Been in a similar philosophy for a while now. I like the idea of staying native to the OS, using open formats as much as possible, and using interoperable toolings.
The idea is to approach content as data-first, with tools on top, and be at ease with plans to Walk-Out when needed.
Besides the article in discussion, here are a few inspirations for plain-text as the defaults.
- The writing of our very own Obsidian’s CEO, Steph Ango at https://stephango.com @kepano on HN.
This is personal. However, many of the people I had meetings with love this. So, here we go.
Quite a while back, I realized that anything digital, from phones to computers, tends to become or look like very official/non-personal and hence looks bad, especially in 1:1 meetings. I decided to go with pen and paper, in a simple Notebook (A5 or A7 is my choice). I’m do not write anything personal, but the points shared or noted down between us are enough to remind me of any points that I might have noted in my mind.
I’ve carried this habit to many other meetings (non-1:1s too), even when there is a note-taker (AI or otherwise). My meeting notes usually get shared or used as references by other participants.
Even during the meetings, other participant(s) sometimes contribute to my notes. I don’t hate digital mediums; in fact, I have used Freeform on an iPad just like I use my Notebook for meeting notes.
The interesting part is that I learnt to draw like Dan Roam[1] quite a while back. So, my notes contain texts with a lot of arrows, stick figures, shapes, etc.
Sidenote: A lot of conversations got sidetracked to discussions about paper, fountain pens, the way I write, etc.
I like pen and paper for meetings because I can take notes while asserting dominance through constant eye contact. I can touch type, but I need to be looking at the screen to achieve the same level of accuracy with which I can blindly write.
Tangential: I also recently switched to paper without lines after 20 years, and it's been quite liberating.
Fortunately, I was trained/forced to write on plain blank papers in school. So, I can pretty much course-correct my invisible lines. However, when I have a choice, I’ve decided to stick to dotted grids.
Hmmm! How many meetings do you do in a week? Unless, you are building a Meetings App or your company is about Meetings, I'd suggest reducing the Meetings enough that you don't have to Transcribe everything.
My meeting notes are, well, like comic books; quite a lot more drawings. So, people usually take pictures or I just take pictures and email them.
For instance, I was once in a meeting at a company planning the product roadmap for the next 3-5 years. I did a timeline-of-sort note with circles (inspired by DaisyDisk), complete with a few different colors. That note became the "official" starting base for the plan, shared across the company and referenced by the team.
If you are a manager and having 1-1s the very use case he called out, you may have 1-1s with 15+ people every two weeks.
I am a staff consultant. I am constantly in meetings with customers, sales, my management for high profile clients, people working on projects I’m leading, internal strategy go to market meetings.
My website[1] will be hitting 25-years next year (2026 JUN 11). I stopped caring about comments, reactions, SEO, etc. for a while; I just post whatever I want these days.[2]
Of course, I like the fact that sites such as Adobe, Wikipedia, WordPress, IBM, the US Patent (mostly via Google), Russian and Chinese Websites, and quite a few other prominent websites maintains their links that points to some of my articles.
Yeah, that’s mostly the direction I’ve taken taoofmac.com to. I do it for fun, extremely odd dives into weird tech, and essentially public notes on my consulting stuff.
That has got to be a joke. It's like they're mocking their customers. I can't stop laughing at the sight of the guy they somehow convinced to model this thing in their promotional photo.
It's a trendy fashion item for a particular subset of rich fashion people, which is not most people. It makes total sense in that context. It doesn't really need to make sense to everybody else.
They're referring to A-POC https://www.moma.org/collection/works/100361 In any case, these were sold in 10 Apple Stores worldwide, and only a single US store. They were aimed at an Asian audience, as far as I understand.
I don’t get the extreme negative reaction here and elsewhere. It’s not for me either, but I also don’t think it looks ridiculous – it just a little bag. There’s a pretty hard limit on how crazy that can look. It’s like the detractors aren’t aware or accepting that there are people with different tastes in the world. Why not just say “it’s not for me”?
I throw everything I experiment with at Cloudflare, including my personal website and the family’s Internet stuff (websites, etc). None of them is commercial. Cloudflare tells me that it served 68.44 GB in the last 30 days, and the Invoice was ZERO.
I’ve been looking for an extra-cheap CDN, and I’m not so worried about high uptime. I’m not yet ready to cough up the cost for Cloudflare R2 and AWS CloudFront, though it’s not costly, but I’m still in that cheap-feeling phase and not ready to offload over 100GB of files to the public while paying a price.
I looked at Bunny CDN a while back, but I remember thinking that the minimum was like ~$50. What did I miss? I dismissed it as non-personal option.
Yeah Ha! I saw that from this article and signed up. I even did the Card Verify thingy for $30 additional Credit. Will be trying this out and also do a comparison with Cloudflare R2.
> I even did the Card Verify thingy for $30 additional Credit.
I hadn’t heard of this, only seen the “14 day free trial” thing, so I checked: the trial gives $20 of credit, and verifying a card gets you $30 more, but it’s all trial credits which expires 14 days after you create your account. In other words, completely useless for people looking to spend under the $1/month minimum.
I’ve come past way beyond the 1st year honeymoon with AWS.
Edit:
I’m sorry but I’m today years old learning that AWS indeed is free-ish, “Data Transfer from AWS Regions to the Internet is now free for up to 100 GB of data per month (up from 1 GB per region).”
“Data Transfer from Amazon CloudFront is now free for up to 1 TB of data per month (up from 50 GB), and is no longer limited to the first 12 months after signup.”
Now, I need to figure out why am I being billed each month for some of the files I use AWS for!
> I’m not yet ready to cough up the cost for Cloudflare R2 and AWS CloudFront
> but I’m still in that cheap-feeling phase and not ready to offload over 100GB of files to the public while paying a price
You wouldn't pay like anything for that on Cloudflare R2. You get 10GB and $0.015/GB (so what... like a dollar or something?) for anything over + free egress.
I’ve got quite a few (very old) downloads coming to my websites, and I don’t want people to lose them. I also want to maintain a no-frills, store-and-forget thing that does not cost much. I was using AWS S3 + CloudFront for a long time, but I realized I was paying over $10 a month for something I didn’t even interact with or check often enough.
I’m OK with a sub-$10/mo budget, but Amazon Web Services doesn’t offer a way to pay recurring charges with Indian Cards. After this thread, I read up a lot yesterday and realized that Amazon AWS India is now pretty well oiled and working. I might stick to it and pay it off in advance. I’d be more than glad to, say, pay off $100 a year and not think about it.
The cost on AWS, I realize, is the S3 storage. Cloudflare is already fronting the CDN aspects of it.
So, I was looking for something with a sweet spot, say, pay something in the lines of $10 a year, at max about $25 a year, and it just dumps all of my files now and, to an extent, in the long term.
They are obviously looking for something to meet there future needs, not there current needs. It is free now, but they might be planning to one day tick over the free thresholds.
This is the first time I've read this but have personal experience similar. A few of my single page, gone nowhere, projects are seeing ~2k views a month. They're seeing zero traffic through google in that same period so no idea where it's coming from?
Personally, I do believe and still on the perpetual aim for that “You have to be right just once.” For me, it is not about the “right one(s).” My philosophy is that I should be able to “Walk Out” from situations, deals, and options that I picked and be ready for the next.
I wrote about Walking Out,[1] but more from a content/digital life perspective. I do follow similar thinking with life situations too.
I’m neither complaining nor comparing, but hey, life dealt a bad enough hand early on. Mother left us when the last of our siblings (sister) was barely 6 months old, and father was never present. My brothers and I survived by working odd jobs, stealing vegetables from neighbors, and running errands for almost everyone in the neighborhood. My brother worked repairing bicycles, cleaning trucks, and giving up studies so I could study. I started teaching the neighbors’ kids in my 5th grade and paid through school, then worked computer stuff to pay for college, and also begged a lot of relatives to supplement for food, books, etc. I know what actual starvation meant. It was only around my 15th year I learnt that winters can actually be warm when I had a sleep-over at my friend’s place where they had warm blankets that was thick enough.
So, my belief is that things won’t work out. Can I Walk Out? Well, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
Way later in life, I realized the neighbors knew about our night crawls. That was why they started giving us their vegetable garden harvest, and the “we have some extra cooking oil.”
The idea is to approach content as data-first, with tools on top, and be at ease with plans to Walk-Out when needed.
Besides the article in discussion, here are a few inspirations for plain-text as the defaults.
- The writing of our very own Obsidian’s CEO, Steph Ango at https://stephango.com @kepano on HN.
- A Plain Text Personal Organizer, https://danlucraft.com/blog/2008/04/plain-text-organizer/
- A template to organise life in plain text, https://github.com/jukil/plain-text-life
- Achieve a text-only work-flow, http://donlelek.github.io/2015-03-09-text-only-workflow/
- Note Taking, Writing and Life Organization Using Plain Text Files, http://www.markwk.com/plain-text-life.html
- Plain Text Journaling System, https://georgecoghill.wordpress.com/plain-text/
- Plain Text Project, https://plaintextproject.online/
- PlainText Productivity, http://plaintext-productivity.net/
- The Plain Text Life: Note Taking, Writing and Life Organization Using Plain Text Files, http://www.markwk.com/plain-text-life.html
- Use plain text email, https://useplaintext.email/
- Writing Plain Text by Derek Sivers, https://sive.rs/plaintext
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