DeveloPassion's Newsletter #133 - Rusty

Welcome

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

This week, I've been quite busy with administrative stuff. As I'm buying a new home, there are countless papers to fill-in, sign, etc. Also, we've been looking for furniture, which is crazy exhausting 😂

Just this weekend, we went to the Ronquières festival, one of the largest in Belgium. The rain just wouldn't stop, and there was mud (and beer) everywhere 😂. Needless to say, I'm exhausted!

I'm also feeling "rusty", as it feels hard to get back to work. I feel tired all the time, and I need to dig real deep to find motivation to get going...

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

This week, I've resumed working on the Obsidian Publisher plugin. I'm busy with link replacement. There's still work to do on that one... Unfortunately, I've discovered that Substack still doesn't have a public API... So I'll either have to hack my way around that, or will have to wait before I can handle cross-posting notes over there. Bummer!

I haven't had time to start recording the Obsidian/PKM video courses, but it's the next big thing I want to do.

New articles

Last week, I've published an article explaining why all solopreneurs should write a journal: https://www.dsebastien.net/why-all-solopreneurs-should-write-a-journal. IMHO, it's an "easy" win for solopreneurs, and they should really consider adding it to their routine.

I've also published a piece about the importance of non-goals. Those are often neglected and deserve a lot more attention: https://www.dsebastien.net/on-the-importance-of-non-goals. Goals set the target, while non-goals help go in the right direction (or at least avoid some wrong paths).

Quotes of the week

• An expert is someone who, over many years, manages to remain confident enough to keep trying and humble enough to keep learning — James Clear
• Sometimes, knowing when to say no is as powerful as knowing when to say yes

Thinking and learning

Obsidian 1.4.2 includes new support for properties. There's now a wonderful UI to manage properties (stored in YAML front matter). The new properties sidebar view reminds me of Notion. I think that this is a wonderful addition to Obsidian, as it will help many more people make use of metadata on their notes, enabling cool usage patterns and automation.

Obsidian 1.4.2 Desktop (Catalyst)

Improvements - Properties: Date and time properties will now automatically be inferred without needing to assign the property type. - Properties: Emails will no…

Obsidian

Also, yay for data portability. There's interoperability between the markdown of callouts in Obsidian and GitHub:

The Johnny Decimal Workbook is now available. A wonderful guide about the Johnny Decimal system from the author himself: Johnny Noble

14.02 The Decimal Workbook║J•D

Johnny.Decimal is a system to organise projects (or your life, or anything else)

Human-centered data networking with interpersonal knowledge graphs:

Human-centered data networking with interpersonal knowledge graphs - DataScienceCentral.com

In the case of interpersonal knowledge graphs, everyone in the community can contribute to the disambiguation and enrichment of the community’s online presence, and at the same time help with findability, accessibility, interoperability and reuse (the FAIR principles). And that applies not only to s…

Data Science CentralAlan Morrison

Luca Rossi on Substack

I am a fan of the PARA method by Tiago Forte for organizing information, and I have brought this to how I organize docs in my teams as well. I believe, at a high level, you can separate between two major types of notes: 🔨 Project Notes 🎨 Area Notes — 1) 🔨 Project notes are the stuff you need…

NotesSubstack

The history of writing tech!

There’s been many recent revolutions in writing technologies, and I thought it would be interesting to compare them and the way they affect the author’s ideas.

blog.benwindingBen Winding

Indie Hacking and bootstrapping

Focus changes everything:

David Heinemeier Hansson on LinkedIn: Clear the barnacles | 36 comments

The easiest way to squander your focus is by paying attention to a million inconsequential things at once. These little mental barnacles add up in… | 36 comments on LinkedIn

LinkedInDavid Heinemeier Hansson

Why most people fail to build an audience:

Neal O'Grady 🍉 on LinkedIn: Why Most Fail to Build an Audience | 108 comments

"Attention is the new oil." – The slogan of the new attention economy. We know its power—but most won't succeed to build an audience. In fact, I'd argue that… | 108 comments on LinkedIn

LinkedInNeal O’Grady 🍉

Killing in on AppSumo:

How we made ~$200,000 in sales, in just 4 days [AppSumo Launch]

Today you’ll read a short story about building a product that really fills a gap in the market, launching it on AppSumo, becoming the best-selling produ…

Indie HackersNikola Velkovski

The Dark Side of business:

Tech

Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb? | Jeff Geerling

Jeff Geerling1 month ago

Linking Modular Architecture to Development Teams

How to improve software delivery with a modular architecture

martinfowler.comMatthew Foster

Hacking With ChatGPT

Ideal Tasks and Use-Cases

Prompt engine, a library to help you craft prompts for LLMs:

GitHub - microsoft/prompt-engine: A library for helping developers craft prompts for Large Language Models

A library for helping developers craft prompts for Large Language Models - GitHub - microsoft/prompt-engine: A library for helping developers craft prompts for Large Language Models

GitHubmicrosoft

AI

Getting ChatGPT to stop apologizing:

How can I get ChatGPT to stop apologizing?

Is there a way to stop ChatGPT from excessively apologizing, when challenged, even when ChatGPT is correct in its reply? ChatGPT will start apologizing and start the replies with sentences like: I

GenAI Stack ExchangeArbel

Google’s updated privacy policy states it can use public data to train its AI models | Engadget

Google has updated its privacy policy to state that it can use publicly available data to help train its AI models…

Engadget

9 useful ChatGPT prompt techniques:

Kunal Sawarkar on LinkedIn: Understanding LLaMA-2 Architecture & its Ginormous Impact on GenAI | 58 comments

Since Meta AI dropped LLAMA-2, there has been hype around it. I reserved my judgment unless I could go through the whole 77-page paper. After going through… | 58 comments on LinkedIn

LinkedInKunal Sawarkar

About Sébastien

I'm Sébastien Dubois, and I'm on a mission to help knowledge workers escape information overload. After 20+ years in IT and seeing too many brilliant minds drowning in digital chaos, I've decided to help people build systems that actually work. Through the Knowii Community, my courses, products & services and my Website, I share practical and battle-tested systems. You can follow me on X 🐦 and on BlueSky 🦋.

I am an author, founder, and coach. I write books and articles about Knowledge Work, Personal Knowledge Management, Note-taking, Lifelong Learning, Personal Organization, and Zen Productivity. I also craft lovely digital products.

If you want to follow my work, then become a member and join our community.

Ready to get to the next level?

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