Way of life, quotes and second brain

Way of life, quotes and second brain.

While I organize the books and articles I’ve already read, Claude recommends other sites, posts and books. And I ended up landing on this one by a Swedish artist, a former programmer, who writes about how not to forget what is important. And I saw that it relates to what I’m trying to create on this blog of mine.

And, looking closely, it seems I’ve been doing this for 20 years. So much so that what I collected here are posts that go way back, to when I was still a young adult. It’s part of my formative years.

In this article, he even says that collecting all the snippets and quotes that truly inspire us (examples, book passages, notes) and later being able to meditate on what we wrote down and what hit hard is an interesting way to get inspired and to act in the appropriate way, in that intentional way.

I keep thinking about this collection of quotes I made. There is the quote collection (in Portuguese) here on the site. Many were collections of sentences I read in 2008, 2009, 2010. Unfortunately I stopped taking notes that way and only picked it up again now.

And I keep thinking that this mechanism of Personal Knowledge Management, of Second Brain, actually has to help us work on what we have somehow already processed, consumed, studied and worked on.

Karpathy’s proposal goes very much around this: “create a wiki for me based on these things I’d like to study”. But I find that very weak, because it’s just one more way of collecting sites, links, books, podcasts that will sit in the queue forever, waiting to be read. It’s much better to be able to use LLM mechanisms, artificial intelligence, to organize what we already recognize as important and meaningful, and not forget it.

The connection graph (in Portuguese) of the site’s index, with what gets cited together in the posts and notes.

This guy even says that his essays are meditations that help him deepen the ideas he wants to live by.

I’ve been finding the act of taking these notes good, even in audio. This one, for example, I’m also doing in a kind of simultaneous writing, since there are passages I clipped into links and even private notes about thoughts and reflections.

Somehow, I’ve improved as a person and as a professional. It’s hard to make that tangible. I hope it doesn’t become one more of the metrics I chase, but it’s quite interesting.