Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

Seems like everywhere the mouse and keyboard took me this week somewhere on the page artificial intelligence was mentioned. Seeing video titles on YouTube: “Top 10 Business Ideas to Start with ChatGPT”. Seeing as many AI-assisted Obsidian plugins come down the line as I do ones for Canvas. Does anyone else notice this pattern getting larger every day?

A Rant About Artificial Intelligence

Back when only super nerds were on the internet, back in the dial-up days, we always thought it would be great if everyone was connected the same way we thought we were. Now everyone is connected, and it didn’t really turn out to be sunshine and rainbows the way we thought it would. The same idea goes for artificial intelligence. We all had our reasons for thinking having AI in our lives would be amazing. We all had our different influences as to what the perfect idea of what AI should be. The year is now 2023, and we’re starting to see AI creep hard into everyday life. It’s now in the text of the articles are reading online under the guise of “assisting”. This leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

Today is Friday the 13th and its on this day that I am always reminded of the superstition related to the day. I read somewhere back in the days before YouTube that it had a relationship to the Knights Templar and something to do with monarchs putting them in prison or killing most of them off. I had read that this occurred on the “first” Friday the 13th. Turns out that is a load of crap. Something else I read back in the day is that large rugs that are made by hand in far-away lands that I will never see with my own eyes had intentional mistakes woven into the otherwise flawless symmetrical design. This would be to indicate to people that it was made by hand and not done by a machine. What will man do to show they are actually writing their articles and not being assisted by machines? You could argue that we’ve been allowing “AI” to assist us since the advent of spell checking. Spell checking and that nifty Microsoft paperclip helped me to be a better user of the English language. Fast forward two decades and I can feel my smartphone sucking my spelling and grammar out of my head and into the form of a crutch for which I come to rely on all too often. Now we’re letting AI help us even further by helping them finish our sentences and thoughts. So many parts of the Second Renaissance feel like they are coming true. (links below)

Admittedly my text gets ran thru ProWritingAid before anything longer in form gets posted. All spelling and grammar suggestions are typically taken to the point of, as Ellane once put it: “without taking your voice away”. I do always ignore the double space after periods because that is so deeply baked into my muscle memory. More times than not some sort of automated process eliminates them as this text gets shuffled around from “Pen to Web”. With all this excitement surrounding AI-assisted writing, I’ve got half a mind to no longer do spelling or grammar checks and just leave the human in me exposed in ugly pure form. The way it should be.
/rant

An update to Minimal distracts me with yet a new color theme to feast my eyes on, called Ayu. It pops a lot louder than Catppuccin does without being violent on your eyes. I’ve been giving it a spin in my primary vault when Minimal updated earlier this week. Having flushed all appearance and typography settings at the turn of the new year, it was a nice change.

Speaking of Appearance settings, we have swapped fonts a bit. As tempting as it is to keep a pure Monospace font across all of Obsidian it just wasn’t feeling right, so we tweaked things a bit.

• UI: iA Writer Mono V
• Editor: M PLUS 2
• Monospace: M PLUS Code Latin 60

M Plus is not new to me by any means, and to be honest when the newer versions of this typeface came out I wasn’t the biggest fan of them, but this is more proof how our tastes change over time because I’m head over heals M PLUS 2 and M PLUS Code Latin 60 right now.

Also in the primary vault, we’ve been toying with the idea of transitioning to Weekly Notes instead of Daily. This probably wont happen but there are times where it does feel right. This could also very well just be due to the fact that it’s a new year.

Quote Share allows you to take text from within Obsidian and turn it into a graphic with a snazzy background that makes for lucrative sharing on your favorite social media platform. You could make use of this plugin as to make infographics for the end of your articles for others to share with your article links. I thought it was super cool that the developer of this plugin used Obsidian Canvas on their GitHub’s README.

Canvas Random Note is proof that the future the is going to be rich with all sort of clever plugins related to Obsidian Canvas.

Out of nowhere, inside my vault Code Editor Shortcuts and Obsidian Keyshots have been quarreling for days. It starting off as innocent chauvinism but quickly escalated into a heated battle. All the other plugins are making bets about the outcome, and it’s safe to assume they’re going to fight it out until one of them doesn’t get up or submits. What will happen!?

With 70 installed and actually used plugins (albeit some of these are very specific and used infrequently) it’s easy to have things go unnoticed. Local Images is a plugin that looks for linked images in your notes as you paste them in (or it can deep dive your entire vault) and pull the images into your vault’s attachment folder. It has always worked as intended and we’re always grateful for it when we use it. There has been no activity on the plugin in over a year. Another fine soul by the name of Sergei Korneev has taken the helm and released Local Images Plus. I love this community so much!

Obsidian Plugin Groups allows you to group plugins (imagine that!) together and delay their startup if desired. This could be useful in many ways. You can disable and enable these groups you made and say for example in my case with 70 installed plugins, I could very well go in here and make a “not used often” group and put together all those one-off plugins that I only need in very niche circumstances. With such an easy-to-use Command Palette, everything is so easy to do in Obsidian.

Datacore. Again, more proof this community is amazing. This is something all Dataview fans need to keep their eyes on. This aims to be the successor of Dataview if I’m to understand this correctly. With aims to improve the things that bottleneck Dataview in its original inception. My Dataview usage is minimal at best. My understanding under the hood is so basic that its fairly intimidating for me to get into too deeply.

Elsewhere on the Web

• Digital Blasphemy released two wallpapers this past week. Moon of Ianeira and Ianeira. I like the play on words. I am just speculating, but he’s got a son named Ian who has recently gone off to college. Maybe Dad misses his Son. It warms my heart. It also blows my mind how long I feel I’ve been part of the Digital Blasphemy family.
• We’ve only owned a Kindle for about six months. I was aware there was a Web Reader but was not aware of the Notebook view of your highlights.
• Haven’t used Tana at all this year.
• Finished reading The Dichotomy of Leadership. Moved on to Meditations: A New Translation and reading The Daily Stoic each day corresponding to the calendar date. Why We Sleep and Discipline Equals Freedom are up next.
• Not much to report on the music front except Thistle Radio has been making regular appearances in the morning with Folk Forward. So good in those early morning hours with coffee and a good soft Hue Dynamic Scene.
• PKM.social has gotten off to a fantastic start. Who would have thought it would have taken the mishandling of that one site to finally be the nudge people needed to seek better alternatives. Now that the world has received that nudge, people have found their appropriate new homes and find themselves enamored with the fact that they can engage with people located elsewhere. That being said, the super-knowledgeable PKM standouts have all made their way over. It was a pleasure watching it all unfold and help fan the flames to help it grow. With the real professionals now in place, the need or desire for my overly enthusiastic posting about Obsidian is no longer needed or required. There is a lot of thoughtful engagement happening over there. I found it to be a better tool for engagement with for the community than reddit ever was.