Your thoughts are not you.
Cognitive fusion is when we treat every thought as truth. As reality. As identity.
The result? We waste energy fighting ourselves instead of observing, questioning, and letting go.
Learning to defuse changed how I think and work.
notes.dsebastien.net/cognitive-f...
What if your AI assistant actually knew:
➤ how you slept last night
➤ your training load this week
➤ whether you're recovered enough to push today
Mine does now.
Here's how I wired it up:
www.dsebastien.net/a-garmin-ai...
And we're now focusing on the combination of AI, Knowledge Management and Obsidian; the killer combo
Members get all recordings plus future sessions. Price of a couple of books per month.
Inside Knowii Community we've run masterclasses on:
➤ AI Master Prompt
➤ Model Context Protocol (MCP)
➤ Clarity
➤ Personal Organization
➤ Journaling
➤ Obsidian
What's the one thing that made your PKM system actually stick?
For me it was giving every note a purpose. One idea, one note, one entry point. Everything else is temporary.
Curious what cracked it for you.
That's why I scream when I see people recommending connecting AI to their email or calendar. It's NUTS :)
The Lethal Trifecta for AI Agents:
1. Hallucination: the AI invents a package name
2. Tool access: the AI can run install commands
3. Autonomy: no human reviews the action
When all three combine, a single hallucination turns into an automatic malware installation and data exfiltration
The overlap between personal AI skills and organizational ones is much bigger than most people think. What I build for my own vault directly informs what we do at work, and vice versa.
I'm now leading an AI Working Group at my day job. The goal: help colleagues climb the Levels of AI Use ladder, from basic chat all the way to agentic workflows with proper context engineering.
Meanwhile, I cannot think of many applications that are as malleable as Obsidian is today.
The only sad aspect is that Obsidian is not open source. Yes the Markdown will always be there (assuming you didn't lock yourself in through plugins). But if you've built an entire universe on top, it might all go tumbling down some day if Obsidian goes unmaintained.
With Obsidian on top of Markdown, you not only get portable/interoperable files. You get a complete operating system/platform that you can use to build literally ANYTHING.
It's MEGA POWERFUL, and very few people truly get this.
It's obvious when people ask questions such as "Why would I care about Obsidian since I can just create/edit Markdown files in a folder?".
This completely misses the point. Yes you can do that.
The thing to understand is that Obsidian runs in a full-blown Web browser, and EVERYTHING is reachable/"hackable" in all sorts of ways.
Moreovers, plugins can
- Interact with the entire computer's file system
- Interact with any third-party service
- Run any other program
...
Heck I've even built a game on top of my notes (Note Village)
- Plugins interacting with third-party APIs (e.g., Replicate, Typefully, OpenAI, reMarkable cloud ...)
- Plugins leveraging local & remote AI models (e.g., Transcriber plugin using Ollama to convert images to text)
- Plugins manipulating note properties
- Custom editor handling & rendering (e.g., dataview serializer query refresh buttons)
- Custom icons for tabs/notes in the file explorer etc
- Support for note type schemas + surfacing in the properties & bases UIs
- Plugins exposing RESTful APIs and MCP servers
You can customize basically ANYTHING. Here are some examples of things I've built already:
- Custom Obsidian Base views (e.g., Life Tracker plugin visualizations, periodic notes processing, bookshelf, ...)
- Custom panel types (e.g., typefully, time machine)
I've been building various things over the last four years, and it has all dramatically accelerated since AI agents have become so powerful.
And it'll keep getting easier and easier to build your own things on top of the built-in features of Obsidian.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycy...
The reality is that @obsdmd is an operating system/platform for Markdown.
People don't truly understand the fact that you can build almost ANYTHING YOU WANT on top of it.
@andy_matuschak gets it, and demonstrated it clearly too!
The big topic: LLM Wikis. AI-generated knowledge graphs that live inside your Obsidian vault. Not as a replacement for your thinking, but as a structured first pass on all the sources you never have time to process.
New newsletter is out! Edition #210 covers LLM Wikis, the upcoming Obsidian Starter Kit v4, a new Graph Explorer plugin, AI skills for business automation, and much more.
A book is a set of ideas arranged linearly by the author.
But ideas aren't linear. They're a graph.
When you decompose a book into atomic notes, you're recovering that graph. And you can connect it to everything else you know.
That's where the real value appears 🔥
