Clankers Made Me Build a Second Brain

I use a single linear date sorted Emacs org-mode notes.org file backed up to SourceHut. All notes are created with org-capture. Anything I want to remember how I did before, I can use consult-line to find answers quickly. Add a couple tags and I don't bother with organizing anything at all, org-sparse-tree for exploring. I have film recommendations, links to read, music to listen to mixed in with how to use Gnus, shell tricks, and less common Emacs commands, etc. I picked this habit about a year ago in response to the rapidly degrading quality of search and to counter the habit of reaching for a LLM for things I should really learn to do by heart.

I find taking note solo hard. I always end up turning "quick notes" into a blog post, which takes me out of the current flow.

My idea off taking notes is a keybind that pops an editor, I scribble a quick line, eg. « put 2>&1 before >/dev/null », replay the keybind, and have it archived somehow, so that later on, I can use a fuzzy finder to look up « /dev/null » and have the note pop up.

This part is actually easy to implement, but this get harder when you want to browse the notes later on. I'd be eager to know how people organize their note, and find their way back...

Right now I just resort to writing shell scripts and comment them out, then grep -r ~/bin to get answers. Only works for shell tricks though.

I've been using wiki software for my own "second brain" for at least a decade now, probably more. I have written hundreds (maybe thousands) of pages at this point. I cannot recommend it highly enough: If you are a knowledge worker, you cannot possibly hold everything in memory. Those who claim they can, are fooling themselves. (The greatest engineers/scientists/researchers throughout the centuries were also incredibly habitual writers and note-takers, and I don't think this is a coincidence.)

Plus, the act of writing something down makes it more likely than not you will remember it (or at least, remember it better). At a certain point, having it available for later reference is almost more of a side-benefit.

I eventually just wrote my own knowledge base for the improved UX/ergonomics. (I'm a big fan of search over metadata curation.) The current version is entirely coded by hand because most of it was written before AI could write code competently enough for my taste, although I am looking at experimenting with some potential improvements using locally-hosted models in the very near future.

Better than Obsidian notes is to put it into your Anki deck (for flashcard review / spaced repetition) and have it memorized and always on your mental cache