Welcome to the 135th edition

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

As an indie hacker/bootstrapper, my motto is to enjoy the journey. I don't focus overly on the end goal, as it might be too far away, unreachable, and that would just make me frustrated all the time. Focusing on the fact that you're not reaching your goals is a recipe for disaster. So, instead, I focus on enjoying each and every day. I try to feel grateful for the little things too.

This week, I'm grateful for the time I could spend with my kids, instead of being stuck in an office 70km away from home. I've also decided to convert a part of my indie hacking revenue into a new friend called Zwan:

He's cute, right???! :)

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

This week, I've decided to spend more time to try and monetize this newsletter. There are two main ways I can do this: convince more of you to become paid subscribers, assuming you get value out of what I create for you, and want to get more/support my work. I try to do that regularly, but I don't want to be too demanding/annoying, and I can fully understand that only a tiny percentage of my readers are willing to do that.

The other way is to include paid promotions in the newsletter. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I've already accepted "exchanging" newsletter recommendations. But this time, I'm willing to try something different. Next week, a first promotion will be included. I will be very clear about the fact that it's a promoted space, so don't worry about that. I hope you'll understand that it's just another way for me to make my lifestyle more sustainable and get closer to my goal: being able to focus 100% of my energy on my indie efforts!

New articles

This week, I've published an article about eventual reciprocity, a concept that we should all keep in mind and use to be better humans and build leverage:

Eventual reciprocity

Eventual reciprocity is a long-term game that can help you build better relationships, accumulate trust, social capital, reputation, and has unexpected benefits.

•Sébastien Dubois Sebastien Dubois

Quotes of the week

• "Doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave" — Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
• "Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become" — James Clear, Atomic Habits

Thinking and learning

Harvard Business Review seems to agree with a point I've made recently, and even goes further. It's not only founders who should keep a journal. Actually, the more senior the job title, the more important it gets:

Clayton Miller goes a bit further about his current PKM system:

This is a further deep dive into why I use what I use in my PKM

This is a further deep dive into why I use what I use in my PKM. It is made up of different applications that fit together nicely though I can also compartmentalize them for varying mental states…

•Personal Knowledge Management Journal Clayton Miller

I couldn't agree more with TfTHacker. PKM tools should really help us all build and share workflows and templates:

Tool Makers Should Help us to Easily Share Workflows

Tools for Thought are known for having steep learning curves, which can overwhelm us as users.

•Medium TfTHacker

Where good ideas come from:

Luckily, the Obsidian installer doesn't require admin rights. But if you really can't use it, here are some ideas about how you can use OneNote as an alternative:

Using OneNote, for when you can’t use Obsidian

Sacrilege!! Why would anyone want to use OneNote instead of Obsidian? Especially if you’re already an Obsidian user?? Well, most companies…

•Medium Ensley Tan

A cool collection of videos of Steven Johnson:

Indie Hacking and bootstrapping

An interview with Louis Pereira:

What we really compete with:

How not to fail:

Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail | Y Combinator

Here’s Jessica’s keynote from our third annual Female Founders Conference [http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/], which brought together more than 800 women building women-led startups. Jessica has seen over 1000 companies go through YC and shares her learnings about what it takes to succeed as…

•Y Combinator Y Combinator

The independent path

Opting out of the default

•The Rebooting Brian Morrissey

AI

Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Models

We introduce Graph of Thoughts (GoT): a framework that advances prompting capabilities in large language models (LLMs) beyond those offered by paradigms such as Chain-of-Thought or Tree of Thoughts (ToT). The key idea and primary advantage of GoT is the ability to model the information generated by…

•arXiv.org Maciej Besta

Early days of AI

Rather then view LLMs, Transformers, and diffusion models as part of a continuum with past “AI”, it is worth thinking of this as an entirely new era and discontinuity from the past

•Elad Blog Elad Gil

An interview with George Hotz about Tiny Corp, which may bring us more weapons to fight against the AIs of tech giants, X, AI Safety, Self-Driving, AGI, etc:

About Sébastien

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois. I'm an author, founder, and CTO. I write books and articles about software development & IT, personal knowledge management, personal organization, and productivity. I also craft lovely digital products 🚀

If you've enjoyed this article and want to read more like this, then become a subscriber, check out my Obsidian Starter Kit, the PKM Library, my PKM coaching page, my collection of books about software development and the IT Concepts Wall 🔥.

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