Every few months, another “how to set up Obsidian so it really works for you” essay does the rounds.

This morning I found yet another one. It looked good. Genuinely thorough. The kind of post where someone has clearly spent weeks refining their setup and another week writing about it.

And I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

Do I read it now? File it somewhere? But where? The irony of not knowing how to file a productivity system article inside your productivity system is not lost on me.

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Relentless Productivity™ has a dark side. The more capable your tools, the faster the work accumulates - and with Claude Cowork, that accumulation happens session by session, each one spawning its own entry in an ever-growing sidebar list that becomes harder to read by the day. I know this from experience. My Cowork sidebar had grown to the point where I could no longer tell what was live, what was done and what was waiting.

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Two thirds of the weight comes back within a year of stopping Ozempic. I keep thinking about that number. And I keep coming back to a diet book published in 1991 that understood exactly why. The book is called The Hacker’s Diet. It was written by John Walker - co-founder of Autodesk and the original programmer behind AutoCAD. By his late thirties Walker had tried everything. Nothing worked. So he did what engineers do: he stripped the problem back to first principles, built a measurement system and ran the experiment on himself.

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I received some of my annual medical test results this week and needed to redact my personal details before sharing them. Standard stuff - name, date of birth, Medicare number, address. But the files were JPEGs, not a Word document I could just edit. My first instinct was to upload them to Claude and let it handle everything. Then I stopped myself. Medical records. Cloud service. Maybe not. I have a full local LLM stack running on my Mac - Open WebUI fronting Ollama, with Gemma and Qwen among the models available.

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For two decades, every question started the same way: open a browser, type, hunt. Google built that world. That era is ending.

Since the World Wide Web went mainstream, every major behaviour pattern on the internet has been built around one fundamental act: the human search. Type a query, receive links, hunt through documents, form a conclusion. It was extraordinary. Billions of people sharing information across the planet, instantaneously. And it made Google one of the most powerful companies ever built.

Now watch it dissolve.

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Years ago I was endlessly lectured by ‘real designers’ that white space was ‘a good thing’. Not every surface of a page, screen or wall needs to be filled. Indeed you need empty spaces (white spaces) to let a design or scene to breath; to ensure that what you are presenting stands out. Here we have the opposite of ‘white space’. This blurry chap seems to want to fill every space with some gold swirlygig.

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As I prepared to race out the door this morning, I snatched up the hand-scribbled agenda for the team meeting and thought: “Oh, at a minimum, I should photograph this.” So I don’t lose the piece of paper. The next thought was: “Hey, I should send this to Claude.” Before I knew it, Claude had read it and turned it into a proper document - ready to throw into the stack for the day ahead.

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Geir Isene sat down at his computer last week and realised something unusual. Almost every program he touched - the window manager, the text editor, the file manager, the terminal, the email client, the calendar - was software he wrote himself. In a few weeks, with Claude Code as his engineering partner, he had replaced his entire desktop computing environment. All of it command line. All of it terminal-native. All of it his.

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“A fascinating way of answering the question of who pays the most for their military!” - spotted via Simon shows you maps - www.facebook.com/SimonGerm…

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