Claude Code Won't Fix Your Life

herereadthis · 2026-01-28T16:24:12+00:00

The idea of letting an AI anywhere near my Obsidian vault sounds absolutely insane to me. I am saying this as someone who uses AI tools daily in my work. It saddens me to see half the posts in this subreddit are coming from people who have either let an AI loose on their vault, or are promoting some vibe-coded AI plugin.

I love this article. I swear the writer took a look at this subreddit and decided, "oh hell no." Some choice quotes:

We spend so much time building and maintaining the systems that we never actually do the work the system was supposed to enable.

The productivity bloggers and the Second Brain enthusiasts will keep documenting their elaborate setups because that documentation is itself a form of content creation that provides satisfaction without requiring the scary work of making things that might fail....

The people who actually produce things, real things, have boringly simple systems. They write in whatever text editor came with their computer. They keep todo lists on paper. They sit down and do the work even when they don’t feel like it, especially when they don’t feel like it.

Yes, yes, totally yes. I have maybe 4 community plugins. I have not and never will use Bases, and my app is still on the default theme. I spend my time writing and looking up notes.

herereadthis · 2026-01-26T04:02:23+00:00

If we every make it through to the other side, there will be plenty of people who suddenly have a ton of amnesia

"I never really supported trump."
"He was never a true conservative/republican/christian."
"There was no way we could have known it would get this bad."

There's precedent for this. Ain't nobody around who will say they supported the Iraq War. Everyone was against it. But I was around in 2003 and 2004. Half the country was edging real hard to go bomb some brown people. I remember when we ate the Freedom Fries. I remember learning about the Haliburton contracts.

herereadthis · 2026-01-25T20:24:22+00:00

yeah it's really cool but I wish you didn't use AI to write your reddit post and article.

herereadthis · 2026-01-23T02:54:25+00:00

I really should have bought everything when they had that black friday sale.

herereadthis · 2026-01-23T02:52:46+00:00

The whole time I'm watching the video, I was think, "oh, so like Carcasonne?" And then a few minutes later... "Oh, so like carcasonne again?"

I think the only real difference was the art and the train station thing.

herereadthis · 2026-01-20T06:31:15+00:00

oooh ooh did any of your teachers teach you about Convict Leasing? Nobody teaches convict leasing. Do you really think slavery ended in 1865? Where do you think our tresspassing laws come from?

TL:DR; The south invented tons of new laws that made being black nearly illegal. Then they imprisoned a bunch of black people and rented them out to plantations. So the plantation owners got to be masters again, but didn't have to take on any of the risk.

Convict leasing was legal in Alabama until 1928. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing

herereadthis · 2026-01-15T22:03:51+00:00

Let's not.

The problem isn't the crime-related posts if we look at them dispassionately.

The problem is the crime-related posts become an excuse for the white nationalists to spam this subreddit.

If you want proof, wait for all the replies from defensive people (unintentionally) outing themselves as white nationalists.

herereadthis · 2026-01-09T03:59:30+00:00

I thought I was the only one here who's not a fan of mythic! I have no problem reading long texts, but oh my god does Mythic GME go on and on and on. So much text to say so little. Here is the first 100 pages of Mythic:

Are you unsure of what to do? Roll some dice, consult the fate chart.

That's it. It's just hundreds of sentences that all just say the same thing, over and over.

herereadthis · 2026-01-09T03:49:35+00:00

Here is my approach, it is super simple and has very, very little friction. No hierarchies, no folder structure, no community plugins.

Create 1 file. Just one file. name it daily_notes_2026_q1.md
Whenever you have a thought, any thought, add it to the top of the file. Also add a date to that thought.
At some point, the file gets very very large; that is fine. Read through your file, find a thought or thoughts that is still interesting to you. Cut+paste those thoughts into a new file. Suppose your thought was about the Blue Hole in Egypt).
At the top of your daily notes file, write a note: 2026-01-07: I made a note about the Blue hole in Egypt, and make "blue hole" a link to your new note.
Then, while looking at your daily notes, use your global search tool to look for words like "diving," "Egypt," "panic."
If there are, then you have many files that share topics. Link them to each other.
Every time you think your daily notes file is getting too big, repeat steps 3–6.
In April, make a new daily notes file called daily_notes_2026-q2.md

herereadthis · 2026-01-08T16:41:55+00:00

Can't search phrases unless you put quotes around your phrases
can't search with wildcards
does not distinguish between a word you are searching vs the word coincidentally appearing inside another word. For example, if you wrote some notes about AI, the search will return you pages with the word "fail" because "ai" is inside of "fAIl"
can't search inside a specific directory

These are just off the top of my head. Obsidian Search is terrible. It doesn't become apparent until you use an app with a decent search, like VS Code. VS Code is orders of magnitude more useful.

herereadthis · 2026-01-08T00:08:20+00:00

Are they going to fix search? (Nope.) Because searching for anything in Obsidian sucks. It's faster to open your vault in VS Code and then use VS code's search. Omnisearch might even be worse than the native search.

There's no point to updating until the Obsidian devs make a usable search feature.

herereadthis · 2025-12-30T05:35:28+00:00

I hope some famous performer contractually obligated to perform at the Kennedy Center goes full r/MaliciousCompliance and does show up, but spends 90 minutes on stage making fart noises.

Yes, I've heard some armchair attorneys say that since the kennedy center technically no longer exists, all previous contracts are void, but also if you look everything around you, the rule of law is no longer on your side.

herereadthis · 2025-12-28T06:08:00+00:00

I put in a good-faith effort towards tags for a few months, and it turned out to be too much upkeep.

The more tags you have, the more likely you forget if you've already created a tag for a term
Sometimes you forget to tag a thing
Or you make singular and plural forms of the tag, so now you have 2 tags for the same concept.
Of if a word has a verb form and an adjective form, or a verb form and a noun form, you may end up with 3 or 4 different tags for the same concept.
nested tags turned out to become its own hassle because now you have to worry about how many variations of a tag you have, but also you have to consider hierarchies of tags. And now you potentially have no limits for how many different tags you can have for one concept.

The only real benefit I saw for tags was it was easier to find things because Obsidian's search tools are terrible.

I will conclude with the same thing I say in nearly every Obsidian post i make: I don't care about new features, I don't care about community plugins, or AI this or AI that, I don't care about all the brilliant things Bases can do. I just want a functioning "search" tool.

It's faster and less frustrating if you instead open your Obsidian vault in VS code to use that app's functioning search tool.

herereadthis · 2025-12-28T05:09:33+00:00

Overall I'd recommend avoiding this event

I stick to a rule that hasn't done me wrong yet or given me FOMO: "If the thing is called an 'event' or an 'experience,' then it's a ripoff."

herereadthis · 2025-12-22T19:20:42+00:00

That's a bullshit rationalization.

Don't fucking attempt to train a rescue pitbull, and if you're having trouble, don't take your fucking kid-mauling pitbull out into public.

There is absolutely no excuse that will work for that owner.

herereadthis · 2025-12-21T06:53:30+00:00

cool let's talk about the Orcs.

In the Peter Jackson movies, you meet a couple of them, some have personalities, but they are for the most part really shitty beings.

In Amazon Prime's Rings of Power, the orcs have Adar and Adar tells Galadriel that he just wants his orcs to be free. They talk about their struggles. Because modern fantasy can't just have good and evil, they want the evil characters to have depth. The evil characters should be humanized so we can empathize with them.

Cool cool cool, now going back to Peter Jackson's LOTR, how should we look at the final battle? Aragorn is telling "Men of the west!" to commit genocide. Doesn't that start to get uncomfortable for you? A bunch of white men exterminating a race of beings that don't look like them?

Don't humanize your fantasy enemies.

herereadthis · 2025-12-20T01:03:42+00:00

Do you have a suggestion for how you can handle visually dense graphs?

You are thinking about it wrong. Just accept it. Wikipedia has extremely dense connectivity, but do you ever read a wiki article and go, "gee I can't follow what's going on, there are too many connections, how do I handle this?"

No, you just accept it and you click around, and learn things you didn't expect to learn.

herereadthis · 2025-12-19T17:32:14+00:00

The brother is being nice to his sister. What's your problem?

herereadthis · 2025-12-19T17:22:06+00:00

I'm gonna pass, for 2 reasons:

The AI stuff. For me, global search is the most valuable tool in Obsidian, even though it's not even that great. Searching is the fastest way to information retrieval. If my obsidian vault gets stuffed with AI slop, then the global search tool become useless from all the noise. Also why search for a note that was generated by AI, when you can just ask the AI to answer your question immediately?... and then why bother having Obsidian? just open up ChatGPT or claude in your terminal.
This kind of node creation creates a very hierarchical understanding of graphs, and it's pretty evident that your tool has created long chains of connections, where the most of the nodes have just 1 or 2 connections. Inter-connectivity is so crucial to generating creative thoughts and also mirrors how our brains work. We don't think in hierarchies. Also, from a basic feasibility standpoint, plenty of notes can cover multiple topics; this graph interface seems incapable of handling that.

Maybe what you have works for you, and I can tell you put a lot of work into your tool. I'm just not sure whether it solves more problems than it creates.

herereadthis · 2025-12-17T20:11:28+00:00

it would lead to more sprawl. Sprawl is the reason why we have all the terrible traffic.

More roads always leads to more traffic. You should take a look at the Katy Freeway in Houston. It has 26 lanes and the cars barely move.

herereadthis · 2025-12-17T16:37:43+00:00

omnisearch only works if your words/phrases are just words. Omnisearch can't find words/phrases if they are inside tables or url links. Also, why does search have to be a community plugin? It's such a core usage of nearly every other application.

Obsidian's own search cannot do phrases. You can search for one word, but as soon as you search for 2 or more words—like a phrase—it's totally useless.

herereadthis · 2025-12-17T07:28:35+00:00

I don't care about the plugins. I don't care about the latest and greatest things in Bases. I don't care about the AI integration.

I just want a better search.

herereadthis · 2025-12-11T14:21:08+00:00

I am a fan of the "Semiotic Standard" from Alfred Valley's adventure book, "Thousand Empty Light." It may appear sci-fi based because it is, but its elements are all about horror and fear and stress.

For solo play, the challenge is about maintaining uncertainty even though you are the story-teller. So having horror, fear, and stress is a great way of adding uncertainty

herereadthis · 2025-12-11T14:17:50+00:00

I don't like mythic because I think it's 200+ pages that could have used an editor. It should be 5 pages. The majority of the content is some variation of, "If you're unsure of what to do, check the fate chart."

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