Great point! They do vary wildly by style and subject matter, while all being masterful IMHO. Incredible talent.

I mean, fair. All great books!

The Culture by Ian M. Banks. It’s a little difficult to approach, but an incredible exploration of Sci-Fi, humanity, AI, and life in general. Unlike a lot of other great Sci-Fi (like The Expanse, which I also highly recommend) it’s gritty, but overall The Culture is a hopeful and optimistic take on the progress of humanity and technology.

The best books are The Player of Games, Look to Windward, and Excession.

Depending on how you’re feeling, I think you can skip The State of the Art, Matter, and Inversions, though they’re worth an eventual read. They’re just less connected to the main Culture story.

It’s a series that truly changed me and my perspective on life.

It won’t actually work. So yes, this is just a grift until funding dries up.

Its dangerous to send goalposts flying around that fast, be careful or you’ll hurt yourself.

Your response is condescending, arguing from ignorance, and arguing in bad faith. I will reply this time, because once again you’re trying to build an argument on extremely shaky ground and I don’t enjoy people spreading ignorance unchallenged. However I won’t engage any further and feed whatever you think you’re getting from this.

I haven’t suggested that people should use Obsidian over OSS solutions. I was simply pointing out your argument against Obsidian’s architecture was poorly founded.

The data you’re insinuating will be lost is pure FUD. While the format isn’t standard markdown, none of the well implemented solutions are, because as you so rightly pointed out, markdown has little to no support for most of these features.

However, obsidian’s format is well documented and well understood. There are dozens of FOSS plugins and tools for converting or directly importing obsidian data to nearly every other solution. Due to obsidian’s popularity, it’s interoperability this way is often far superior to FOSS solutions’.

Content is your notes. In obsidian this is represented by markdown files in a flat filesystem. This format is already cross platform and doesn’t need to be exported.

Metadata is extracted information from your notes that makes processing the data more efficient. Tags, links, timestamp, keywords, titles, filenames, etc are metadata, stored in the metadata database. When you search for something in obsidian, or view the graph, or list files in a tag etc obsidian only opens the metadata database to process the request. It only opens the file for read/write.

Does this help?

Tell me, are you aware of the distinction between content and metadata?

Also, what do you mean, no official export? The data is already sitting on your filesystem in markdown…?

Oh certainly. I wasn’t suggesting not taking steps to improve the situation. But I’m advocating for each country (or perhaps even the G20 itself) establishing a similar set of rules, penalties, and aggressive enforcement. Anything else will leave loopholes and be a half-measure.

The problem, as ever, is game theory. All you need is ONE bad actor to spoil the entire effort. See the panama papers.

If one country has laws that allow billionaires to claim residence or establish a shell corporation and have lower or no income tax and these bastards will all jump at the chance and that tax money will slip through the fingers of everyone playing by the rules.

Laws are great. But what we need is real enforcement by agencies with real teeth. Ban shell corps. Tax overseas transfers aggressively. Treat white collar crime like a real crime with severe penalties.

This isn’t really the case though. Obsidian uses a database for metadata, and therefore can extremely rapidly display, search, and find the correct file to open. It generally only opens a handful of files at a time.

I’ve used obsidian notes repos with hundreds of thousands of notes with no discernable performance impact. Something LogSeq certainly couldn’t do.

The complaint in the post you’ve linked is a) anecdotal and b) about the import process itself getting slow, which makes sense as obsidian is extracting the metadata.

I’ll always champion OSS software over proprietary, but claiming this is a huge failing of the obsidian design is just completely false. A metadata database fronting a flat filesystem architecture is very robust.

Edit: adding link to benchmark. https://www.goedel.io/p/interlude-obsidian-vs-100000

No no no, not infinite money! That would be ridiculous, oh my gosh!

No, they think that you’re born with 2 million magical dollars attached to your name, and birth certificates are basically the check transferring that money to the federal government. And that if you game this system properly, you can earn interest on that 2 million and use it however you want while getting to ignore the laws that hold everyone else down.

No, I’m not joking. That literally the whole thing.