Starting a new job has meant I haven’t been getting out to shoot as much as I’d like.

I’m slowly getting back into the habit.

Here’s a grab bag of photos from the last few months.

🔗 ∙ Tagged in My Photos.

My sports teams suck but the good news is that margaritas still work.

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I’m basking in my role as the family Cookie Monster.

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Found a sweet new meeting room.

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I like to maintain my own personal set of Markdown notes for work. The act of typing ideas and information helps me process them mentally. I tend to organise my notes as a series of daily notes with links to longer-lived reference notes for concepts or projects.

I switched from NotePlan to Obsidian as a veneer over the Markdown files a while back. I didn’t have a need for NotePlan’s task management infrastructure. Obsidian is free and has loads of plugins if you want to cut loose on extending it.

I recently started a new job, which meant creating a brand-new vault, and I felt like giving the LLM Wiki approach a crack. Ultimately, having a robot do all the wiki bookkeeping for me feels like a worthwhile experiment.

The overall workflow is simple: I write in my daily note throughout the day, and I ask an LLM to process it at the end of the day. The LLM fetches relevant meeting transcripts and whatever else it can find by following links in my daily note. It then links everything together in long-lived notes covering projects, domain concepts, people I work with, and anything else it decides to maintain.

I also maintain a file called big-picture.md, which outlines the main open loops on my mind from week to week. The LLM doesn’t edit the main part of this file, though it can add reference information to a dedicated section at the bottom.

The vault is a Git repository, so both the LLM and I can use its version history to see how things have evolved over time.

I can search the long-lived notes in Obsidian to get an up-to-date view of each project, person, or concept, along with related information from linked notes.

As a bonus, during my end-of-week review, I ask the LLM to summarise my week, including which tasks or open loops I’ve moved forward or closed, and which new ones I’ve created. This helps me set my goals for the following week. I put these reflections and goals in a weekly note.

That’s pretty much it. I’ve found the reduction in bookkeeping valuable so far. I’ll see how well it scales over time.

As for plugins, I try to use as few as possible. These are the ones I use in this vault.

• At People for easily creating references to people notes.
• Seek for better vault search than Obsidian provides out of the box.
• Calendar for visually navigating daily and weekly notes.
• Dataview for rolling up indexes of notes. The LLM added this and uses it; I only consume the results.
• Mister Sheen for sanitising text pasted in from Slack and Google Docs. I got the LLM to write this private plugin to apply my preferred formatting.

🔗 ∙ Tagged in AI, Knowledge Management, Productivity.

I see Greg’s name, I click.

↬ ∙ Tagged in Music.

I was in Denver last week for work. I managed to get out to Red Rocks on my final morning.

It was fantastic during the day—I can only imagine what it would be like seeing a gig there at night.

🔗 ∙ Tagged in My Photos, Travel.

I feel like building a canoe on Alone rarely pays off.

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Good yarns.

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I’m in the new job SaaS onboarding washing machine.

These apps are falling over themselves to pop up callouts over every button they have available to get me to click them.

I’m like Indy with a machete hacking past them to get to the humble dashboard button or whatever.

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It’s a popcorn, wine, and Tim Tams kind of trip to the shops.

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Bruce Schneier:

At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift … even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things. The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work – if the task has to be done and no one cares how – then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and how the task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.

↬ ∙ Tagged in AI.

Andrew Kemp:

Between 150 and 500 million people may have lived and died in Australia before 1788 (British colonisation).

I always enjoy these kinds of posts.

↬ ∙ Tagged in Trivia.

I’m back on my learning guitar jag. This set of theory videos is great.

↬ ∙ Tagged in Music.

Charity Majors:

The mandate is one way of putting organizational muscle behind a decision. It’s a funding mechanism. It works by acknowledging that “hey, we are all going to be a little slower for a bit while we figure this out, and it will be annoying and expensive and we accept that.”

Without funding and a mandate, you’re effectively telling your employees to build these skills in their spare time, if they can and if they feel like it. Which is the same as telling them “this is NOT a priority, we are NOT willing to fund it.”

↬ ∙ Tagged in Work Culture.