I do not understand how people have enough things to put down for posterity where they need linking between different documents, rather than a simple hierarchy. I suppose we are very different humans.
Roam has always felt like a bit of a chore -- while it's easy enough to set up backlinks, having to do that one step has always been like a waste of time to me. This is the kind of thing that imo an agentic workflow could do for you:
- Just start typing
- Let the LLM analyze what you're typing, given the RAG database of everything else you've added, and be able to make those kinds of correlations quickly.
- One-button approve the backlinks that it's suggesting (or even go Cursor-style yolo mode for your backlinks).
Then, have a periodic process do some kind of directed analysis; are you keeping a journal, and want to make sure that you're writing enough in your journal? Are you talking about the same subjects over and over again? Should you mix things up? Things like that would be perfect for an LLM to make suggestions about. I don't know if Roam is thinking of doing this or not.
But... backlinks are fully automated. If you just make forward-links that you'd normally do in the course of writing.
You're thinking of an optional step of adding extra links "just because", but IMO that's as a learning process in the beginning when you're not used to adding any forward-links whatsoever.
I think this might be the most exciting use-case of LLM's I've seen suggested here. I've struggled with exactly this problem with note-taking and personal knowledge-bases.
> But there’s one main reason that I don’t use it anymore: when I write my notes the thought, ‘Where am I going to put this?’ plagues me every time. It’s a direct and immediate pain. And it sometimes gets in the way of me even taking notes at all. I have this sensation many times a day and it’s deeply uncomfortable.
I had a similar problem when designing my personal management system last decade [1]. Every system you use, you have to stick to in order to get results. Sticking to a system can be emotionally draining to the point where you give up.
IMHO, that sense of emotional drain you get with fancy note-taking systems is tapping into something true. Only a small fraction of what we think we need to remember actually matters and will benefit from so much care to structuring it. The rest is a waste and a drain on our limited cognitive resources.
My solution is to initially write in a designated place that allows for less structure. In the to-do system, the main doc has a "landing zone" for action items to be quickly jotted down, then structured and organized later. In the project system, I'll have a "dump" file where I dump project thoughts that I'm not sure are important. I trust that if the ideas I jot down are actually important, the structure they deserve will come to me later.
Is that trust always right? Maybe not 100% of the time, but it seems like a more useful heuristic than "everything I put into this system needs lots of structure I don't feel like providing, so I don't, and it makes me feel like a failure".
I don't know about you guys, but I'm an Obsidian lover and that's not gonna stop anytime soon. IMO the big problem about what this guy is saying can be boiled down to this:
>My most common behavior is to Actually Write the Notes. That’s why Roam needs to help me with the thought, ‘I don’t know where to put this.’ If it does that well, it makes the vast majority of my time spent in the app a breeze. If it does that poorly, it makes my experience so painful that I want to switch systems.
The lesson of Obsidian for me has been that organization is creativity. If what you want is to have an ideological maid that can organize all your thoughts for you, then you're gonna have a bad time with any note taking service (although I'm sure you can develop llm plugins to do this in a way that you personally enjoy now.) What's beneficial about these note apps is that they put this issue directly in front of your face. Either rise to meet it or go back to pretending like organization doesn't matter and avoid the responsibility of creativity.
Using Obsidian goes through stages much like a growing business. You start and you have personal relationships with all the notes so you can remember them, but once you get enough notes you realize it's too much to manage just using personal relationships and you need to start implementing a system. As you get better, your system changes, leaving a paper trail of notes with different systems. That's why the only thing that I think these note apps need is a deprecation system, but otherwise IMO they're perfect.
I started using Roam and as a proper geek, dug through the data it sends back and forth about me and my notes in the browser console. It was doing access logs and some random day I saw some random dude’s name in the access log for my notes. I reached out to ask. They told me he was a new employee. I saw no reason to save personal notes and ideas on a platform where any employee can enjoy them. Thereafter I took my notes to tools i wrote myself. Very enlightening to the incentives for building such tools.
Tana, Capacities, Bear, Lgseq all have backlinks and other stuff from Roam for years now or so, thanks to Roam IMO. I wish they were able to make some good money from this innovation but they moved too slow at some crucial moment.
OTOH the app that really won was Obsidian, due to flawless execution with the "local first" principle. Being closed source and "not listening too much to the community" weren't issues, they just focused and improved consistently.
Logseq has been my go-to for a couple of years now, it's datalog-esque query language is great for automated page generation, and it's implicit "indirect" links are also really nice- the block-level note primative fits very neatly in my head as well.
When I tried to read this, I was sent through several redirects with a total of somewhere around 80MB or more of data downloaded, to end up at an otherwise blank "Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue" screen.
It seems like it would work really well for someone who practices zettelkasten. I spent some time trying to learn to manage my knowledge using it with Roam but it never quite clicked with my way of working.
Another one for the “not really using Roam any more” box
Are there extensions that e.g. use NLP/LLMs/vectors to suggest potential links from elsewhere in ones KB? Could be a fairly straightforward plugin.
(I haven't used Roam personally and have no idea if it even has a plugin architecture or is extensible, but this reminds me a lot of some of the knowledge management work we're doing with corporates)
I used to use Roam, but they move like molasses, no new features or fixes for weeks. F’ing on cruise 40 in a 60 zone. Also it didn’t give me much “connecting the dots”. I went back to simple Apple notes, save myself some time trying to squeeze value from the subscription
I do not understand how people have enough things to put down for posterity where they need linking between different documents, rather than a simple hierarchy. I suppose we are very different humans.
Roam has always felt like a bit of a chore -- while it's easy enough to set up backlinks, having to do that one step has always been like a waste of time to me. This is the kind of thing that imo an agentic workflow could do for you:
- Just start typing
- Let the LLM analyze what you're typing, given the RAG database of everything else you've added, and be able to make those kinds of correlations quickly.
- One-button approve the backlinks that it's suggesting (or even go Cursor-style yolo mode for your backlinks).
Then, have a periodic process do some kind of directed analysis; are you keeping a journal, and want to make sure that you're writing enough in your journal? Are you talking about the same subjects over and over again? Should you mix things up? Things like that would be perfect for an LLM to make suggestions about. I don't know if Roam is thinking of doing this or not.
But... backlinks are fully automated. If you just make forward-links that you'd normally do in the course of writing.
You're thinking of an optional step of adding extra links "just because", but IMO that's as a learning process in the beginning when you're not used to adding any forward-links whatsoever.
I think this might be the most exciting use-case of LLM's I've seen suggested here. I've struggled with exactly this problem with note-taking and personal knowledge-bases.
> But there’s one main reason that I don’t use it anymore: when I write my notes the thought, ‘Where am I going to put this?’ plagues me every time. It’s a direct and immediate pain. And it sometimes gets in the way of me even taking notes at all. I have this sensation many times a day and it’s deeply uncomfortable.
I had a similar problem when designing my personal management system last decade [1]. Every system you use, you have to stick to in order to get results. Sticking to a system can be emotionally draining to the point where you give up.
IMHO, that sense of emotional drain you get with fancy note-taking systems is tapping into something true. Only a small fraction of what we think we need to remember actually matters and will benefit from so much care to structuring it. The rest is a waste and a drain on our limited cognitive resources.
My solution is to initially write in a designated place that allows for less structure. In the to-do system, the main doc has a "landing zone" for action items to be quickly jotted down, then structured and organized later. In the project system, I'll have a "dump" file where I dump project thoughts that I'm not sure are important. I trust that if the ideas I jot down are actually important, the structure they deserve will come to me later.
Is that trust always right? Maybe not 100% of the time, but it seems like a more useful heuristic than "everything I put into this system needs lots of structure I don't feel like providing, so I don't, and it makes me feel like a failure".
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/renormalize/p/my-markdown-proj...
A post on Obsidian and a post on Roam today?
I don't know about you guys, but I'm an Obsidian lover and that's not gonna stop anytime soon. IMO the big problem about what this guy is saying can be boiled down to this:
>My most common behavior is to Actually Write the Notes. That’s why Roam needs to help me with the thought, ‘I don’t know where to put this.’ If it does that well, it makes the vast majority of my time spent in the app a breeze. If it does that poorly, it makes my experience so painful that I want to switch systems.
The lesson of Obsidian for me has been that organization is creativity. If what you want is to have an ideological maid that can organize all your thoughts for you, then you're gonna have a bad time with any note taking service (although I'm sure you can develop llm plugins to do this in a way that you personally enjoy now.) What's beneficial about these note apps is that they put this issue directly in front of your face. Either rise to meet it or go back to pretending like organization doesn't matter and avoid the responsibility of creativity.
Using Obsidian goes through stages much like a growing business. You start and you have personal relationships with all the notes so you can remember them, but once you get enough notes you realize it's too much to manage just using personal relationships and you need to start implementing a system. As you get better, your system changes, leaving a paper trail of notes with different systems. That's why the only thing that I think these note apps need is a deprecation system, but otherwise IMO they're perfect.
I started using Roam and as a proper geek, dug through the data it sends back and forth about me and my notes in the browser console. It was doing access logs and some random day I saw some random dude’s name in the access log for my notes. I reached out to ask. They told me he was a new employee. I saw no reason to save personal notes and ideas on a platform where any employee can enjoy them. Thereafter I took my notes to tools i wrote myself. Very enlightening to the incentives for building such tools.
Tana, Capacities, Bear, Lgseq all have backlinks and other stuff from Roam for years now or so, thanks to Roam IMO. I wish they were able to make some good money from this innovation but they moved too slow at some crucial moment.
OTOH the app that really won was Obsidian, due to flawless execution with the "local first" principle. Being closed source and "not listening too much to the community" weren't issues, they just focused and improved consistently.
Logseq has been my go-to for a couple of years now, it's datalog-esque query language is great for automated page generation, and it's implicit "indirect" links are also really nice- the block-level note primative fits very neatly in my head as well.
[2022], earlier discussion at the time (109 points, 103 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30320977
When I tried to read this, I was sent through several redirects with a total of somewhere around 80MB or more of data downloaded, to end up at an otherwise blank "Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue" screen.
Why do people tolerate the WWW working like this?
It seems like it would work really well for someone who practices zettelkasten. I spent some time trying to learn to manage my knowledge using it with Roam but it never quite clicked with my way of working.
Another one for the “not really using Roam any more” box
Are there extensions that e.g. use NLP/LLMs/vectors to suggest potential links from elsewhere in ones KB? Could be a fairly straightforward plugin.
(I haven't used Roam personally and have no idea if it even has a plugin architecture or is extensible, but this reminds me a lot of some of the knowledge management work we're doing with corporates)
I used to use Roam, but they move like molasses, no new features or fixes for weeks. F’ing on cruise 40 in a 60 zone. Also it didn’t give me much “connecting the dots”. I went back to simple Apple notes, save myself some time trying to squeeze value from the subscription