Parts of what follows grew out of several older posts I wrote on different topics that, at first glance, did not seem to belong together. Looking back, I realized they were circling around the same question from different angles. Instead of rewriting those posts, I decided to keep them as they are and try to synthesize the bigger pattern here.
Over time, I started noticing the same pattern in very different areas of life.
In education, in technology, at work, and even in private life, systems tend to drift away from what builds long-term capability, resilience, and alignment. Instead, they optimize for what is easier to reward, easier to explain, or simply more attractive in the short term.
I have been using the Brainiac intensively over the last months and made some changes to the configuration along the way. Get your update here or from Codeberg.
Improvements:
Added journal.org to the list of refile targets.
Reduced the width of comment, source, etc. boxes in brainiac.css.
The attached items are now visibly listed in the drawer of the headline.
Minor changes in the configuration, e.g. increase of idle time etc.
New things:
Added org-crypt to the config, so that sensitive information can be encrypted if storing files on public servers.
To integrate Brainiac into your system menu, I propose the following: copy brainiac.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications and brainiac.svg to ~/.local/share/icons.
I added basic AI support by using a customized ollama-buddy-mini and running models locally with ollama. Although I previously stated that Brainiac would not have AI, the chosen combination presents a nice compromise between functionality and privacy.
I also introduced the abbrev-mode as a template storage for some useful org templates and as a mechanism for storing AI prompts for future usage.
In order to consolidate important functions and keystrokes, I configured a menu which can be reached by pressing C-c b using transient.