The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly in the vault folder. And people sell courses for this??? Like I know you can add plugins, tweak css to your liking, and basically turn obsidian into an all-encompassing monstrosity to match your particular software kink, but the 80/20 of it all is really pretty basic to anybody who has ever used a personal computer.
There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines.
Nothing against it, you just need the warning early on to avoid the timesink if you want things done and follow the wrong guide.
It really baffles me that a forum full of people who casually deep dive into all corners of tech regardless of its “usefulness” can’t understand people might want to do the same with their personal notetaking or organization.
I can't speak for those commenters, but I think a lot of people have gone down this path and felt like it was a negative experience for them. I'm sure other people don't, but since a lot of these deep dive resources come from "productivity" communities, it's not surprising there's people that didn't feel very productive reorganizing their second brain, even if it seemed kinda intoxicating in the process.
I also feel like there's an odd assortment of people in the note optimization community that tries to present themselves as super human taskmasters, like Neo on a keyboard. The Roam research videos do not look like they're trying to teach me to use Roam. They look like they're trying to sell me a cozy aesthetic and vision of merging my brain with a computer to become greater than. I just want a note taking app.
It just ticks exactly the right boxes for people who are into STEM without really being satisfying at the end of the rainbow. Personally I'm done trying to do more than just some tags and backlinks.
> There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines.
On the other end of the spectrum you have me, who’s been only vaguely organising my files for years. I am currently collecting my data from across different hard drives I have and running hashdeep as a first step to identify duplicate files. Even though I’m not organising the files themselves well, I do maintain backups. Both in the form of ones that are replicated ZFS snapshots, but also files that I’ve manually copied between drives and computers.
The amount of data has grown to too many TB now, so deduplicating things is the first step of cleaning up.
It remains to be seen if the reorganised files will be a sane and measured thing, or if I will go too far in the other direction and create a way too elaborate system of organization for my files.
I have been toying with the idea that since I am currently using hashdeep to get file hashes of all paths on different drives, I could collect all the files organized purely by hash in terms of paths on the file systems, and keep the hashdeep records for future reference, imported into queryable DuckDB databases to help me find related files etc. (For example, to find back to which other files were once under some given directory path.)
Blob storage basically. Perhaps something along the lines of Perkeep (formerly Camlistore) https://perkeep.org/
But I would really like to also do an effort of having the data organized in a way that makes it easy to determine which files I need more copies of (favorite photos of important moments, etc) and which ones I need fewer copies of (random screenshots of games, etc), and which files I can discard completely.
What do y’all do to organize all of your files? And how much data do you guys have that you consider important for the rest of your life?
Mine really does help me, though I'm not very organised, I just dump my notes in a handful of folders and rely on the search function (which could be a lot better in obsidian, it always finds unrelated stuff first). Still it's magnitudes better than that crap they call onenote which I unfortunately am required to use at work.
I'm really averse to meticulous organisation so a good search function is key. Tagging and categorising stuff will never work for me. I've been thinking about looking for other plugins for that.
I know that it's just a super common distinction between pilers and filers, but I really struggle to comprehend the usefulness of just "dumping everything" in one place and hoping that search will sort it out.
At a certain threshold, doesn't it just become impossible to remember what you do or don't have in that pile?
When search fails, is it because it isn't there? Or is it because the search just didn't find it?
Yeah that's why the search needs to be really good.
I just don't have the mindset for painstakingly categorising stuff so that'll never happen. When I was younger I sometimes tried to do that but I always ended up giving up on it and just having a pile of outdated stuff.
As everyone has learnt the hard way, when you have a long to-do list, you will be tempted to suddenly spring clean your room, and it will make you temporarily feel productive... but it will not, in fact, shrink your to-do list.
Making an elaborate Obsidian setup is very much the same instinct.
Not defending some of the not that amazing Obsidian courses or similar out there, but it sounds like you already have a lot of pre-existing knowledge and an approach that works for you, so as I said in the post, keep using that!
You know about markdown syntax, about #tags, about [[linking]], but a lot of people who first hear of Obsidian don't.
Part of what inspired my post was to help people who don't need the extra complexity of a bottom-up note system, Zettelkasten, ever-green notes, atomic notes or other areas of Obsidian, but also to give direction to someone wants to explore these.
For example I'm very happy with my bottom-up approach for knowledge notes, I have been using it for multiple years now and I can still find the things I need, and it doesn't feel messy or anything.
Apologies, I didn't mean my post as an attack on your post, which was well thought out and reasonable. My post was meant as a general obsidian-related rambling in a general obsidian-related thread
Not sure if new but every tool has its coaches and influencers. Running entire businesses off some SaaS tool. Not long ago I felt like I was swarmed with posts from Notion coaches. Obsidian no different. Repeat for every other tool out there.
> Like I know you can add plugins, tweak css to your liking, and basically turn obsidian into an all-encompassing monstrosity to match your particular software kink, but the 80/20 of it all is really pretty basic to anybody who has ever used a personal computer.
Probably org-mode envy ;-)
(To be clear, it's the same story - using simple plain org-mode is easy, but some people love to customize like crazy)
It’s interesting eh, it’s a wonderfully straightforward tool to use, but it’s scary.
My theory is that those courses aren’t selling you on how to use obsidian, but are instead selling “how do I organise knowledge and information. Oh btw we’re using obsidian”
They aren’t marketed like that, but I think that is what they’re really doing
It’s like taking a course of office organisation. I mean filing cabinets are easy right, it’s just putting labels on folders and putting them places.
Except I would absolutely be terrible at that job and would pay nearly anything to be good at it.
>The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world
I find it the weakest link. It always tends to find the stuff that's least relevant first somehow. It's pretty terrible.
Having said that I have the organisational skills and affinity of a baboon so I really need to be able to dump my notes somewhere and still find them back somehow. This is not too typical for this kind of package, I notice a lot of people are meticulous and follow complex structures like zettelkasten.
For me that will never work though. It'll just subconsciously mark the system as "not worth the hassle" and never touch it again.
Honestly with LLMs you don't need an Obsidian anymore. You can just use neovim or emacs. Every feature you need, like search, or linking can be done via plugins or shell commands.
Because before LLMs you couldn't use neovim? Emacs's search feature was vide coded in 2024? How is the first half of your comment even related to the second half.
I use Obsidian to view a series of markdown files I am generating / working on with a LLM - a rendered interface if you will with pointing and clicking
I was using vimwiki with a ton of plugins for many years before Obsidian came along. It was very nice to be able to open all of my notes in a UI made for editing them.
It hasn't made sense for loads of nations since 2008 and they've loudly complained about it, but the political will to leave isn't there due to lack of flashpoint social issues.
This rightly points out that many issues that are known will have their veto used don't even get brought up. Removal of the veto will stop this and I expect lightning rod topics and disputes to occur much more frequently.
Same with the free-riding comment. Removing the veto will expose some nations "true colors" in ways that most do not anticipate. It's not all sunshine and rainbows of agreement among the EU member states.
> many issues that are known will have their veto used don't even get brought up.
It's quite disingenuous to blame the veto power for lack of discussion on important issues, if anything it's an argument in favor of the veto, because the only reason to avoid discussion when you lack coercive power is weak arguments... and there's no need to waste time with such nonsense.
> Removing the veto will expose some nations "true colors" in ways that most do not anticipate.
Another slippery argument - there is absolutely no reason to hide the "true colors" of veto-capable members you disagree with, actually the opposite is true, one will have to come up with more, more convincing and true-color-exposing arguments in order to apply pressure via the electorate of the true colors.
> It's not all sunshine and rainbows of agreement among the EU member states.
No it's not, there are shady forces who dream about coercion for the worse.
yes - i am so relieved. this was a real conundrum for the EU - booting hungary out would have been a huge problem (i.e. opening the door for a russian stronghold right in its mid), but keeping orban in would mean the a) abuse continued and b) it would send a signal to others that this is a winning strategy.
democracy may suffer from the problem that it allows the election of anti-democratic autocrats but it seems that it's definitely able to come back from the brink, even if the deck's stacked against it. i wonder what message it sends to the other countries.
Certainly an excellent news. What puzzles me that he managed to stay in power for 4 periods, despite behaving very consistently - subverting EU, de facto being russian spy, stealing EU dotations, led Hungary to stagnation. Yet people kept voting him in.
Exactly same story as just north from it, Fico in Slovakia is a tragedy for that nation and he keeps winning the votes.
Bro, even for an entire year that is less than a single ambulance ride in some parts of the US. Heck, you might pay $1000+ even with insurance coverage.
Even a family plan insurance can bankrupt you in the US if you get admitted to the wrong place. Most Europeans don't realize how crazy expensive even the most basic care and meds are in the US.
I speak German, Polish, and English fluently and my take is: German is very precise, almost mathematical, there is little room to be misunderstood. But it also requires the most letters. English is the quickest, get things done kind of language, very compressible , but also risks misunderstanding. Polish is the most fun, with endless possibilities of twisting and bending it's structures, but also lacking the ease of use of English or the precision of German. But it's clearly just my subjective take
Why are talking about something you have no idea about? There are multiple videos of this system engaging in combat missions. There are first-person videos from them accompanied by footage of recon drones flying above them. And some of those videos are from last year already.
You are being dishonest. Those squads usually have SOME degree of drone, artillery and aviation support behind them. They are basically there to find out where the defenders are. Sure they are expendable, but they are just a part of the attack. I bet 24 hours sitting in a trench with FPVs, 152mms, and FABs exploding all over your position would change your mind as to the danger posed by those attacks you make fun of. Being at exactly this location vs kilometers away while remotely controlling a mobile gun turret makes ALL the difference
I am not making fun. If it seems that way, I misspoke. I think that any war is terrifying and this one more than any other I know of.
The way I imagine the attacks this UGV defended against is small groups of men deemed expendable knowingly going to their very likely deaths. Yes, this is part of a bigger Russian strategy which is very dangerous and unfortunately, so far, too effective.
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