The Future of Personal Computing

Refer to Computing

Look into Alexander Obenauer (site), who is doing great research on this topic. He is looking at it from a graph-based system of items and links. Quite similar to Personal Knowledge Management systems like Obsidian. In this iteration, it will serve as a new layer for how we interact with our computers. Currently, we use application windows and file system. However, we are increasingly using our browsers and most people rarely use the terminal. The file system as feels archaic as it is hard to search, prone to redundancy and takes a lot of time and effort to organise, where most people don't even try.

With a graph-based system, the goal is to make items like videos, website links, emails and so on, more accessible to the user. Whether this is true is up for debate. With my journey on Obsidian, I have had to go through a mindset shift in order to get the most out of the system. You can't just take notes and hope for the best, you need to actually cultivate the notes^[1]. You have read through them, edit them, move them around, truncate, delete text and so on. This is a continuous process. If you can get people to understand that this system takes time to get results, that would be great. On the other had, you can bring in the idea of the Digital Mind, that has a Self-Organising File System or Self-Organising Graph-Based System that uses AI to link and retrive files that are relevant to you at a given time. This is similar to what Mem.ai and Tana are trying to do.