> I find that much anxiety can be alleviated by finding beauty in transience, imperfection, and scars. If we feel judged for our scars, we become afraid to get scarred. We follow the path that results in the least amount of pain, rather than the path that leads to the most amount of learning.
Have you given much thought to diffing diagrams? The source can be version controlled and a source diff can be seen, but a visual diff would be amazing and easily sway me from writing prose to writing diagrams.
I've tested a couple of diagrams that I found on some website and I couldn't see any major differences in the layout. Can you point to some systematic differences?
To quote another reply regarding mermaid by @kepano:
> Mermaid.js has transitioned to "mermaid.ai" and is losing its original vision. Take a look at their new site.
> The latest version of Mermaid (12.1) ships with yet another layout engine (three now), and has a questionable safety record (see CVEs). In Obsidian 1.13 we had to introduce a new toggle/warning because of potential unsafe Mermaid diagrams.
This is so so awesome! I always find Mermaid hard to read but Pele is a delight. Just sponsored you on Github as a small way of saying thanks for Pele. Thank you so much kepano
Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end.
A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, etc. Not dissimilar to how people use Obsidian. The Henry Ford Museum has fifty of these notebooks: https://www.thehenryford.org/search?Query=%22jot+book%22
How should we quantify the impact of Henry Ford's notebooks? How should we quantify the impact of spreadsheets?
Most people who accomplish anything take notes in some form, because writing is a way of thinking. We love to mythologize the tools and methods of accomplished people because we hope it will let us absorb a bit of their genius. But a good camera doesn't make a good photographer. Taking lots of photos helps.
Should you take notes? Probably. Does it matter what your method is? Probably not. Whatever works for you. Obsidian (or any other form of notetaking) is successful if it disappears and lets you accomplish your work.
Totally on your side here, asking for the accomplishments of a tool is strange. Isn't it easy to envision two people using the same note taking system extensively, with one achieving nothing and one really making it a tool that is essentially to their goals?
That being said, I have never seen such procrastination as with people on the lookout for their ideal productivity systems. People writing lengthy blogposts about the last 0.1% of optimization on their note taking systems as if note-taking was their main job. The thing is: a note taking system doesn't need to be ideal, because as with most tools it matters much more who is using it, how they are using it and for what purpose. A note taking system is like a musical instrument: if you constantly find yourself swapping them because "they don't work" chances are this is a skill-issue, not a problem inherent with the system.
There is immense value in just picking a simple system, sticking to it and only revisiting it if there are real tangible problems. I for example just put a piece of paper on my desk every week and write down the things I need to do that aren't appointments. For more complex things, sketches, etc. that I may need in the next two or three months I use a notebook. For long lived stuff I use whatever. A markdown file in the project folder, a text file on the server, Obsidian. This has served me very well for the past decade.
But my job isn't taking notes, my job is doing the things I need to do, taking notes is just something that helps me doing that.
> A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end.
Let's be fair, this article is about this exactly.
> That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. (...) How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world? (...) The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world.
and then tries to challenge quoted articles again to prove/disprove those words.
The contribution of Excel, the most popular programming environment in the world, is undoubtable - therefore, not only has Excel accomplished something (popularize programming among non-programmers) but it's also easily measurable (it has done so more than any other technology in existence). It _is_ a genuine contribution to the world, by the tool itself, not just by what people use the tool for.
So, I disagree with this line of criticism - I think you very well can do those things.
I don't disagree here. I just pointed out that above commenter seems to dispute the author without having read the article in full. Turns out, some of us are just bad at communication :)
>Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end.
Yes, but, the _shape_ of something does offer affordances of what it makes easier or harder to do. So "obsidian" vs "saving files on my computer" does seem to be a legitimate question.
I agree with you. For example, [[links]] are a useful affordance for thinking that wasn't as popular before Obsidian. However the original piece was asking:
> Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems?
My question is: in a world where photography didn't exist, how would your life have been different? How would everyone's lives be different? It's a counterfactual that's impossible to answer meaningfully. Similarly, we can't measure how the world is different as a result of the popularization of [[links]].
He also has Dyslexia, so this would have been harder and more effort than for most other people. It probably help him overcome the short term into long term memory flow that a lot of people with Dyslexia struggle with.
> Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?"
I think you have to be somewhat careful with this line of reasoning - the camera put the portrait artist out of business pretty much permanently, and the spreadsheet had similarly cataclysmic effects on the accounting and engineering professions.
Just because these things are tools, doesn't mean they can't distort the world by their very presence. I'd be hard pressed to put my finger on the distortion caused by obsidian et al
That is exactly the point I am making (echoing the author of the linked piece). Those tools did change the world. But I do not know how you go about measuring the net effect of it all. I can certainly share many anecdotes but what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes?
> what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes
In someways the problem here is the inverse one might expect. Without photography, the entire modern world does not exist - it's the base technology required to develop optical lithography, without which we never achieve silicon chips. Without the spreadsheet (VisiCalc), the IBM PC likely fails to find product-market fit, and the entire tech and financial worlds are a decade or more behind where they are today. These are technologies with downstream tech trees so deep we can't reasonably put an upper bound on their value.
I don't personally believe that note-taking represents a paradigm change in the same sense - obsidian and friends are really just reifying existing text-based (and even paper-based) note taking workflows, with some hypertext niceties layered in...
We're in agreement. And it's not only the technological advances that came after, it's all the small life moments and personal accomplishments too. That's why I connected this to the Henry Ford example. How can we determine which of his accomplishments would or wouldn't have happened without his notetaking practice? He probably would not be able to answer that question himself.
Web clipper is great. just tried the reader mode on this chatgpt transcript, it only shows 1 page of it. Is the purpose of reader mode to enable interactive annotation before saving to notes?
> Added detection for backlinks in Canvas files. They now appear in the Backlinks view, and count as links in the Graph view.
https://obsidian.md/changelog/2026-02-27-desktop-v1.12.4/
reply