Overview: Personal Productivity

"how can you use ChatGPT to generate ideas and brainstorm within Obsidian?", which is currently my note-taking tool of choice. First, some generic advice for prompting:"be specific about the outcome that you want to achieve... providing a prompt that contains more descriptive language ...give preceding prompts ... [specify the] resp…

Borrowing heavily from an article "about social media platform saturation inspired by the craze to sign up on Threads (only to sign out a week later).", Alberto Romero does the same for generative AI to explain "why it isn’t worth getting generative AI fatigue.After providing a potted timeline of the release of the major LLMs for th…

An interview with Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind & architect behind AlphaFold.

"ChatGPT only looks at the past... [it's response] based on an “average” of everything already said on the issue. It’s pure reversion to the mean"

"AI-generated advice represents a huge shift"convenience: whereas a google search inundates you with results mixed with spam, splog and ads, "ChatGPT streamline this process... people choose convenience over almost anything else... [cf]Fogg’s behavior model: Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt". With AI, it's finally …

While my focus at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre has been on their Knowledge4Policy platform (K4P), I've recently been pulled in to help design their internal communications, community, collaboration & knowledge management strategy as they grapple with migrating from Jive to M365.

"“Document Search Chatbot” ... field common questions (FAQ’s) based on the content of several documents.... Azure Search to extract and rank key highlights from a set of text documents based on a user query. This user query and Azure Search results are then passed to OpenAI to be interpreted and formatted into a chat based response..."Wh…

" a step-by-step guide for building a document Q&A chatbot in an efficient way with llama-index and GPT API... ask the bot in natural language about your own documents/data... [see it] retrieving info from the documents and generating a response [1]... customer support, synthesizing user research, your personal knowledge management"K…

How can a reasonably conservative corner of the European Commission adopt M365?

Wired's rules for using generative AI: "Not for images, yes for research, no for copyediting, maybe for idea generation". Meanwhile interactive book PromptCraft shows how to "get the most out of the creative man/machine communications... AI is like querying our collective intelligence".So how best to design an AI prompt?…

from Alice Albrecht, who "runs re:collect, a startup building an AI-powered thought partner:... advances in AI and cheaper compute lower the bar for getting from a creative idea to a final output... though, we still need to provide the initial seed... and ... judge whether we’re heading in the right direction. We’re still the creative direct…

"What if we were to think of LLMs not as tools for answering questions, but as tools for asking us questions and inspiring our creativity? ... even simple tools can lead to interesting results when they clash with the contents of our minds"So he tries using ChatGPT as a muse. TL:DR; "ChatGPT asked me probing questions, suggested spe…

First of 3 posts on managing tasks with Obsidian, which I need to invest in as I'm creating tasks as I write my notes and then never looking for them again. This post starts with installing Calendar and Obsidian Tasks plugins.As always, to follow this advice I then needed to set up another plugin. Journaling Using Daily Questions in Obsidian …

Interesting, illuminating (but contested) metaphor for thinking about LLMs from one of my favourite authors, Ted Chiang:"Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information... but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation... nonse…

This piece captures and then explores exactly what I've always thought about the future direction of myhub.ai: imagine what would happen if you had your own personal AI assistant operating across your content - your public posts, private library (including content shared from friends, stuff in your reading queue, etc.) and the wider web, emph…

Articulates exactly my problem with most Tools4Thought, hence the "super simple Thinking Tool" I want at the heart of myhub's CMS."Perhaps something as simple as having the word ‘Tool’ first causes us to focus on the tool more than the thinking... to confuse thought as an object rather than thought as a process... [causing us t…

"I wanted a way to add any bookmarks I make there into a 'Read later' category in my RSS reader ... I create a PHP file that gets the latest 20 bookmarks... and takes an access token from your mastodon 'development' admin page. Then I can give this URL to my RSS reader: https://neil.mckillop.org/stuff/mastodon_bookmarks.rs…

NvdH's complete overview of her usage of Obsidian. My first step in transitioning from Roam is to Hub this with my thoughts (PS she has a video):Setupmultiple Obsidian vaults, each version-controlled Git repository on GitHub.plus main Obsidian vault in a Dropbox for extra version control and backup"Just for overkill" Obsidian Sync a…

Summarising Clive Thompson's How I Take Notes When I’m Doing Research: "It’s the reframing of material into summaries or marginalia that adds value and meaning for the researcher", which is precisely why I'm paraphrasing and describing what I curate, and how it relates to my own experience and plans, rather than just simply co…

Marc-Antoine Parent's project: HyperKnowledge.

"a root cause of the messy state of Information Architecture in large institutions and on the web today... application-centric mindset... remedy: ... Data is the center of the universe; applications are ephemeral.""systems could be more than an order of magnitude cheaper and more flexible" if data-centric key principles are res…

I do like a challenge."We live in the most distracted time in human history. Can we reclaim our attention spans?... A new book by the British journalist Johann Hari, called Stolen Focus, takes a close look at what’s happening — and what’s happened — to our collective attention... we’re all becoming lost in our own lives, which feel more and …

I've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). My chapter will encompass each user’s PKG, the Social Knowledge Graph created by networking them together via the Fediverse, Solid hosting, AI writing tools and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.This post provides a first draft of its Introducti…

A short experiment on getting the most out of podcasts by using speech-to-text engines to create rtanscripts. TL:DR:Welder’s excellent and free; Otter.ai’s got some amazing features, but it’s pricey; just forget Google.

A neural network to help web content authors efficiently and completely characterise their content using the site taxonomy. Accuracy improves with use.

"Feeling stuck?" This YANSS podcast is with "professor, author, therapist, and speaker Britt Frank, a trauma specialist who ... helps clients to get out of the feeling of being stuck."This was well-timed, because stuck is something I've been feeling for a while now. Perhaps unjustifiably, but nevertheless her book's d…

Really good but short piece on how most "Note-taking apps have ways they want you to work, a grain you should follow. Except Obsidian... an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for text files ... [not] a note-taking app... an integrated thinking environment. ".Hence you have to set it up to support the way you want to work, rather …

A "How I use it" from Ivo. "Roam changed the game [by] ... treating the data as a graph ... [and] allowing blocks to quickly be nested, referred to, embedded, created from a piece of text in a block, appear in the sidebar, being searched and queried".Ivo developed a way of ontologising his Roam graph: "In the context of a…

"the underlying problem is stubbornly intractable"Great piece, although I'm unsure that "a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic", it is true that:productivity geeks exist, develop their system and then try to sell it.speaking from experience, it is really, r…

An overview by Coda, with 20 more resources, on Coda & Notion, which both take "a modular approach to digital documentation. You can do traditional docs ... but you never have to leave the tool to build more complex workflows and processes".