I'm going to dissent - The smaller/fewer screens you have and the more default your config, the more important, mysterious and highly paid you are. The guy with the tiny macbook that never bothered to remove any of the dock programs their machine shipped with (bro, why do still have Contacts in your dock?) and still has the terminal (terminal, not iTerm) background color set to the retina-searing default white will 9 times out of 10 be the smartest, humblest mf in the room. 100 percent chance they will show you the most devastatingly elegant solutions to problems that stumped your whole team for a week.
This is 100% true in my experience and I can only guess it's because they spend their time solving actual problems and considering ideas rather than going down the config and personalization rabbit hole.
A counter argument: the people who spend most of their time doing nothing or playing with configs are that way because they finish their work very quickly and have loads of extra spare time.
an early colleague of mine was a guy who ran ratpoison for a fullscreen firefox window and did the rest of his work in the frame buffer. he had no time for, or interest in, any kind of aesthetic distraction, but he was one of the most insanely skilled and knowledgeable people (especially at his age) i've ever met to this day.
I can't prove that neolithic hunters sorted themselves into cultures based on the pointy rock they preferred, but I wouldn't doubt it.
I'm old enough to remember the Mac vs. PC cultural divide, with the ubiquitous ads of the hip/cool "I'm a Mac" dude teasing the corporate "I'm a PC" guy.
And before that there was the stereotype of the young, fast-and-loose, self-taught PC programmer battling against the stodgy mainframe empire of IBM.
With a little bit of searching I found plenty of examples of cultural divides centered on tools:
1920s-1950s: Stanley vs. Craftsman
1900s-1940s: Yankee vs. Generic
1910s-1930s: Atlas vs. Independent
1800s-1900s: American vs. British Toolmaking
My point--if there is one--is that this is not a new phenomenon that emerged from notetaking software. This is likely a deep feature of human nature.
Haha I agree completely about the timeless nature of this dynamic. One of the monster Unix greybeards who took me under their wings when I was a sapling had a T-Shirt: "The sports team from my area is inherently superior to the sports team from your area", the point being (it was explained to me) that such statements are in fact true or false given context (given that this was San Diego in about 2003, generally false).
A critical feature of the (trivially superior) hacker culture from back then was that we did pass such judgements. Not always with complete consensus (vi/emacs), but pretty often (Windows sucks).
Passing judgement, and more importantly, sharing judgement with your in-group, is the root instinct at play here, IMHO.
The ability to organize into groups with a common purpose is, I think, the key evolutionary leap that allowed us to outcompete every other species on Earth. And having shared idols and taboos, whether religious or software-based, is the primary instinct for keeping the group together.
When someone says that Obsidian is better than Notion, they are merely following a million-year-old instinct embedded deep in our hardware.
Most, if not literally all, large early societies were very rigidly structured and authoritarian. I think we still have a lot of that instinct within us. How logically ridiculous and dumb is it that we trend towards societies that all have one person be the big boss leader of hundreds of millions, if not billions? All the while they inevitably make decisions that tend to piss off just about everybody, yet we keep doing the exact same thing and hoping it'll be different with the next guy. It makes no sense whatsoever.
But it makes perfect sense if we go the other way, and consider that society was not the product of people coming together but people being assimilated. Chimps, for instance, have reasonable enough intelligence to come together into fairly decent sized groups for mutual benefit. But these group sizes peak out at around 150 chimps which is definitely, also in humans, around the peak size before you start getting into major social issues of scale.
And the interesting thing is that those chimps will then go to war against other chimp groups, and take the spoils - including the other group's women. Yet they lack that additional higher level thought to think 'Hey we've completely conquered and dominated these guys who were also doing okay on their own. What if we now forced them to work for us?' And not only work for us, but now you've got a way bigger pack ready to go conquer, and assimilate, other packs even more reliably.
It's been that way for a long time. I remember when some non-techie friends were opining at the bar on what having a @gmail.com vs a @aol.com email said about a person, circa 2006. At the time, I found it completely surprising that it implied anything about a person other than wanting 1GB storage and search for email.
I know a lot of people running Chromium engine browsers (and I have brave installed for the occasionally necessary IPMI widget or whatever), but I see a lot of Safari on MacOS, a lot of Edge (Chromium/Blink based IIRC) on Windows, and a lot of Firefox on Linux and Android (where I have Vanadium via Graphene).
This is a very technical/programmer sample, so leading indicator at best, but it seems like "best on platform" is making at least a minor comeback.
Five years ago that same kind of a sample was all Chrome and the Firefox weirdo. Now I'm the Firefox weirdo.
I vaguely felt like I was reading an ad for Arc, a browser I have never heard of before, with some content wrapped around it. Kind of like those gross Apple ads that showed Einstein and Madame Curie to sell iMacs.
Very fun citations. Provocative and in line with what I want to believe.
I hope computing gets to the point where taste matters. It still feels like the lowest common denominator rules, that hyper-massified same-tool-for-everyone computing is where we have been latched up for most of a decade now. That it takes scale to survive and only by making the most universal of products do we get to scale.
I really want to believe that taste & discernment & distinction may rise again. That there is some kind of demand-side desire, some reward, for having taste, for modelling good hip interesting.
It feels faded, worn but I still think it's mostly that we have failed to rebuild cool, lost our own cool, that has made Tim O'Reilly's "follow the alpha geeks" mantra lose its luster. Folks seem empowered in little narrow verticals & to be doing well with for example mentioned here Notion or Obsidian, but it's software lifecycle within a very small segment. It doesn't affect the rest of most of those user's computing life. That's just not sufficiently cool, not broadscale enough to fully be a believable follows le lifestyle.
Does the author find it aesthetic or artistic to write like this? No caps, incomplete sentences, banal and faux-poetic prose? He's writing an opinion piece about software, it doesn't need to read like Tumblr poetry written by teenagers.
Software didn't "change". It's mostly linkedin social signaling that dragged everyone to use the same tools as the "successful bros". Cargo culting technologists are everywhere today, from the newbie who can git but can't write 10 bug free lines of code, to the HR person uploading his daily breakfast to github because he s "a techie". Software is like fashion nowadays , built for mass appeal to twitter and teamblind.com users. The craftsmen, fewer-and-fewer every year don't even tell you what tools they use.
I'm sorry, I know it's tangential, but how was anyone able to read all that AI fluff?
It wasn't just frustrating, it was terribly repetitive. It's not ~~just~~ the content of the post, it's the way that it's written. And the AI authorship disclaimer? Missing. (Not that that would've made the contents much better, but it would've made it a bit more palatable and feel less sneaky.)
I take offense to the notion, ahem, that Obsidian somehow isn't aesthetic. It's as minimal as you want it to be and looks great especially with a theme.
Wow this will be a perfect addition to our revolutionary product, The Left Shift Key! Are you willing to discuss a merger and acquisition? Please get in contact with the PR firm of the law firm managing our upcoming IPO on behalf of the bank that has our $100 cash reserves.
Wrong on every account. The default installation of Obsidian is free. You can pay to sync up to their servers, or take 20 minutes to "wire up" Gitea for syncing.
Even the author's statement is kind of bizarre to me. Obsidian pretty much gets out of your way and you can start writing immediately. The WYSIWYG nature means you don't even really need to be thinking about markdown syntax that much. Obsidian is a tool for people who actually like to write.
Fun little post. An Arc & Notion early adopter right there. Probably using Dia now. Also the short phrases, and lowercase writing. I know a few like that, toned down over the years but still a pretty consistent subset: The ones that were doing hyperdetailed skeuomorphic iOS icons in Omnigraffle or Sketch back then in 2010, but suddenly remembered how they always loved minimalism when iOS 7 came out. Or Rails early adopters.
I do observe their workflow and tools as some sort of vibe check every few years, don't agree on everything; they don't seem to favor solutions that seek to remain stable over time, but also aren't full tinkerer experimental. They also avoid the design-experimental part, kind of like the weird yet productive nadir, like tools that resemble the AmigaOS times.
The Obsidian comparison was a cheap shot, compare to Vim? Come on. I wonder where does this person stand on other stuff like Vivaldi or Brave. Or notetaking apps like Affine or Anytype. Or Reflect, Recall, Rewind. Or Screenpipe. Whatever.
Apple invented this concept for computers and software… before then it was cars. It’s legit human behavior.
Even people who are above it all are in itself identifying with that mentality in itself. It’s inescapable. You are part of some tribe whether you care to admit it or not. And your usage of tools goes beyond just utility and speaks to an identity.
I'm going to dissent - The smaller/fewer screens you have and the more default your config, the more important, mysterious and highly paid you are. The guy with the tiny macbook that never bothered to remove any of the dock programs their machine shipped with (bro, why do still have Contacts in your dock?) and still has the terminal (terminal, not iTerm) background color set to the retina-searing default white will 9 times out of 10 be the smartest, humblest mf in the room. 100 percent chance they will show you the most devastatingly elegant solutions to problems that stumped your whole team for a week.
This is 100% true in my experience and I can only guess it's because they spend their time solving actual problems and considering ideas rather than going down the config and personalization rabbit hole.
A counter argument: the people who spend most of their time doing nothing or playing with configs are that way because they finish their work very quickly and have loads of extra spare time.
very anecdotally doubtful. it's why bike shedding is a term.
the nerd snipping cat nip of micro optimizations of a dev setup is too great.
dockutil --remove all
https://github.com/kcrawford/dockutil
an early colleague of mine was a guy who ran ratpoison for a fullscreen firefox window and did the rest of his work in the frame buffer. he had no time for, or interest in, any kind of aesthetic distraction, but he was one of the most insanely skilled and knowledgeable people (especially at his age) i've ever met to this day.
I can't prove that neolithic hunters sorted themselves into cultures based on the pointy rock they preferred, but I wouldn't doubt it.
I'm old enough to remember the Mac vs. PC cultural divide, with the ubiquitous ads of the hip/cool "I'm a Mac" dude teasing the corporate "I'm a PC" guy.
And before that there was the stereotype of the young, fast-and-loose, self-taught PC programmer battling against the stodgy mainframe empire of IBM.
With a little bit of searching I found plenty of examples of cultural divides centered on tools:
1920s-1950s: Stanley vs. Craftsman
1900s-1940s: Yankee vs. Generic
1910s-1930s: Atlas vs. Independent
1800s-1900s: American vs. British Toolmaking
My point--if there is one--is that this is not a new phenomenon that emerged from notetaking software. This is likely a deep feature of human nature.
Haha I agree completely about the timeless nature of this dynamic. One of the monster Unix greybeards who took me under their wings when I was a sapling had a T-Shirt: "The sports team from my area is inherently superior to the sports team from your area", the point being (it was explained to me) that such statements are in fact true or false given context (given that this was San Diego in about 2003, generally false).
A critical feature of the (trivially superior) hacker culture from back then was that we did pass such judgements. Not always with complete consensus (vi/emacs), but pretty often (Windows sucks).
Passing judgement, and more importantly, sharing judgement with your in-group, is the root instinct at play here, IMHO.
The ability to organize into groups with a common purpose is, I think, the key evolutionary leap that allowed us to outcompete every other species on Earth. And having shared idols and taboos, whether religious or software-based, is the primary instinct for keeping the group together.
When someone says that Obsidian is better than Notion, they are merely following a million-year-old instinct embedded deep in our hardware.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Most, if not literally all, large early societies were very rigidly structured and authoritarian. I think we still have a lot of that instinct within us. How logically ridiculous and dumb is it that we trend towards societies that all have one person be the big boss leader of hundreds of millions, if not billions? All the while they inevitably make decisions that tend to piss off just about everybody, yet we keep doing the exact same thing and hoping it'll be different with the next guy. It makes no sense whatsoever.
But it makes perfect sense if we go the other way, and consider that society was not the product of people coming together but people being assimilated. Chimps, for instance, have reasonable enough intelligence to come together into fairly decent sized groups for mutual benefit. But these group sizes peak out at around 150 chimps which is definitely, also in humans, around the peak size before you start getting into major social issues of scale.
And the interesting thing is that those chimps will then go to war against other chimp groups, and take the spoils - including the other group's women. Yet they lack that additional higher level thought to think 'Hey we've completely conquered and dominated these guys who were also doing okay on their own. What if we now forced them to work for us?' And not only work for us, but now you've got a way bigger pack ready to go conquer, and assimilate, other packs even more reliably.
The missing link, to me, is a chimp Genghis Khan.
It's been that way for a long time. I remember when some non-techie friends were opining at the bar on what having a @gmail.com vs a @aol.com email said about a person, circa 2006. At the time, I found it completely surprising that it implied anything about a person other than wanting 1GB storage and search for email.
> like how one day you realize everyone around you stopped using chrome
I don't know what universe the author is living in, has anyone else realized "everyone around them stopped using Chrome"?
I know a lot of people running Chromium engine browsers (and I have brave installed for the occasionally necessary IPMI widget or whatever), but I see a lot of Safari on MacOS, a lot of Edge (Chromium/Blink based IIRC) on Windows, and a lot of Firefox on Linux and Android (where I have Vanadium via Graphene).
This is a very technical/programmer sample, so leading indicator at best, but it seems like "best on platform" is making at least a minor comeback.
Five years ago that same kind of a sample was all Chrome and the Firefox weirdo. Now I'm the Firefox weirdo.
I vaguely felt like I was reading an ad for Arc, a browser I have never heard of before, with some content wrapped around it. Kind of like those gross Apple ads that showed Einstein and Madame Curie to sell iMacs.
> I don't know what universe the author is living in, has anyone else realized "everyone around them stopped using Chrome"?
Maybe it's the same universe in which capital letters were never invented.
I can in here to be snarky about this because it drives me nuts and screams "I'm so artsy" that it's aggravating. But you beat me to it.
Very fun citations. Provocative and in line with what I want to believe.
I hope computing gets to the point where taste matters. It still feels like the lowest common denominator rules, that hyper-massified same-tool-for-everyone computing is where we have been latched up for most of a decade now. That it takes scale to survive and only by making the most universal of products do we get to scale.
I really want to believe that taste & discernment & distinction may rise again. That there is some kind of demand-side desire, some reward, for having taste, for modelling good hip interesting.
It feels faded, worn but I still think it's mostly that we have failed to rebuild cool, lost our own cool, that has made Tim O'Reilly's "follow the alpha geeks" mantra lose its luster. Folks seem empowered in little narrow verticals & to be doing well with for example mentioned here Notion or Obsidian, but it's software lifecycle within a very small segment. It doesn't affect the rest of most of those user's computing life. That's just not sufficiently cool, not broadscale enough to fully be a believable follows le lifestyle.
Does the author find it aesthetic or artistic to write like this? No caps, incomplete sentences, banal and faux-poetic prose? He's writing an opinion piece about software, it doesn't need to read like Tumblr poetry written by teenagers.
Are you surprised to see an author writing about software as ingroup signaling making his prose about ingroup signaling too?
Software didn't "change". It's mostly linkedin social signaling that dragged everyone to use the same tools as the "successful bros". Cargo culting technologists are everywhere today, from the newbie who can git but can't write 10 bug free lines of code, to the HR person uploading his daily breakfast to github because he s "a techie". Software is like fashion nowadays , built for mass appeal to twitter and teamblind.com users. The craftsmen, fewer-and-fewer every year don't even tell you what tools they use.
I'm sorry, I know it's tangential, but how was anyone able to read all that AI fluff?
It wasn't just frustrating, it was terribly repetitive. It's not ~~just~~ the content of the post, it's the way that it's written. And the AI authorship disclaimer? Missing. (Not that that would've made the contents much better, but it would've made it a bit more palatable and feel less sneaky.)
I noticed, but carried on given how the topic was treated. Made an exception, only this time. Next time I'm calling it out.
skimming
I take offense to the notion, ahem, that Obsidian somehow isn't aesthetic. It's as minimal as you want it to be and looks great especially with a theme.
I'm launching a revolutionary new AI-enhanced hardware product, and I think you are my target demographic! It's called: the Shift key.
It's a button, conveniently placed on any standard keyboard, that temporarily capitalizes the letters you type whilst holding it down.
I think it's gonna change the world. Would you be interested in an early release preview?
Wow this will be a perfect addition to our revolutionary product, The Left Shift Key! Are you willing to discuss a merger and acquisition? Please get in contact with the PR firm of the law firm managing our upcoming IPO on behalf of the bank that has our $100 cash reserves.
I hate that I know exactly what he's talking about. <3 obsidian. :middle-finger: vim.
> obsidian is for people who want to wire the whole building from scratch.
This is why I never really understood obsidian, it's just paying for someone else to do what you should already have done?
Wrong on every account. The default installation of Obsidian is free. You can pay to sync up to their servers, or take 20 minutes to "wire up" Gitea for syncing.
Even the author's statement is kind of bizarre to me. Obsidian pretty much gets out of your way and you can start writing immediately. The WYSIWYG nature means you don't even really need to be thinking about markdown syntax that much. Obsidian is a tool for people who actually like to write.
and here I was thinking Obsidian was the soft non-technical option, because I got to confounded by EMACs and Nvim configs.
Soft option is the file system and the basic editor that comes with your operating system.
I don't think most people use the file system anymore.
Only an Apple user would write this article.
Fun little post. An Arc & Notion early adopter right there. Probably using Dia now. Also the short phrases, and lowercase writing. I know a few like that, toned down over the years but still a pretty consistent subset: The ones that were doing hyperdetailed skeuomorphic iOS icons in Omnigraffle or Sketch back then in 2010, but suddenly remembered how they always loved minimalism when iOS 7 came out. Or Rails early adopters.
I do observe their workflow and tools as some sort of vibe check every few years, don't agree on everything; they don't seem to favor solutions that seek to remain stable over time, but also aren't full tinkerer experimental. They also avoid the design-experimental part, kind of like the weird yet productive nadir, like tools that resemble the AmigaOS times.
The Obsidian comparison was a cheap shot, compare to Vim? Come on. I wonder where does this person stand on other stuff like Vivaldi or Brave. Or notetaking apps like Affine or Anytype. Or Reflect, Recall, Rewind. Or Screenpipe. Whatever.
Never heard of any of the tools mentioned there.
I agree though that tools can cause some affinity. If I see people using neovim, I would be curious what plugins they use.
Apple invented this concept for computers and software… before then it was cars. It’s legit human behavior.
Even people who are above it all are in itself identifying with that mentality in itself. It’s inescapable. You are part of some tribe whether you care to admit it or not. And your usage of tools goes beyond just utility and speaks to an identity.