Alex

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Never stop saying "dozen" and "half dozen". Never stop using the word you read in an old novella. Never stop using your regional jargon. Don't succumb to an internationalized English stripped of its whimsy and romanticism in the name of streamlining global commerce.

@thinkingshivers en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region-be…

Someone who struggles a bit with concentration gets nothing. Someone else who struggles a bit more with concentration gets cool drugs and extra time on exams. Someone who's a bit sad gets nothing. Someone who is a bit sadder gets to bring an emotional support snake on flights. We pretend mental illness is this discrete category, you either have it or you don't, when it's really a continuum. It's unfair that a slight change to your condition can give you access to enormous resources and sympathy. My heart goes out to those just below the cutoff.

@justinskycak I saw your video on learning topics other than math. You used LLMs to make a spaced repetition curriculum for biology. Did you run the process only inside an LLM chat, or did you couple it with other tools too?

@ObelFeed @Stammy @M2Fauzaan What are your needs?

@Alex_Botham @Stammy @M2Fauzaan I need to install plugins to make it fit my needs

- cogito.md - clearly.md - writer.computer - tolaria.md - md-preview.app - github.com/GRVYDEV/marky ...

@Stammy @M2Fauzaan It's like "I'll skip the lambo and use an old suzuki x-90 from 1995 with a sick paint job instead"

@Stammy From the above list only md-preview.app seems useful, well done @M2Fauzaan for the instant space preview. No idea why people would otherwise want to use anything else than Obsidian

@ObelFeed @Stammy @M2Fauzaan you control the plugins you install

@Alex_Botham @Stammy @M2Fauzaan obsidian is ugly and bloated by plugins

@fithikings @Stammy @M2Fauzaan Features and UX of obsidian can be almost infinitely customized

@Alex_Botham @Stammy @M2Fauzaan Features and UX are the most common reasons.

Can someone build Obsidian for a @typstapp compiler?

@sebkrier *Prometheus has entered the chat*

caveman 1: fire will burn the earth. we cannot control it. deaths from the freezing cold are part of the natural order. caveman 2: no, fire will be incredible, and nothing bad will ever come from it. we must build a giant, eternal fire! (fog dissipates) wise elder caveman 3: we must weigh the risks and opportunities of fire. it is like berries: some poison us, others nourish us. wisdom lies in learning the difference, and cultivating what is good. *wild, thunderous applause from onlookers*

@TfTHacker @obsdmd Yes for hobby projects, using a git submodule directly inside the main proejct repo. Works very well

Do you do task management in Obsidian and if so, how? #obsidian @obsdmd

= learning by demand. The main issue with learning by demand (versus accumulating a body of knowledge for it’s own sake), is _only_ understanding what you apply, but missing second order effects or even near adjecent knowledge. I.e. ”The big picture” versus in demand niche fragmented knowledge

@Alex_Botham only what is applied

i think nowadays with access to LLM's & deep research agents, reading books is inefficient when it comes to acquiring info... you can get an agent to go through 1000's of books & extract the most applicable info to your specific case without having to waste hours reading if you do it for leisure then that's fine, but reading as a way to "acquire knowledge" is one big cope pushed by the self-improvement cult

@theo @mattpocockuk On meta level it reminds me of how diffusion models work (denoising in particular) — from low resolution towards higher resolution (chaos => order). The ”how” to apply this for LLMs is via the above ”grill” skills from Matt have worked for me pretty well

@theo Using @mattpocockuk grilling skills really helped to lock the rails for Claude and stop it from following insane paths I found turning chaos into structure (Claude) is easier than turning too much structure or pidgeon holing into novel ideas / better taste (Codex)

It's so hard to describe the vibe difference between Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 (for coding) GPT is smarter and can unblock you, but it gets stuck in stupid ways and strangles itself with context sometimes. Opus will go down the most insane paths and refuse to acknowledge obvious answers, but it understands intent better and has more taste. Whenever I use one for more than an hour, I always reach to the other to "clean up". Best part? All of this changes every few weeks 🙃

@aryanlabde Distribution is a harder problem than building

Worst part about building solo: you ship something genuinely useful and nobody sees it.

The degree to which a person is ”capable of solving life’s problems” is correlated with the amount reading and writing one does. A rich reasoned mental map of reality is a precursor to high agency.

@charlieholtz When? 🥹

I think I have a partial solution. Build a ”workout” routine for the mind which only takes a fraction of your time and counter balances the atrophy. Simplified example just to drive the point home: What happens when you never work out? You atrophy. What happens when you work out 4 times a week (only ~3.5% of your time)? You grow, get stronger, and reverse atrophy (6h / 168h) I believe this applies to most evolutionarily developed domains, including cognition. So => What ”mental workouts” could we use to counter balance multi-attentional vibe coding with 7 simultaneous terminals? No clue, but I have a hunch. I’m building xnback.com to tackle this exact problem (i.e. strengthen working memory and volitional attention), but I believe there are better ”mental workouts” still to be discovered (in addition to the obvious — reading, writing, meditating, socializing, sports/exercise). Vibe coding is 80% reading LLM responses, 20% creating prompts and replying, so you are not actually ”creating” much, you’re mainly just observing and reacting. What would be an activity exact opposite of this?

I'm 22 years old and Claude Code is deteriorating my brain. Every single day for the last 6 months I've had 6 to 8 Claude Code terminals open, waiting for a response just so I can hit 'enter' 75% of the time. And it's doing something to me. In convos with a couple of friends, it's been a point that's been brought up pretty frequently. None of us feel as sharp as we used to. I don't know if it's just us, or others in their 20s are feeling the same thing, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot. P.S. I know this is a problem with my reliability/usage of it, not Claude Code itself, but the effects are real nonetheless