Week 28-38, 2025 - Reboot
📋 What I learned recently
A few weeks ago, I ditched Notion and started to use Obsidian. It's not about privacy in my case; I'm just slightly paranoid about losing access to my documents due to any mistake made by a service provider, myself, or a third party. (I'm also backing up my Google Docs with rsync and restic – I have a few spreadsheets that I really wouldn't like to lose.) So far, I miss rich text editing from Notion, but I enjoy having full control of my data and the beautiful simplicity of Markdown files. Especially since they somehow became the de facto LLM text file format. Connecting my Obsidian notes to Claude and asking questions about it was quite simple to set up.
In other news, I finally retired my two ancient Macs and bought a refurbished Lenovo ThinkStation. A powerful Intel Xeon E-2146G processor with 32GB (ECC!) RAM, with all my previous internal and external drives, in a small form factor case running barely audible under the living room TV, for less than 300 euros, was a great deal. Migration was surprisingly straightforward. After a few small configs on the Proxmox host, I simply restored the latest VM backups, and everything was up and running.
Having this much RAM also gave me a chance to try ZFS! I was living under a rock, thinking Linux file systems plateaued at ext4 – and was surprised to discover that ZFS is even older than that. Built-in snapshots, compression, thin provisioning, all the amazing stuff I never knew I wanted to have in a file system. Thanks to these, a ~100GB offsite backup of a dozen LXCs and VMs is done in a few minutes, without any service interruption.
🤔 Articles that made me think
30 Life Lessons from 30 Years
While this format has been quite overused, I found that Andrew Yeung's version has a lot of solid wisdom. The one that resonated with me most was the concept of slowing down the passage of time by doing hard and new things. The general idea is that the perception of time speeds up as we age, because one year to a teenager is almost 10% of their entire life, while it's only 2% for someone hitting 50. But this explanation doesn't grasp another important reason: one year flies by faster when we're older because we have fewer new experiences in it! Sure, some of it is natural; a child's main job is to explore and learn, which cannot compare to the daily routine of a working adult. Still, we can compensate for this by making an effort to move out of our comfort zones, seeking out hard and new things to try, building memories to look back on, and wondering how we could have fit them into a single year.
Liquid Glass is Skeuomorphism Revived
This Tuesday, I upgraded all my Apple devices to try the cross-platform user experience as Apple intended. While I like to discover new things, I know I'm not the biggest fan of change in tools that I have muscle memory operating. Being mindful of that, I’m trying to keep an open mind and get used to things that are hard to see how they made sense to someone.
The comparison to iOS 6's full-on skeuomorphism made me realize what I hate in Liquid Glass: it prioritizes look over usability, form over function. Every time I pull down the translucent glasslike notification area on my phone, two things happen: I struggle to read what's there because the underlying text is too prominent – and at the same time, I can't help but play with the edge distortions because they look so cool.
How Not to Introduce AI To Your Team
I know that's not the original title, and the article is not doing a great job of hiding the deep anti-AI stance of the author. Still, it's a good list of botched AI-first policy examples and their negative aftermath.
I might write about this longer at a later time, but a few ideas off the top of my head about how to introduce AI to engineering teams:
- Talk about the problem you're trying to solve. A dictate like "Use AI in every process" focuses on the ways of working, and not just takes away autonomy from developers, but misses a chance to explain what you're trying to achieve. Is it about the perceived speed of development? (though writing the code was never the bottleneck) Is it about slow prototyping? Low-quality communication? How can you have your team improve something if they don't know what you're aiming at?
- Create a safe-to-fail culture to allow people to freely experiment with new stuff without external pressure or fear of retribution in case of dead ends.
- Empower your team to select and use the tools that give them the most benefit.
- Measure actual (not just perceived) performance changes, evaluate, and adapt if needed.
🤖 Something cool: Granola to Obsidian
I'm using Granola to enhance my notes during video calls. I found that this is the sweet spot for me: before the age of AI, I was a notorious note-taker (noteorious?). I found that taking notes during discussions helped me better process information, structure my thoughts – and of course, it was a great way to ensure I can look back on the notes of a meeting later. I tried a few AI transcription tools that automatically transcribe and create hierarchical notes from a call (Gemini and Fathom come to mind), but something was missing for me. Maybe the fact that I didn't work on the notes myself made the text somewhat distant, full of miscalculated balances and redundant details.
Granola combines the two techniques: it has a pretty decent editor I can use during a call to take notes in, while it transcribes the entire discussion in the background, and uses this text to enrich my own notes after the call. The result is the best of both worlds: the structure is mine, but no important details are missed, even if I didn't note something during a faster part of the discussion. A nice surprise was that Granola even lets me change the prompt it uses to enhance my notes based on the meeting type – there are different things I want to capture during an introduction call, a work follow-up, or a mentorship session.
The missing piece was storing these notes together with my other documents – and this small community plugin does just that: it synchronizes my Granola notes to Obsidian, so they come up in searches, can be referenced from other notes, and I can use the entire corpus to converse with using Claude or another LLM.
That’s it for today, enjoy some late-summer warmth during the weekend,
Péter