I am aware I haven’t posted here for a while, but this isn’t dead. I have just been busy with getting a new house and making it liveable. But I’m back to a more normal schedule here so I thought I would write an update as a sort of ‘more to come soon’ message.

What’s this blog for anyway?

I am going to make tools for reading, thinking and agency. My intermediate goal is a tool for *deep reading of a number of texts while note taking and using AI*. I want to create tools which give people more agency and free people from the social distortions that surround them. This is based on an understanding that important personal knowledge is often very lightly buried below a layer of biased reinterpretation which can be solved by reading the sources, and thinking critically, and having technology help you.

Along the way, I will do stuff, read stuff, and live a life. All of this work may be useful to others so I will share it in the hope that people are interested enough to follow along with me. Also, I want to trade off useful work for the ability to influence others. But I will try to keep the *main feed* this blog a good mix of the relevant and the interesting.

Some tools that I consider to be “fellow travellers” along my path are Obsidian because it is a tool to allow personal through not taking, Wikipedia because it gives people the agency to change the world through in depth understanding and challenges “conventional” wisdom, tools like ground news, AI in general for it’s ability to break down knowledge cartels, social media in general for it’s ability to let individuals share a personal understanding and easily absorb knowledge. What I consider enemies are professional bodies, safetyism, broad brush politics, generic corporate positivity, and simple ideology.

Why this blog might be interesting to you?

Firstly, you might be interesting in who I am and how this interacts with what I am trying to do. I studied in mathematics and worked in software engineering before taking a turn to legal and philosophical. I want to solve the fuzzy and agentic with the concrete.

You might be interested in the topics I am exploring. I will write a lot about reading, agency, notetaking and Obsidian. I also produce a stream of tools related to the work I do some related to coding, some related to reading, some related to Obsidian.

The reality of the market and the pivot

Money is a necessary part of life. In a sense, people paying for things is an indicator that what you are doing has value it is also a necessary tool. My position is it is fine to seek money and attention as long as you do some morally and in a way that is subservient to the goal. It is entirely plausible that people will no value reading tools sufficiently to pay for them, nor do I necessarily *want* people to pay for them for reach. Also, the things that you do to make money can act as tools to get the attention and reputation that you need to do thing things along the way.

The key points is that they are moral and do not distract too much from my main aims. The obvious candidates are reading or research tools for particular markets where the financial pay off is more immediately visible, social media and writing tools, AI productivity tools, writing, specific consulting, tools that occur from my day to day work. Also the work and tools I make should reflect my vision rather than some random money making scheme that VCs have, this requires a measure of long term thinking and diversification.

Progress so far

So where is readwithai. I have obtained a house. I have a treadmill desk with a split keyboard and a nice view of the park with some squirrels. My office is lined with white boards. I have a violin and an electric guitar within arms reach that I can play when I am bored. I have a desk fan and lights that I can switch on with a button on my treadmill desk.

I have found a potentially compatible group of people in the form of Obsidian. I’ve staked my claim in the Obsidian space by becoming a daily user blogging and various aspects of my usage and creating a couple of plugins, Plugin REPL being the main one. I have written a range of blog posts on the topic. I have created a cookbook of hacks using Obsidian and plugin REPL. I have a small but existent number of X followers. I have smeared the name and concept of readwithai on a number of open source projects I have released and updated those I created before. This puts the concept of readwithai in front of hundreds of people a month. Not much compared to what I might get from youtube videos - of which I have a few. It is however natural, part of my work, and not too much additional work when I do something. A big win seems to be the FFmpeg beginners cookbook I made.

I’ve started prototyping the things I want to create within Obsidian using the tools that I have created. I’ve got control of a PDF editor in Obsidian and understand how code mirrors plugin system works.

In the coming months I intend to finish a working proof of concept of the tools I want to make, continue pushing for attention on the social front in a similar manner but perhaps stretching in youtube, and get a decent handle on the number of readers I have and where they come from. I also have some plans for a couple of tools related to jupyter and AI that may get some attention. I also may try and make and sell some small tools related to substack editing with the aim of being somewhat diversified.

Keeping up with me

I intend to post more regularly here with posts mostly related to the readwithai vision and work, but with a bit of variety. If you wanted more of me, and to hear about tools I create on a day-to-day basis you can follow me on X.