Paul Bryan

I'm not worried about brain rot from overusing LLM's. Rather, I'm worried about brain rot from overusing #orgroam in #emacs

Anytime I need to look up how to do something (in an info doc, web, manual, etc) I write an org-roam note about it. When (not if) I forget in the future, there's the note. What I'm discovering is that now I can't remember anything! I *have* to look up my org-roam note.

Today's example was decrypting my Luks encrypted external drive. I can never seem to remember the right command, but it's there (even with the UUID of my drive) in org-roam. I can even just execute the source block with the shell command 😀

Jun 4 at 7:48amWeb
Show thread𝓙. 𝓜.4d ago

@pabryan rather than "brainrot", perhaps think of it as "offloading"? Do you really find it necessary to keep all of it in the head? If wizards can have grimoires, you can certainly have your notes.

Besides, now you have something you can possibly pass on to other people who might want to learn what you know.

Show threadPaul Bryan4d ago

@tpfto Absolutely! I started doing it exactly to offload things. Mostly I'm just have a little joke that was sparked off when I (yet again!) couldn't remember cryptsetup :)

At some point, I would like to work out a good way to publish from my org-roam. At the moment, I'd have to publish the whole thing since it's interlinked, but I don't want to do that as it has personal information there (such as my disk UUID!). I should work out a good way to mark notes as private (or maybe safer to mark notes as public, with private the default) and perhaps generate warnings telling me which public notes have links to privates notes. Then I just publish the public notes and fix up the links from public to private!

Show threadPaul Bryan4d ago
@tpfto Ah, but one complication is that I also have links to emails, info pages etc.
Show threadslackline :emacs: :orgmode:4d ago
@pabryan I recognise this, the challenge I've found is then trying to remember where I saved a particular piece of information within all the notes! 😆
Show thread𝓙. 𝓜.4d ago
@slackline I find that when you're taking notes with software of this sort, it takes some amount of discipline to maintain an index of sorts (possibly hyperlinked), so that the next time you need something you forgot, the index is what you look at first, as opposed to aimlessly sifting through multiple notes. (cc. @pabryan )
Show threadPaul Bryan4d ago

@slackline For me, when I write a note, I try to think of a reasonably precise title and possibly an alias or two with other.common terms.

So far the only issue I've encountered when searching for notes is when it turns out I forgot to write the note in the first place!

Show threadSharlatan3d ago
@pabryan I guess org-roam is about something else ;-) the real power for me is to find new connections and not adding one more unlinked note
Show threadPaul Bryan3d ago
@sharlatan I use it for capturing ideas, some of which have links to other notes, and some that don't. I haven't found any particular use for exploring connections for it's own sake. I do use the search facilities a lot though.