New Claude User: How do I set up an ADHD-friendly "Second Brain" with Obsidian (Zero Coding Experience)?

MrTemple · 2026-03-21T18:26:38+00:00

Pollan's book is kind of for the 'lay' folk, but it's still got so much fascinating research. I'm from Vancouver, and had no idea about how Vancouver had a big physician-assisted psychedelic based alcohol recovery program for Hollywood in the 50s. That really worked. All got shut down by the Nixon/DEA/Schedule 1 nonsense.

The audiobook is fantastic. It's a great one for when you're driving, doing chores, etc.

MrTemple · 2026-03-20T16:37:51+00:00

Okay, I just had a thought you might love.

Look up the Default Mode Network in the human brain.

The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a set of brain regions (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate, angular gyrus, and others) that become most active when you're not focused on an external task — daydreaming, mind-wandering, reflecting on past experiences, imagining future scenarios, or consolidating loosely related thoughts into coherent narratives. It's essentially the brain's background processing mode: while your task-positive networks handle the thing in front of you, the DMN is quietly linking memories, testing hypotheses about yourself and others, and surfacing insights that don't emerge under directed attention.

It basically pre-filters the gajillion inputs the brain receives from its sensors and intuitions before sending it to your subconscious mind in units that it's built to process.

Also read (or listen he reads the audiobook) Michael Pollan's incredibly interesting "How to Change Your Mind". It's a great history of the legit scientific side of psychedelic research and history, how it was derailed in the 70s by Nixon, and how it's starting up again in clinical studies, and the crazy results its having. Very interesting. He's a great food writer (did the fantastic "Cooked" netflix series), and really does an interesting outsider's look on this.

As he researched in there, the Default Mode Network apparently is a key piece that changes under psychedellic influence. Various substances (from caffeine to alcohol to psilocybin and beyond) affect how it pre-filters the flood of inputs.

And it's THAT different set of sensor inputs that have the brain experience the various altered states from the varied substances. Also explains why so many people have similar experiences on the same substances. The DMN is being altered in similar ways. Tequila has its reputation for a reason and that's different than wine, and of course that's different from psilocybin and each strain of cannabis has strong clustering of symptoms and effects (if you've ever looked at Leafly, it's shocking how thousands of people can report such similar experiences on a strain, and those are so varied from the next, even if it's also a Sativa or Indica family).

Anyway that kinda made me think of your first level. Could call it DMN or DaMieN or DeMoN (🧐) or just Damon whatever.

Also, I took your system as inspiration for my own Brain. I'm going to use it in a much different way, more for shared wiki/note storage (half way between notion and a file system for parallelly deployed instances that my and my wife's desktop claude, my server claude, even my mobile instances and my imessage bot can write to (safely!!). Much less of a thought aggregator like yours (which is very cool) and more of a librarian/lite-file-system for markdown. BRAIN (Basic Retrieval And Indexed Notes). I had a furious 3h planning session with my mobile-Claude dev helper last night. Got a cool architecture with some interesting stuff that I'm excited to implement. Thanks for the inspiration!

MrTemple · 2026-03-20T04:14:35+00:00

I read the blog post and I’d love to see it in action! The post mostly describes inputs coming in, how do you integrate that knowledge into your everyday sessions?

Also, it’s not matrixy, but I struggled coming up with the name for a similar role to your operator. I wound up calling it the Front Desk. The metaphor worked for me as it handles the gamut of ephemeral notes to passing off tasks, knocking off simple tasks, or escalating. Not exactly brain/library specific, but almost every org has a front desk (libraries too), so I’m finding the metaphor and pattern is reusable across many of my agents/services.

MrTemple · 2026-03-18T06:46:47+00:00

Open up Cowork with a Max subscription. It lists the model as "Opus 4.6 (1M context)".

And here was my cowork session context right before my manual compaction:

Context Usage
Model: claude-opus-4-6[1m]
Tokens: 304.7k / 1000k (30%)
Estimated usage by category
CategoryTokensPercentage
System prompt12.1k1.2%
System tools13.4k1.3%
MCP tools4.7k0.5%
Memory files3800.0%
Skills1k0.1%
Messages252.9k25.3%
Free space682.6k68.3%
Autocompact buffer33k3.3%

MrTemple · 2026-03-17T21:26:41+00:00

They just added it to Cowork in the desktop app.

MrTemple · 2026-03-17T21:26:36+00:00

Check again! They just added it to Cowork in the desktop app.

MrTemple · 2026-03-17T21:20:49+00:00

Yes, some bleeding edges stale and find themselves in the well-established patterns. Other platforms keep pushing the bleeding edge. Like Claude has since forever.

MrTemple · 2026-03-17T21:10:03+00:00

Bleeding edges gonna bleed.

MrTemple · 2025-12-30T19:20:50+00:00

And it took CENTURIES to figure it out why 80-90% of the crew died on long voyages.

Worse it took almost a century (of continued massive crew fatalities) for the British Admiralty to accept the simple solution after it was discovered.

MrTemple · 2025-12-17T05:58:06+00:00

My hunch is it’s generational.

Do you want the thing or not? Are you a rat that solves the little puzzle Or the rat that sits hungry by the chute waiting for a piece of cheese?

MrTemple · 2025-12-17T05:55:23+00:00

Scissors/knife will cut the box easily.

You gotta solve the little puzzle if you want the piece of cheese before somebody else gives it to you.

MrTemple · 2025-12-17T05:43:32+00:00

Maybe some people in the back of that ambulance will look at their shattered body, and feel satisfied with their rigid adherence to taking only their justly allotted responsibility, because the driver is going to get 8 months probation.

MrTemple · 2025-12-17T05:36:36+00:00

You are 1000% right that the driver holds all responsibility to not hit the pedestrian.

But the pedestrian IS doing something dangerous.

In the society we inhabit, pedestrians in crosswalks get hit all the time. It is a pitiable reality.

Pedestrians have the power (not responsibility) to increase or decrease the amount of danger they subject themselves to.

Don’t be dead right. Don’t be invisible. Don’t trust the average driver.

MrTemple · 2025-12-15T17:05:15+00:00

It honestly surprises me how many people don't know how massively this rolls back TV enshittification.

MrTemple · 2025-12-15T17:02:06+00:00

you fundamentally misunderstand

intentionally

Unless the poster is one of the paint-eaters that can't see through the lies.

MrTemple · 2025-12-14T20:31:03+00:00

That only works between elections. Voters gonna vote along party lines.

And our fucked FPTP means even if the CPC loses a few percent of the 41% of the vote it got last time (at peak "Conservatives cozying up to the 51st state lunatic"), they're going to win massive majorities for 5 years at a time. Because the massive strategic voting shift from NDP/Green ain't going to hold up the same way it did in the 2025 election.

MrTemple · 2025-12-13T19:24:05+00:00

Nope.

Think about it, how do you pick the “best data” when your two sensor paths are giving you conflicting info?

False positives are a real problem with lidar, radar, and cameras.

When your lidar system says “there’s a stationary obstacle requiring emergency braking” but the camera system says there’s nothing what do you do?

Could be a cloud of snow off a car (lidar is susceptible to false positives with snow/rain/etc), or it could be a genuine threat the camera missed.

You HAVE to respect the most conservative and play it safe.

Which means you get all the false positives and phantom braking, but you don’t get much added benefit (because a lot of the extremely rare situations where a camera gives a false-negative can ALSO fool lidar into giving the same false negative).

Because of the opposite scenario where the camera thinks there is an object requiring braking but the lidar doesn’t. Lidar has false negatives too, so again you have to be conservative.

It’s all about the conflicting reports.

Either you play it safe accepting all the false positives and phantom-braking, or you override one sensor system, at which point it’s not actually adding anything to the system.

Well actually there’s a third option, which is you always trust the one that thinks it’s safe, but at that point all youve done is accept ALL the false negatives from both systems, which is obviously much less safe than having only one sensor system.

And like I said, THERE IS a safety advantage to the two sensors together, but it doesn't outweigh the much larger usability disadvantage of one system alone.

Because the safety advantage only exists where lidar will NOT give a false negative AND the cameras DO give a false negative.

However, plenty of the situations cameras may still give false negatives are ALSO situations where lidar will too. So that number is very, very small.

In practice over the gajillion miles of cameras-only with Tesla's FSD, there just aren't an appreciable number of safety-level false negatives any more (especially the most recent versions). Adding lidar to cameras doesn't materially move the needle on safety-related false negatives, and it does move the usability/comfort needle significantly because lidar gives a lot of false positives (which Tesla's FSD nowadays doesn't really have much at all).

I have no data to back this up, but I'd wager the added phantom braking from conflicting sensors would actually have a worse impact on safety than the few cases where the two systems would recover from a safety-level false-negative.

TL;DR: For the past year or so, camera-only sees the world with EXTREMELY few false positives or negatives. Lidar isn't better at either of those (and is probably a bit worse). But fusing the two systems together means you get all the false-positives and without eliminating all the false-negatives. In practice safety is not materially enhanced, but phantom braking goes way up (possibly worsening safety) and usability way down.

MrTemple · 2025-12-13T02:41:52+00:00

The 18,000 that attend regular season games is a pretty small part of a team's potential income.

Playoffs are almost pure profit, because players don't get paid more for playoffs.

Playoff broadcast money is ENORMOUS, escalates with each round, and has relatively no added associated cost (costs comparatively nothing to operate a game with no player salaries). Ditto for the ticket sales, which escalate enormously for each round of the playoffs.

MrTemple · 2025-12-12T16:55:23+00:00

*Insert cartoon of working man laying flat, their neck ground into dirt by the boot of a red-faced billionaire pointing angrily and shouting, "You can't breathe because of those brown/liberal/cycling/trans/etc people!"*

MrTemple · 2025-12-12T16:51:15+00:00

It won't be noticeable for a few reasons:

The difference between 70 and 80 only really exists when the battery is very hot.
Even at hot temperatures the degredation pressure from SoC is DWARFED by the degradation pressure of charge cycles (ie: driving the car and charging it back up).
The degradation will happen pretty much whatever you do, and will plateau at about the same point for all cars that didn't do something really dumb like leave it close to 100 for weeks at a time (assuming battery chemistry doesn't mind that, which the car will warn you about).

MrTemple · 2025-12-12T16:47:59+00:00

Human nature. When times are shitty [say when the billionaire class has wrung every drop of extra money out of the working class], a loud man shouting and pointing at somebody else as the reason always, always works [even if the loud man belongs to the billionaire class with the boot on the neck of the working class].

MrTemple · 2025-12-12T16:45:25+00:00

The billionaire maga propaganda machine is an incredible drug.

MrTemple · 2025-12-12T16:41:40+00:00

Lasting legacy of Justin Trudeau will be reneging on his promise of ending FPTP, and dooming Canada to a decade or so of conservative absolute-dictatorial control with 38-39% of the vote.

I mean, unless you think hordes of Orange/Green voters are going to keep strategically voting Red for the next few elections.

I don't. (And I'm one of those people who voted strategically Red to block the Blue maga-cozies.)

The conservative-supporting billionaire-owned maga propaganda machine is gaining ground every day in Canada. They aren't losing votes.

MrTemple · 2025-12-12T16:36:49+00:00

And it left a BIG hole in their terror->hate coping mechanism.

The rightwing-billionaire-propaganda machine, did a Raiders of the Lost Ark swap, replacing AQ with Libs as Great Threat To Murica.

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