kepano

@stephango.com

making @obsidian.md

The extent to which Claude specifically is being promoted by bot accounts on GitHub and social platforms smells fishy. It forces me to wonder how much of it is an organized campaign and who is paying for all the tokens.

formats evolve over decades, apps over months, intelligence is evolving every day in terms of pace layers "file over app" defines priorities: invest deeply in proven formats, and don't expect anything at the intelligence layer to last very long

Software pace layers: formats, protocols, platforms, libraries, apps, intelligence. By @kepano, adapted from Stewart Brand

This update fixes some particularly thorny and longstanding bugs on iOS and Android when dealing with very large Markdown files. You can now scroll smoothly in Live Preview on iOS and use "Select all" on Android. Should be able to handle massive files without a hitch.

Obsidian@obsidian.md · 3w ago

Obsidian 1.13.2 (early access) is now available to Catalyst members for desktop and mobile. Adds image zoom on desktop and resolves bugs: - Fixed "Copy" button on large code blocks - Fixed scroll stuttering in long files on iOS - Fixed "select all" in long files on Android

The new iOS share sheet in Obsidian lets you save YouTube transcripts, and content from within other apps. Everything is converted to durable Markdown files. Try it in Obsidian 1.13 (beta)

I was joined by @stephango.com – CEO of Obsidian – on the latest episode of Cortex. This has been one of my favourite conversations so far. Steph has some really insightful approaches to work, running a small team, and developing a powerful tool for the world. www.theenthusiast.net/the-philosop...

The Philosophy of Obsidian, with CEO Steph Ango

New episode of Cortex out today: Myke talks to Steph Ango, CEO of Obsidian, about building tools for thought, working without meetings, managing knowledge with markdown and links, and how a seven-per...

theenthusiast.net

Two new security audits of Obsidian Sync by Cure53 and Trail of Bits are now available on our Security page. All findings have been addressed via remediations and disclosures validated by the respective auditors. Read more: obsidian.md/blog/cure53-...

Obsidian Sync audits by Cure53 and Trail of Bits

Two security audits of Obsidian Sync are now available. All findings have been addressed via remediations and disclosures validated by the respective auditors.

obsidian.md

mature things tend to get pressured into being less weird over time, so if you're starting from scratch your advantage is that you can be very weird if you don't start weird you're probably trying to compete inside the local maximum of something more boring than you could be

Obsidian Reader also works on mobile using Safari on iOS or Firefox on Android. You can set it as the default option when opening Web Clipper.

Obsidian Web Clipper now lets you manage highlights, and stays in Reader mode when you click links. It's such a pleasant way to browse the web. You can control the colors, fonts, and easily copy anything to Markdown.

New policy from Atlassian: Unless you opt out by August 17th 2026, data from Jira and Confluence will automatically be used for AI training. Some data cannot be opted out at all on some plans.

Atlassian recently announced updates to how we use eligible customer data so we can deliver improved AI experiences for all customers. We designed this change with your security and privacy in mind - giving you control over your data contribution with new in-app settings and strengthening our existing privacy-preserving measures - so you can adopt AI confidently. These changes are reflected in our customer terms and will go into effect on August 17, 2026.

As part of this change, we are:

Updating how we use metadata and in-app data to improve apps and AI experiences for all customers.
Introducing new data contribution settings in Atlassian Administration, so you can manage your organization’s contributions.
Note: Initially, these settings will apply to data in Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management, including data in your Atlassian Platform apps (Rovo, Home, Teams, Projects, Assets, Goals, Analytics, and Administration).
Strengthening our existing privacy‑preserving measuresData contribution default settings follow the highest active plan in each Atlassian cloud organization.

Some Atlassian cloud organizations are excluded from data contribution due to their compliance requirements, so default settings are not available.


If your Atlassian organization has an active Enterprise plan, you can opt-out of metadata contribution.

If your Atlassian organization’s highest active plan is Free, Standard, or Premium, metadata contribution is always on, and you’re not able to opt-out.

All metadata is de-identified and aggregated before it is used to improve apps and experiences for all customers. We remove information that directly identifies individuals, such as name and email addresses.

You can learn more about what metadata is, how it's protected, and how it's used in the documentation.

I can't go back to the regular YouTube UI after this 😅 Obsidian Reader now makes the transcript interactive so you can scrub, highlight, auto-scroll. It feels so nice.

New in Obsidian Reader: - Themes and typography settings - Highlighting - Save options Also added a beautiful new reading experience for deeply nested comments on Reddit and Hacker News. Available with Obsidian Web Clipper 1.3 on all browsers.

One thing that makes Obsidian Reader insanely difficult to build is that websites are full of bugs and bad HTML/metadata that I have to work around e.g. here New Scientist defined author as "#author.fullName}" in the metadata but Obsidian Reader still gets the correct one

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what are the chances this thing will be abandonware in a month? you can make something in a few days but will you commit to maintaining and improving it for the next few years?

The future is not creating a power drill from scratch for every task. It's making reliable tools that can easily adapt to the task. A power drill provides motorized torque in a handheld format. It's more malleable than a screwdriver because you can change the bits.

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I have been working on Obsidian Reader for over a year. I didn't want to share it until I felt it was good enough. It's finally there. Consistent formatting for any article. Outline, syntax highlighting, nice footnotes, adjustable typography. Runs locally. Just rules, no AI.

If you are using MCP to access your data, you are trusting that third party with unencrypted access to your data. Third-party MCPs are not an option if you value privacy. End-to-end encryption makes MCP effectively useless.

Defuddle now returns Youtube transcripts! Paste a YouTube link into defuddle·md to get a markdown transcript with timestamps, chapters, and pretty good diarization ...or if you just want to read it, try the new Reader mode in @obsidian.md Web Clipper powered by Defuddle