I built an Obsidian plugin that finds and helps you tidy up the notes you once thought were important but that have quietly gathered dust. It’s out now as an official community plugin.
Hard to spot in the graph view
As a vault grows, so do its notes and backlinks.
When links pile up and cross-connect, the graph view turns a note into a catch-all that seems connected to everything. There’s plenty of information, but that abundance is exactly what keeps you from reaching the note you actually want.
Six years ago, in the very first piece I wrote here, I described the small magic in our pockets. The magic that stretches memory almost forever, and blurs the line around who owns knowledge. Since then my notes kept growing. The magic kept its promise and pushed my memory further and further outward.
And now I stand on its other side. Too many to find.
The papers I’m curious about but never sit down to read
I keep running into papers and long essays I’m genuinely curious about. The curiosity is real; the focus to sit down and read them is not. Reading is active work, and I rarely find the slot for it.
The time I do have is the passive kind — a commute, a walk, the few minutes I spend staring out a window. That time arrives whether I plan for it or not, and for this kind of material those moments are actually the best ones: listening slots into them in a way reading never will. So what I want isn’t a summary to skim or a transcript. I want the thing broken down plainly enough that it comes in just by listening, hands free.
An Obsidian plugin that automatically counts meaningful edits and helps you keep track of the notes you revisit most. It’s been working well enough on my end, so I’m releasing it as a beta.
Starting Point: Finding the “Heavy” Notes
After using Obsidian for over 3 years, my notes had grown considerably.
When I opened the graph view, every note appeared at roughly the same size. Link count does affect node size, but that reflects “how connected” a note is — not “how actively I’m thinking about it.”
It became a chance to revisit what a valuable note really means to me. The answer: notes I keep opening, adding to, and rewriting. In other words, notes with a high edit count.
It all began with a common problem: I wasn’t getting enough exercise.
Remote work became standard, which was flexible, but it also meant I had days where I didn’t leave the house at all. I knew I needed to change that, so I started a new habit: just walking.
“Humans are happy creatures because they can forget.”
This is a phrase my math teacher taught me when I was a student. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, but in today’s world, where information constantly floods us, I deeply feel the weight of these words. This isn’t just a philosophical question; it’s an extremely practical wisdom for maintaining mental and physical health and having the space to think in this information society.
Every day, we are exposed to an enormous amount of information: work tasks, news, social media and app notifications, personal notes. If we tried to remember everything, our brains would quickly become overwhelmed.
Generative AI has become capable of telling sophisticated lies indistinguishable from human ones.
Precisely because of such an era we must not delegate “understanding” itself to AI.
Gathering and interpreting information in our own way and putting it into your own words has become ever crucial. Because without it, connecting disparate knowledge and experiences to form a single thread, will be impossible.
This act of “connecting the dots” is the essence of thought: a domain that must never be delegated to others let alone AI.
What is intelligence? I believe it can be represented by a tree.
In the human tree, there are various elements: objectively guaranteed facts that exist outside human preferences, such as scientific truths; opinions that can be mutually exclusive and contradictory; and ingrained common sense from one’s cultural upbringing.
Physics and Bayes’ theorem in Mathematics both contain the notion of measurement.
