by Ancapistani | 2025-09-05 14:18:45+00:00
> I’m pretty shocked to hear that someone like you exists already.

Which part? The VR part, or the AI stuff?

For VR, the tech honestly isn't there yet. I fell down that rabbit hole when I started playing combat flight sims regularly, and then managed to get my employer to buy me an AVP. I never really had "VR sickness", but what little discomfort I did have faded within a couple of week. I probably spend ~40-60h / week on average in VR now, but honestly don't keep close track of it.

> First, now that you spend so much time in VR, why does that kill your need to take notes?

Not at all, it's just effectively impossible to do so by writing while wearing a VR headset. The AVP comes closest to allowing it, but the passthrough resolution isn't quite good enough to make it work well.

> Are you somehow taking notes in VR?

Yep. For most things I use Markdown in Neovim. I have an mkdocs site configured to run locally whenever I have a terminal open, and push changes to a remote git repo regularly. I've considered moving to Obsidian, but am still not sold on the proprietary stuff.

Increasingly, I've been using STT and AI tools to speak my thoughts and record them that way. I've not settled on a "final" tech stack for that, but Limitless (and their Pendant) has been working well enough so far.

> Do you find that these notes are as effective and personal as real writing?

No.

Despite the VR and AI stuff, I'm an analog person at heart. I'm in my early 40s. I wear a fully analog watch (I don't find smartwatches worth it). I collect and restore fountain pens, and have one with me pretty much at all times.

Handwriting it by far the most effective way to keep notes. I believe that's because it's slow enough that you have to synthesize your thoughts at the same time you're writing, which in turn leads to better initial understanding and likely commitment to long-term memory.

> Do you put everything you write into an LLM now and trust that it’ll be searchable forever and the AI won’t lose its context?

Sort of.

I don't put everything in there, of course. Limitless is for non-work stuff, as I work in healthtech and don't want our IP stored there without a BAA in place. It works well enough for personal stuff, though.

For work, I have a transcript file that I keep for each day that I use my STT stuff that contains the raw text that I said. That's accurate enough that I trust it. From those files, I have AI create a summary of topics. Those are then fed into a simple RAG that can reference the summaries and the original files as needed.

I figure this approach means that I can always create new summaries or move to another workflow in the future if I want. For now, it's been at least as effective in terms of lookup as manually typing notes. Transcription errors are very rare and easy enough to figure out if I ever need to correct them. They're far more comprehensive, though. I can dump an entire meeting into a transcript, then go back and figure out exactly what was said and by whom.

Feeding Zoom's transcripts into the RAG has saved my ass a couple of times. I've privately asked a chatbot what I'd said about a given topic in the past while on a call, then used that context to make sure I'm using the same arguments in support of a position that I did six months ago - or found that position has changed and called that out to the others on the call.