I switched from an Obsidian fanboy to only writing by hand, and I'm never going back.

It seemed preposterous to put notes in something I can't back up or "CTRL+F" search, but I've found that yes, sometimes I spend two minutes looking for a note, but when I do I generally never have to look up that information again... as opposed to things I'd search Obsidian for constantly that seemed to never get stored in my brain.

Hi. Retention is a problem not because there is something wrong with our memory but that’s how the brain works. Science shows that we forget 70% of what you read in 24 hours. I have had the same issue and always left me with the feeling that I am not getting the best out of my reading. So I created LearnBetter. It applies learning science principles to help you retain by converting what you read into short exercises. Re-reading, highlighting or writing it yourself by creating then organizing notes won’t give you the results you are looking for. Atleast not to me. Trust me I have done them all. Try out Learnbetter. See if that helps you. It’s free. I am passionate about this problem and I want to help others who are going through what I did. It’s getlearnbetter.ai. It’s in beta so expect some minor issues here and there. Would love to hear what you think if you decide to try.

In my first job, my supervisor gave me a Day Timer binder and set of pages for it and I very dependent on it within a few weeks. That thing was always with me and I was a little terrified that I would leave it somewhere. If I were hit by a bus and they gave that book to my replacement, they would have no problem picking up where I left off.

Then I got a series of Palm Pilot devices and left the paper behind. It worked pretty well for me and the grafitti handwriting system was ingenious. Aside from my contact list being duplicated a few times a year, I didn't really have any negative experiences.

Then smart phones hit and even though they can do everything any electronic organizer ever did for me, I've never been as happy with them.

I'm seriously considering buying a paper planner again. Shared calendars is the only thing blocking me.

I love Obsidian too, but for me it's just a place where I park notes for future reference. I don't actively use it.

Writing by hand has some advantages and writing by keyboard also has some advantages. Using note-taking app or similar software is very convenient and useful in some situations.

That's exactly how I used "AI"... to augment my thinking and writing process.

On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.

After a year I could no longer write for shit.

Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.

Now I don't even write near a computer.

also a very popular messaging platform for [redacted] enthusiasts

I used to use DuckDuckGo out of protest, despite it being inferior, but sometime in the last year (between general improvements and Google's rapid enshitification) it started outperforming Google for me.

I'm pretty sure there'd be a double-digit drop in LLM use if Google hasn't made search worse every year for the last decade.

As someone who was getting information this way most of last year, I'm pretty sure I'll never want to again.

An increasing number of studies are indicating a reliance on "AI" leads to deleterious cognitive effects. I felt this acutely myself.

I've noticed a significant boost to my recall since shunning "AI" as much as possible.

I'd gladly suffer the indignity of stepping on a few leaves if I didn't have to listen to an hour of blaring leaf-blower every Tuesday morning.

Leaf litter is also where juvenile lightning bugs live. Less leaf litter = less lightning bugs.

Is that a worse problem than hours of leaf blower noise?

I googled and apparently it's another name for fireflies and on my list of insects that cause problems, fireflies don't make the list.

Insect populations are dying out and it’s a huge problem we don’t talk enough about.

People are calling out fireflys because they are (were) very visible but it’s a problem for every species. We are replacing native plants with low pile outdoor carpet in the suburbs, and dousing everything else in pesticide

I mean to discourage people from blowing away their leaves.

Less leaf blowing may also result in more lightning bugs / fireflies, which many people enjoy.

> Leaf litter is also where juvenile lightning bugs live

Also various species of bumblebee and fledgling birds, from magpies to owls.

AI art is like dreams. I'm amused by my own but never want to hear about anyone else's.

AI art is like a photoshop drawing. If it's done by someone who sucks, which are most users if the tool is accessible enough, you will just think "That's a bad photoshop drawing". You will recognize the standard tools, the standard brushes, bad masking – all the stuff that is easy to do and that everyone will do.

That's not a tool issue. It just means that working on a raised floor is not the same a being able to reach a higher ceiling.

I love this analogy.

Your real poetry on the other hand, pretty good!

> AI art is like dreams. I'm amused by my own but never want to hear about anyone else's.

I don't know. Scrolling the Sora image generations feed is pretty fun.

It's got trendy memes, lots of mashups, and cool art. They've also managed to capture social media outrage bait on the platform: conservatives vs. liberals, Christians vs. atheists, and a whole other host of divisive issues that are interspersed throughout the feed. I think they have a social media play in the bag if they pursue it.

It feels like Sora could replace Instagram.

Meta's already starting to fluff up their content with AI slop. How is it better when someone else does the same?

Honestly, this is the kind of anti-AI argument that makes me care. It also acknowledges just why those of us who like it are so passionate.

I've seen some prank calls (a YouTuber cloned Tucker Carlson's voice and called Alex Jones) but he just had a sound bank with a few pre-generated lines and it fell apart pretty quickly.

At least for now there's too much lag to do a real time conversation with a cloned voice.

Speech to Text > LLM Response > Generate Audio

If that time can shrink to subsecond, I think there'll be madness. (Specifically thinking of romance scammers)

At last summer's WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin, one of the talks I went to was by someone who did this with their own voice, to better respond to (really long?) WhatsApp messages they kept getting.

It worked a bit too well, as it could parse the sound file and generate a complete response faster than real-time, leading people to ask if he'd actually listened to the messages they sent him.

Also they had trouble believing him when he told them how he'd done it.

Awful, bots on their own having real conversations with people with the voice of a loved one. Scamming on steroids

You don't need an LLM Response

I've tried giving it languages like Turbo Pascal or telling it to obscure frameworks like fp-ts and while sometimes it's not syntactically perfect, but I can guarntee it's not just scraping code snippets from somewhere.