Yes, and PKMs in general. Like labeling your emails by topic in Gmail. The problem is that the 'toil' keeps piling up, while the value gained is increasingly hard to see.
No, but I haven't been following the space. (I suspect that with Claude Code-level coding agents, you should be able to do something amazing that thoroughly obsoletes Obsidian/Roam/org-mode, but I don't actually know of anything.)
I've been focused on creative writing, with poetry as my test case, to see what the bottlenecks are to truly amplifying myself through LLMs (as opposed to helping my boss automate away my job or spamming the Internet more efficiently).
I haven't tried using agents to make a full editor, but Claude Code and Gemini CLI are actually quite good at writing Obsidian plugins, or modifying existing ones. You can start with an existing one that's 90% of what you want (which tends to be the case with note-taking/PKM systems: people are so idiosyncratic that solutions built by others almost work, but not quite) and tweak it to be exactly right for you.
My own Obsidian setup has improved quite a bit in the last couple months because I can just ask Claude to change one or two things about plugins I got from the store.
This is the way. If you symlink the .claude directory (so Obsidian can see the files) then you can also super easily add and manage claude skills.
I've spent 20 years living in the terminal, but with claude code I'm more and more drafting markdown specs, organizing context, building custom views / plugins / etc. Obsidian is a great substrate for developing personal software.
The conclusion here seems largely unjustified by the data and indeed is difficult to relate to simple distributions or statistics:
> Increasingly, public institutions seem to exist to manage the obsessions of a tiny number of neurotic—and possibly malicious—complainers.
Why would anyone complain about airport noise when it is ~100% guaranteed to do them no good, and almost all the benefits go to everyone else even if it somehow did anything? Just thinking like an economist here... (Indeed, if a large fraction of locals did complain about something like airport noise, that would itself be highly suspicious to me - as it would indicate an organized campaign or an issue which has become politicized in some way and is now a pretext for something else entirely like a culture war.)
And if there is something I've learned about design and problems, it's that you can have a huge problem, and you are lucky if even 1% will ever tell you.
Your website could be down, and if even 1 person takes the risk of going out of their way to tell you, you should thank your lucky stars that you have such proactive, public-spirited readers!
> I thought people recognized that they don't appear out of nowhere.
I don't think that paper is widely accepted. Have you seen the authors of that paper, or anyone else, use it to successfully predict (rather than postdict) anything?
I haven't paid attention and the paper seems to be arguing against the existence of the phenomenon of emergence behavior and is not related to predicting what is possible with greater scale.
> is not related to predicting what is possible with greater scale.
If they can't predict new emergence, then 'explaining' old emergence by post hoc prediction with bizarre newly-invented metrics would seem to be irrelevant and just epicycles. You can always bend a line as you wish in curve-fitting by adding some parameters.
It's also more than hiring someone overseas esp just for a few months. Honestly it's more than most interns are paid for 3 months outside FAANG (considering housing is paid for there etc)
1. You put a lot of time into an intern or a junior too.
2. I didn't say 'paid', I said, 'fully loaded [total] cost'. The total cost of them goes far beyond their mere salary - the search process like all of the interviews for all candidates, onboarding, HR, taxes etc.
1. Idk, I didn't have to. I managed an intern a few months back and he just did everything we had planned out and written down then started making his own additions on top.
2. Yeah I mentioned that also.
3. It's still more expensive than hiring a contractor esp abroad, even all in.
Could you explain why you think that? I'm looking at the lottery ticket section and it seems like he doesn't disown it; the reason he gives, via Abhinav, for not pursuing it at his commercial job is just that that kind of sparsity is not hardware friendly (except with Cerebras). "It doesn't provide a speedup for normal commercial workloads on normal commercial GPUs and that's why I'm not following it up at my commercial job and don't want to talk about it" seems pretty far from "disowning the lottery ticket hypothesis [as wrong or false]".
I think that was pretty clear even when this paper came out - even if you could find these sub networks they wouldn’t be faster on real hardware. Never thought much of this paper, but it sure did get a lot of people excited.
It is real in that it exists. It is not real in the sense that almost nobody has access to them. Unless you work at one of the handful of organizations with their hardware, it’s not a practical reality.
They have a strange business model. Their chips are massive. So they necessarily only sell them to large customers. Also because of the way they’re built (entire wafer is a single chip) no two chips will be the same. Normally imperfections in the manufacturing result in some parts of the wafer being rejected and other binned as fast or slow chips. If you use the whole wafer you get what you get. So it’s necessarily a strange platform to work with - every device is slightly different.
I am guessing you are on mobile and are referring to the togglebar 'demo mode', illustrating its existence.
I wish we didn't have that, but we have to. That demo of the theme togglebar exists to educate users, because we found that a lot of complaints came from people who were blind to the gear icon and were unaware that the control they wanted already existed. (Which is regrettable but understandable, because almost all websites provide useless controls or visual spam, in an example of 'why we can't have nice things'.)
Obviously, it's disabled on subsequent page loads. (One of a number of parts of the UI/UX we streamline using 'demo-mode', as we try to thread the Scylla & Charybdis of a cluttered but explicit UI vs a clean newbie-unfriendly UI.)
To clarify the point here for people who didn't read OP: the oral exams here are customized and tailored to the student's individual unique project, that's the point and why they are not written:
> In our new "AI/ML Product Management" class, the "pre-case" submissions (short assignments meant to prepare students for class discussion) were looking suspiciously good. Not "strong student" good. More like "this reads like a McKinsey memo that went through three rounds of editing," good...Many students who had submitted thoughtful, well-structured work could not explain basic choices in their own submission after two follow-up questions. Some could not participate at all...Oral exams are a natural response. They force real-time reasoning, application to novel prompts, and defense of actual decisions. The problem? Oral exams are a logistical nightmare. You cannot run them for a large class without turning the final exam period into a month-long hostage situation.
Written exams do not do the same thing. You can't say 'just do a written exam'. So sure, the students may prefer them, but so what? That's apples and oranges.
I have a little rant about it - "‘Tools for thought’ winds up being a lie: there’s tools, but not much additional thought." https://gwern.net/blog/2024/tools-for-thought-failure https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoqFpaorNHsWxRzvz/what-comes...
(My answer, of course, is that almost all of this scutwork is well within the capabilities of a frontier LLM today. We just need to apply them.)
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