Build a Privacy-Aware Second Brain

This post by Tiago Forte gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I recently started to lean into journaling, using Roam Research for my personal knowledge management.

I have been following Fortes’ thoughts on “building a second brain”.

I’ve became intrigued by idea of zettelkasten and the 17th century idea of a “commonplace book” after reading Tom Ricks’ book First Principles in January 2021.

I can see the personal value in training a stochastic word hammer on one’s personal style and voice.

After playing with a few tools and learning more about the counterpublic narrative of the AI hype machine, I can’t see the value in a living content creator purposely giving up their intellectual property in real-time to OpenAI.

I would opt for a free, privacy-aware, locally running option like GPT4All to accomplish the exact same thing that Forte suggests.