had many good conversations afterwards, on a roll and i hope to keep the energy going. thanks @zachkrall.com for the invite and @modal-labs.bsky.social for hosting!

handing out these ai receipts as mini uxr sessions taught me a lot about how to design ai memory to draw connections that feel hospitable. It's enzyme's unfair advantage.

i contrasted preference memory -- helping you accomplish a task you asked for, from conviction memory -- which wonders with you about what you care to find out

with a challenge: you'd forgive AI slop on a charming receipt, but not when it comes to your daily AI tools

i shared learnings that started with a months long experiment: seeing how people reacted to sequences of my personal reading highlights printed on thermal receipts, in exchange for themes in their uploaded photos.

Last Thurs i gave a talk at RAID NYC titled "what your notebook owes a stranger" on agentic memory design

GitHub - jshph/aside: Vault-native meeting capture. Timestamped notepad + local transcription + Claude Code skill that distills into Obsidian notes connected to your existing thinking. Vault-native meeting capture. Timestamped notepad + local transcription + Claude Code skill that distills into Obsidian notes connected to your existing thinking. - jshph/aside

3.1k lines of rust. 5MB binary. records both sides of the call. no accounts, no cloud, your audio never leaves your machine. apache 2.0

brew install jshph/aside/aside

github.com/jshph/aside/

ran it on two meetings today. the note it wrote linked back to a half-finished doc i forgot about — not as action items, as context for what i'd been thinking about

i was tired of pasting transcripts into claude myself. so i built the integration layer

the distillation is a 240-line markdown file — a claude code skill the LLM follows as instructions. your memo lines are the attention signal, your vault is the context window

you can read it, fork it, change how it writes notes. no black box

terminal notepad that records mic + system audio. every line you type gets a timestamp synced to the recording

after the call it transcribes locally, aligns your notes with the transcript, then distills everything into your obsidian vault with [[wikilinks]] to your existing thinking

friday night aside: built an open-source meeting recorder for the thoughts you'd never say out loud but turn out to be the most important thing said

bye bye Mac Mini. Using NanoClaw + Sprites to create a remote claw in 10 mins that you can text from Telegram

github.com/jshph/nanoclaw

i made a Claude skill to migrate all your X follows to Bluesky. Comes hot on the heels of removing the X app from my phone...
github.com/jshph/claude...

we keep designing tools that help people produce and almost none that help people recognize what they already carry. those are different products with different economics and i think the second one is underbuilt

how? Enzyme grounds itself in the questions I would ask and applies it to a new corpus

Query: "getting things done"

qmd: "Once you are reaping the benefits of computers, you are also at their mercy."

enzyme: "The meaning of doing lives in the concentration and care brought to the act, not in the output."

Local model 20% the size. 12x indexing speed on 220 docs.

the part that surprised me about using a camera with bad autofocus: having to manually set focus distance taught me more about composition than years of letting algorithms decide

makes me wonder if great design isn't about removing all difficulty but making the hard parts worth learning www.jpham.space/posts/subpa...

still figuring out whether this attachment comes from the tool itself or from earning understanding through friction

now i can switch between freezing motion and creating blur without thinking. the controls live where my hands expect them. muscle memory built through frustration

we assume good tools should work perfectly out of the box. but the ricoh's difficulty forced me to learn every setting, every button, every workaround

spent hours mapping custom controls. shutter speed to one dial, aperture to another, snap focus to a side button. not because it's efficient but because setup creates attachment

the camera has objectively terrible autofocus. forces me to use zone focusing instead. this surprised me: the limitation made me understand depth of field better than any tutorial

been using this ricoh camera for a month. not because i wanted better image quality but because my iphone makes photography too convenient to be creative

Do you find that the friction makes you rethink technical aspects or product oriented ones?

it's not seamless but it works!

just seems like a good idea is a collection of notes tied that say the same thing in different ways. a good idea also holds nuance between two extremes. to write well, claude needs to identify the right articulation, not just the space between two extremes

Yeah!! Been pushing out a lot of updates to it recently. Obsidian and Claude Code have been really taking off since we spoke in nyc

Hey!! surprised that I only just came across your share, thanks a lot! Have you gotten a chance to kick the can around yet?

Hey Johannes! great post, i've also been using claude code + obsidian since early last year and love it. Are you doing a lot of cross-tagging or importing of highlighted content in your work? would love to chat more.