Brad Barrish

I love Obsidian, but I’ll admit that it can be a bit much for non-nerds, especially if they’re looking to switch from Apple Notes. I made the (minor) mistake of migrating a friend from Apple Notes to Obsidian recently and that lasted less than a day. And really, I couldn’t blame them and I felt bad I had steered them wrong.

The whole thing sent me down this rabbit hole of revisiting a couple of apps I had used in the past—Bear and iA Writer, both of which are exceptionally well-designed and simple to use. Opening them up after so many years was refreshing. They differ a bit in that, similar to Obsidian, iA Writer keeps all notes as individual files and Bear has a database. Practically speaking, this matters if you’re going to use them with AI, but Bear’s recent release is pretty great news for using it with Claude. So, all of this to say that if you are in Apple’s ecosystem, you keep digital notes and you want to use your notes with AI, I recommend checking out Bear and iA Writer.

RIP Craig Venter

Great photo from Patrick.

Saw Project Hail Mary today. Thought it was good but it could have been shorter and the ending was dumb.

Someone bought friendster.com and made a clever app. I like it.

Today’s episode of Decoder is worth a read/watch/listen.

My mom died a year ago today. It’s unbelievable that it’s been a year, but if I’m being honest, it felt like she was kind of gone long before she died. She had Parkinson’s for years. What an insidious and cruel disease. It was even worse for her because of how bright she was. Had she not stopped practicing psychologoy because of Parkinson’s, I’m certain she would have probably never retired. She was such a good listener and I loved her dark sense of humor. My sister told her to send us ladybugs as signs and let me tell you, we all see ladybugs all the time! On my first business trip after she died, a ladybug landed on me IN A PLANE! We all see them everywhere, which is so wonderful. I wish she was still here, but not siffering the way she did from Parkinson’s and dementia. I was so lucky to have her as my mom.

Robert, Angie, Shayna and I hiked Bronson Canyon on Saturday. Too many people with speakers, but some great views of the city and the Hollywood sign. I took the first two photos and Shayna snapped the other one.

Ai-generated punk songs from daughter’s texts to her mom. The whole family was crying.

I too believe headless is going to be a thing (it already is for me).

It turns out that the best place for personal AIs to run is on a computer. Maybe a virtual computer in the cloud, but ideally your computer. That way they can see the docs that you can see, and use the tools that you can use, and so what they want is not APIs (which connect webservers) but little apps they can use directly. CLI tools are the perfect little apps.

From Matt Webb’s latest post, Headless everything for personal AI.