologist and happy to riff / give feedback.
This “push and pull” framework and the perspective that “noise equals insight quality” are precisely the core constraints I wanted to center my design around.
Two follow-up questions:
1.If the connector adopts a chat-first mode (similar to Signal/SMS), could this generate excessive noise? Since human input often carries emotion and subjective bias, my original intent was for the AI to serve as an emotionless, relatively neutral bridge.
2.Regarding trust mechanisms: Before implementing stricter governance measures (auditing/penalties), should we establish foundational safeguards through local-first storage + explicit export (md/json/sqlite)?
If you're open to deeper discussion and love to explore this further. I put additional information and an optional feedback form in my HN profile.
I wouldn't say it was oneshotted, but it did produce a working MVP in one Plan execution. Meaning, I went back & forth a few times about requirements, it built a plan, and then CC spent just under 15 minutes writing the code. Once I got the credentials plugged in, the core integrations (Slack, gmail, IMAP, iCloud calendar) and agent loop did work. I can share the initial message if you're curious.
This is very compellingly written but I've found a lot of it not to be true for me. It is gray and rainy and a bummer outside most of the time, so frequent sights of that are like frequent sights of politics news. In my home office, I don't have much of a (detectable) background thread running for who could be at my office door, but opening the window and seeing people walking their dogs etc directly at the edge of my unfenced front yard absolutely causes that sense to flare up, even if they're all harmless and I recognize half of them.
Getting the room cozy and psychologically satisfying was a huge deal, and I"m really glad I did it, but the end result is much closer to horse blinders. I have ADHD, so distraction minimization is the name of the game.
We're all used to legislators with foundational misunderstandings of both firearms and technology, but this one is particularly unhinged.
It uses a highly invasive, trivially circumvented rule to target two cohorts, while ultimately impacting neither:
1. High volume, low complexity: These are your glock switches (overwhelming majority of the illegal firearm parts trade), 80% lower kits, etc. You catch these at customs in the case of most temu switches, and at distribution time by creeping public IG accts for the ones that are actually printed. Blockers here aren't technical. Customs needs to deeply inspect small things, LEOs need resourcing to pursue the long tail of digital market vendors, prosecutors need to find the political will to hand a looottttt of 15 year olds to the ATF. This bill doesn't do those things.
2. Low volume, high complexity: this is your FGC9s, all-but-barrel printed guns, etc. This crowd is tiny, niche, slow, and basically unstoppable for as long as copper wire and magnets continue to exist. Overindexing on manufacturing here is silly, as there are vastly more regular illegal guns trading hands, and anything that works on those will work here too.
I've done some of this using the daisy seed. For time based effects like reverb, the memory/hardware constraints can be spicy. Definitely maxed out the seed hardware before achieving the (very long) level of reverb I wanted.
The hardware descriptions here seem on the light side. I'd want to be confident that it can handle intense time based effects.
It's promising that they seem to allow arbitrary write to the device, and only charge for tokens for the people that require the prompt playground.
Looking forward to see where this goes.
As an aside: building an ear-pleasing FDN reverb on an obscure-ish board with intense hardware optimization needs has been one of my favorite barometers for the abilities of new LLM models.
I've certainly noticed some variance from opus. there are times it gets stuck and loops on dumb stuff that would have been frustrating from sonnet 3.5, let alone something as good as opus 4.5 when it's locked in. But it's not obviously correlated with time, I've hit those snags at odd hours, and gotten great perf during peak times. It might just be somewhat variable, or a shitty context.
Now GPT4.1 was another story last year, I remember cooking at 4am pacific and feeling the whole thing slam to a halt as the US east coast came online.
This is my guess, sometimes it churns through things without a care in the world and other times is seem to be intentionally annoying to eat up the token quota without doing anything productive.
Kind of have to see which mode it's in before turning it loose unsupervised and keep an eye on it just in case it decides to get stupid and/or lazy.
I wonder if the current laws are written in a way that accounts for these models. Sure, if a specific tool call results in a paid product card for pepsi, that ought to be labeled. But what if the number on some pepsi-related weights is massaged just a bit, way early on in the process? What if the training data is tweaked to include some additional pro-pepsi inputs?
I look grimly forward to the future of adblock, which I predict will literally involve a media interception and re-rendering agent that sits between us and everything we see, hear, read, etc. AR goggles that put beach pictures over bus stop posters and red squigglies under sentences with a high enough adtech confidence score. This shit's gonna get real weird in our lifetimes.
Small things, mostly from skimming my amazon history. Nothing crazy, but all of these make my everyday life... smoother. Things that were a little bit annoying are invisible now. It stacks up. Raw links, no affiliates or trackers.
* Hakko FX888D soldering iron. I used to hate soldering, and it always came out awful. Perfect soldering is effortless now. It's a delight.
* Oxo 5lb kitchen scale (or anything similar). Cooking in metric is just sane. Excellent for bread.
* The Speakman S-2251 showerhead, with the flow regulator pried out. Was 100 when bought, 3x that now. Reddit voted it the most powerful and high quality showerhead. If you like that kind of thing, it's still worth it at 300.
* Schlage BE365 deadbolts. Can be found on sale under 100. Keyless door entry, supports multiple codes, not smart or connected in any way, battery lasts years.
* Velcro cable ties of various lengths. Every cable in my closet is orderly, and when you're done with one, it never sprawls or tangles.
* ESP32S3 boards. Drastically lowers the activation threshold for oneoff web-connected silliness.
* These little [dimmable lights](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D4Q4D5VP) (in amber). Warm colored, layered lighting all over the house. Huge vibe upgrade.
* [Dimmer leashes](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DL7V3CM). These sit between plug and outlet, and provide a separate 6ft cable with a dimmer switch on the end. I use them on my desk to control my zoom lighting, and in bed to dim my shelf lights without getting up.
* Multi-packs of small tools. We have a dozen pairs of scissors, box cutters, etc floating around. Sharpies and mechanical pencils in ~100 packs. Place around the house. It's very nice to not have to look far for these.
* [Masking tape](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R28DGHM) and stickers in many rainbow colors. Useful for knowing EG which cable goes to the PS5 (blue) vs xbox (green).
* [Giant digital clock](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCVV8J98) w/ date, day of week, and temperature. Ended up buying more for other parts of the house because I got so used to looking for it.
* [Ratcheting adjustable belt](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08VDMFZB2?) Also loops the belt tip onto the inside, not the outside. The idea of having a belt with adjustment intervals of inches instead of mms, with a tip that flops on the outside feels very silly now.
>The Speakman S-2251 showerhead, with the flow regulator pried out. Was 100 when >bought, 3x that now.
Holy molly! You aren't kidding. I literally have one laying around in my bathroom cabinet that I bought during Covid for, I wanna say, $60? I used it for about a month or two before I decided I liked my previous shower head better (Kohler Forté).
Also, I'm curious why it is so common recommendation across the internet to take out the flow regulators. Even see it mentioned in Amazon reviews. It is bypassing regulations and selfish. It defeats the purpose of everyone doing their part to cut down their water usage, especially in areas that really need it (Arizona, Nevada and California). I still have mine in at 1.75gpm and it rinses me fine. No one needs the Kramer "Commando 450" force.
We're really sorely missing something like "semver for food".
I don't have deep food industry knowledge, IIRC there are some rules around SKUs needing to rotate in response to certain changes, but these are completely opaque to customers. People should know they're eating snickers 12.2.2, and while a sub-1% change to one ingredient's amount might be a patch bump, a 10% total weight reduction should absolutely trigger a major version bump. SKU and nutrition labels should be tied to a public changelog, and inaccuracies in that changelog should proportionally imperil manufacturer solvency.
Capture: notion and twitter have been best, obsidian and regular markdown have been worst.
Notion is good because of how they support a calendar view where you can put documents in a day's cell, and then see a list view that's just a stack of those notes. I keep a daily diary or youarehere type doc, where I'll have checklists and notes on small things that don't merit changes to a dedicated page. There's arguably a "retrieval" breakdown in that I don't really go back through these to update them or collate them into bigger pages.
Twitter is good because it's low friction and I can just go off, which is fun, and because they have decent search, so I can quote-tweet a related thing and sort of thread the graph together. If you're talking about BASB you're probably familiar with this corner of twitter. visakanv etc. This method works well if you use it enough to be able to recall your other notes. I think there's something special about the twitter format here too: it discourages whole-page thoughts in favor of sequential pithy bits, which i think are easier to both link and recall.
Execution: I would like a chat frontend (signal/SMS/etc) where I can just talk to my projects, ask the status of things, get suggestions, etc. Push based, rather than pull based, execution.
Active project context: I've dropped todoist-like things since they're limited in what they can express, and notion/markdown can do todolists etc. I tend to have lists in markdown style that live in two places: my daily diary/todo docs, and the actual projects themselves. This is messy and it would be lovely if notion or similar had the concept of a "todo block" and could collate all of them into a single view where I could understand association, prune and dedupe, etc. Even better if there's an agent that does or suggests cleanup whenever a new block enters.
Larger projects will get docs of their own, lots of sprawl and notes etc, and then some formalization around a spec or something. I move these to an archive folder when I'm done with the notes and the final document is fleshed out, but I'd love an agent review that makes sure I'm not leaving things on the cutting board, and that I've handled all the todos etc in my notes pages.
I don't use bidirectional linking/tagging enough, but I really should, since I want to be able to coin keywords for particular concepts inline, and then be able to access their overview and see everything that mentions them in a graphlike way.
Calendar is definitely a much used component day to day. For planning, etc. But it's not a source of truth. Everything on a calendar should just be a proxy/link to a more robust doc.
Hard nos: My take on privacy policies for things like this is "show me your incentives and I'll show you your outcomes". That is to say, any company that can survive an attempt to profit from data fuckery will do so. Your data retention policy should include technically unambiguous red lines that are not to be crossed, and define specific per-user monetary payout in the event that a breach occurs, to include clauses that cause user payout to occur before eg preferred stockholders get liquidation preference and drain the possible payout pool. Routine third party audits of how user data is handled/retained/distributed etc. I recognize that this is a bit unhinged, but that's what signaling credibility looks like. A company says "we won't sell your data" and I say "or what" and there's hemming and hawing because nothing will happen to them. If the answer is "this company dies on the spot and our investors get completely fucked", now we can talk.
I think AI service pricing applies here: generally, if it seems neat I could be in for $20 easy, and if it's genuinely game changing, $200/mo is completely reasonable to ask.
re Migration cost: I expect to be able to get 100% of my data in a reasonable non-proprietary format. If that's some blend of markdown, json, sqlite, whatever, fine.
But the bottom line for me, where does my second brain break down the most? It doesn't talk back to me. I want it to understand what I've got going on, and my idiosyncracies. I want to present it with new information and have it be like "oh, this relates to X" or, periodically, to pop up with something like "I'm noticing this correlation / related idea in areas X, Y, Z... does that resonate? Is there something here?" Again, push vs pull. My second brain should be a proactive chatbot. "Noise" is so often thought about in terms of frequency, but it's really about insight quality. If my response to 80% of push notis is "damn, good call" then you can send one every 5 minutes.
I also hear no mention of one's personal life. I don't really make the distinction. It's all in there. I should be able to bitch to this chatbot about my manager, have it know about that background, and riff with me to navigate hard convos. I should be able to talk to it about side projects I have going on, and let it thread those into my calendar. Etc. Notion is already an adequate second brain for work. Nobody has yet built an adequate second brain for the home. My house, my relationship(s), my side projects, my own diarying and self reflection... these are the contents of my brain that matter.
Email in bio if you want to talk. I'm a design technologist and happy to riff / give feedback.
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