Brennan Kinney

Feom https://brennan.day/what-have-note-taking-pkms-accomplished-really/: "German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, as he was famous for his use of the "slip box" or Zettelkasten note-taking method and the achieved output of more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles. This is the kind of remarkable output that many in the PKM community aspire towards." I think that is somehwhat misguided. The goal shouldn't be great quantity of output, but great quality. I think AI has revealed that to us in reccent years. AI can produce endless output. But who needs it, what is it good for? Unless we have a GOOD QUESTION to AI, it's output is not very valuable. These note-taking apps, you write a lot of notes, but is there an overarching question the notes are meant to answer? Depends on how you use them of course. But I would guess that most of the notes are more "Good to Haves" than "Step towards a definite goal". Most notes don't probabaly take you closer to the end-goal of your project. You just think they might become useful in the future, so you write them down. Just in case. To feel you are taking good care of your precious ideas. But how much time are you eilling to spend to read them in the future?

Note Brennan, who wrote the article this one is responding to added an update: https://brennan.day/what-have-note-taking-pkms-accomplished-really/#up… Brennan could have gone about a better more interesting route that I would have agreed with more, instead of incorrectly blaming Obsidian and conflating it with a specific PKM framework. I am an avid obsidian user and have avoided most PKM stuff, and instead just developed a PKM that works for me through slow incremental improvements and changes. The beauty of Obsidian is the plugin eco system, and I even was able to develop my own plugin for what I specifically wanted. I think that's what Brennan basically talks about in his "Question 3" section where he favors just making your own. I do think that there is "choice paralysis" that people may have when jumping into Obsidian and trying to add plugins too early instead of discovering what works (and what doesn't) for them first. His final point: > After researching... well, research, a part of me feels a sense of relief. The fact is that I've been using ad-hoc, improvisational methods for research and knowledge management for my entire life. It's clear I haven't been missing out on deeper, richer understandings by way of more complex knowledge management systems. I completely agree with this, and Obsidian is one of the best tools to do this! And Brennan corrects this in his update at the end of his article.

I wish if more SSG could be made digital public goods as well like hugo, eleventty[0] etc. A lot of such products can really benefit from the funding and in some sense, yes one can use these static site generators eternally and use the same version but I do feel like these tools still fall in a digital public good category. From my understanding of digital public good, the process seems to have benefits of UN and other nations contributing but the process seems immensely bureaucratic so I hope that UN could cut down on its bureaucracy hopefully just a bit too. [0]: https://brennan.day/the-end-of-eleventy/