A CHINESE TRADER BUILT A SECOND BRAIN IN OBSIDIAN... THAT GENERATES 3 TRADING IDEAS EVERY MORNING AT 6AM AND MADE $180,000 IN 6 MONTHS. No Bloomberg terminal. No analytics desk. No team of analysts. A Mac Mini by the wall. An iPhone in his pocket. One local Obsidian vault. Six N8N pipelines running 24/7, pulling every article he reads, every podcast he listens to, and every voice note he drops into a Telegram bot—directly into the vault. Every night, a neural network reads across 4,000 connected notes and finds the strongest connections between fresh information and old theses. Every morning at 6AM, a brief lands in his inbox: - 3 trading ideas with confidence scores - The emerging thesis of the week - Any note that contradicts an active position The system only wakes him up when a fresh note contradicts his thesis, or when an idea breaks 90% confidence. Everything else runs without him. The monthly bill: $120 in API costs. The monthly return: approximately $30,000 into the account. Traditional quant funds pay teams of 8 people to produce the same flow of insights. He pays $120 and a Mac Mini. The full system breakdown is in the article below. Bookmark this before you pay for a Bloomberg subscription. Follow CyrilXBT for every solo operator setup that changes what one person can build.show more

Obsidian notes = raw material. This system = finished... output. Five workflows that process every capture into something usable. Decision support. Writing fuel. Conversation material. Action triggers. Every note connected. Every idea surfaced at the right moment. Nothing captured and forgotten. The vault that produces instead of collects. Read this and Bookmark it now.show more

THIS IS WHAT YOUR SECOND BRAIN SHOULD LOOK LIKE... most people dump notes into obsidian and call it a second brain it’s not a second brain it’s a second drawer karpathy just dropped the pattern that changes this and it’s called the llm wiki every time you add a source ai reads it, extracts key claims, updates every connected note and flags contradictions your obsidian stops being an archive and starts being alive save this and show it to someone still using notion as a second brain full breakdown in the article ↓show more

Claude, Obsidian and n8n form a second brain that... clears $5,200 months from brand UGC deals. Most creators still open a blank CapCut file and hope the brand brief sticks. That loop dies at $1,800. The stack replaces hope with a closed system. Obsidian holds every brand voice, every past script that hit 400k views, every rejection note. Claude reads the vault through a local project and rewrites the next five UGC packages in 3 minutes. n8n watches the inbox, creates the note, triggers Claude, formats the brief, and drops the finished package into the brand portal while the creator sleeps. No more research tabs. No more “what angle worked last time.” Month 1: build the vault and wire the three tools. Month 2: first automated batch ships. Two brands pay $1,100 total. Month 3: the same loop runs on four brands. Average deal $480. Twelve packages leave. Bank shows $5,200. The second brain does not store notes. It compounds every win into the next model. Script that scored 18% engagement gets tagged. Claude pulls only those tags next run. The model improves without extra prompt engineering. UGC brands pay for consistency, not inspiration. This system delivers the same quality every week at the same speed. Set the vault once. Let the three tools run the rest. If this was useful - follow.show more

THIS TRADER TRAINED HIS OBSIDIAN VAULT ON HUNDREDS OF... CHART PATTERNS AND NOW IT THINKS WITH HIM every setup he ever studied is in there > linked to the outcome > linked to the context > linked to what he was thinking at the time he types one command > Claude Code finds the relevant sources, runs analysis through NotebookLM, saves everything structured the vault doesn't just store information anymore it connects it most traders are still screenshotting charts into a Discord and forgetting them in 48 hours article belowshow more

THIS MAN HASN’T OPENED HIS TASK MANAGER IN A... WEEK AND HIS ENTIRE LIFE IS STILL ON TRACK he dumped everything into one folder before bed and closed his laptop woke up to a system that had already sorted every note and flagged every stalled project and assigned every task his coworkers are still living in their inboxes the only difference is one folder called CAPTURE and claude running at 8pm every night every idea goes in and claude files it and nothing requires a decision and nothing gets lostshow more

1 Neural Network + Obsidian + Karpathy’s 1-file method... = the most unhinged second brain build of 2026. It remembers everything you’ve ever done, and it costs $0 on top of what you already pay. The base is Karpathy’s append and review: 1 giant note, new thoughts stack on top, old ones sink, every few days you reread and pull the survivors back up. No folders, no tags, no plugins the rereading IS the system, because review is what turns storage into thinking. The flaw: past 10,000 lines, no human rereads anything. That’s where the neural network takes over. You keep the note in Obsidian 1 vault, everything dumps to the top: ideas, links, meeting fragments, half-thoughts. You never organize, you only dump. It all lives as plain markdown on your own disk, and that detail is the whole trick. Because now you point Claude Code at the vault folder, and it reads every line you’ve ever written. “What did I think about pricing in March.” “Find the 3 ideas I keep circling.” “What did I drop that deserves a second look.” It answers from YOUR notes, with quotes, in 15 seconds. Then once a week, 1 prompt closes the loop: read the last 7 days, surface the 5 entries worth pulling back up, flag anything that contradicts what I wrote a month ago. The model does the sinking and surfacing Karpathy did by hand, and the note stays alive instead of turning into a graveyard. Week 1 feels like nothing. Week 4 you hit the first “I already solved this in January.” Month 3 you consult your past self more than Google. Most second brains die in 11 days under 40 plugins and 200 folders. This one is 1 file and a loop, and it compounds because dumping takes 0 discipline. Notion stores what you thought. This thing argues back.show more

A $20 APP CAN ORGANIZE WHAT MOST PEOPLE NEVER... DO One creator got tired of scattered notes, forgotten ideas and unfinished projects, so he built his own operating system on top of Obsidian Powered by Claude, it transformed 378 notes, 1,816 connections and 53 knowledge clusters into a living dashboard that looked more like a sci-fi command center than a note-taking app He could see how ideas connected, which projects were active, what routines supported them and where every new piece of information belonged. The system evolved every day, becoming more valuable with every note he added instead of more chaotic In reality, spending $20 a month on the right AI tools and organizing your knowledge properly can be worth far more than buying another course you'll never finishshow more

Realising you have been measuring your note-taking system by... how many notes you have when the only metric that actually matters is how many times a note contributed to a decision, a piece of writing, or an action. Most notes in Obsidian never get used. Not because the information was not valuable. Because every note-taking system optimises for capturing and ignores using entirely. Someone built a five-workflow Obsidian system designed from the opposite end. The contribution rate compounds from the first processed note. Here is the full build nobody is talking about.show more

Obsidian plus Vellum = a second brain that never... stops thinking. Works while you sleep. Obsidian holds everything you know. Vellum reasons across it continuously. Every idea connected. Every pattern surfaced. Every insight waiting when you wake up. The people who build this tonight will never go back to thinking alone. Read this and Bookmark it now.show more

Anthropic didn't build his memory system. He built it... himself, and what you're looking at is the proof. Same source, no gatekeeping. The Obsidian CEO published it, anyone can install it. That's not a screensaver on his second monitor. It's his vault. Every point of light is a note. Every cluster is a project his AI already understands without being told again. He doesn't even touch the keyboard to move through it. One hand up, and the whole cluster tilts and spins, like he's turning a globe that happens to be his own head. A year ago he opened a new AI tab every morning and explained himself from scratch. Who he is, what he's building, what he wants. 200+ hours a year, just re-introducing himself to a machine. Then he stopped writing prompts and started writing one file instead. It loaded before every session. His goals, his projects, his blind spots. Claude read it first, every time, without asking. Now the cluster on that screen keeps growing on its own. New notes link themselves. Nothing gets explained twice. He's not showing off code. He's showing off the machine that finally stopped forgetting him.show more

My friend got a promotion in 4 days that... he had been waiting 2 years for Now he just sits and watches the agents do everything for him A few days ago he called me Complaining he was exhausted from work He sells corporate HR software Every day the same thing - searching for clients, researching companies, finding the HR director, calls and so on An hour per lead. 8 leads a day - that was the ceiling I told him to build a team of 4 agents in Claude The agents scan 200 company websites every night, write letters based on each company's specific problem, analyze when the right person is online, and prepare a full brief before every call Today he called again In 4 days his conversion rate grew by 37% His boss looked at the numbers in silence. Then looked up and said: "What do you need to roll this out across the entire department?" My friend is becoming head of the sales department and getting a percentage of the entire department's revenue full guide on how to build your first agent team - in the article belowshow more

Karpathy method + Claude Code reading your whole Obsidian... vault is the smartest second brain on earth. The method is simple and brutal. If you can’t build a thing from scratch, you don’t know it. Tutorials are fake learning and your brain deletes them in 3 days. Most people ignore this. They build a second brain that just sits there, folders of notes nobody reopens, dead text. Point Claude Code at the vault and it wakes up. 5,000 notes, one mind. It reads all of it and answers in your own words and your own proofs, not a model’s guess. Then the loop closes. Want to understand neural nets? Skip the 3-hour video and ask Claude Code to build a tiny one. 200 lines from scratch. Watch it train, break a layer, watch it fail, fix it. It clicks in 20 minutes instead of 3 weeks. The second it lands the note gets written. One idea per file, linked to 10 others, dropped into the vault while the memory is still hot. Now it compounds. Month 1: is 60 notes. Month 6 is 900. Every new note pulls in old ones, so you ask anything and the answer comes from your brain, not the internet. Before: 40 tabs, 6 half read PDF, 0 retained. After: build it once, own it for life. Setup takes 4 minutes. Plain text, no lock-in. A second brain nobody reads is a graveyard. Yours just started thinking.show more

Do you actually understand what's happening. He took an... old laptop and turned it into a box that replaces every AI subscription he pays for. Now that box brings in $2,500 a month, per client, on repeat. No new hardware. Just parts he already had, mounted on a printed plate, running six agents without breaking a sweat. The agents don't sleep. One scouts topics. One writes drafts. One rejects anything below standard. One pushes finished work out the door. One watches over the rest. Fifteen clients. Thirty pieces of content each, every month. Four hours a week from him. The system he built out of spare parts now earns more than most people's actual job. Everyone else recycled their old laptop. He recycled his into income.show more

This guy bought a $400 Mac mini and walked... into a coffee shop with $2,100 for installing an AI agent that never touches the internet. I had to rewatch this because the pitch is almost too simple. He shows up, plugs in the Mac mini, installs a local AI agent running entirely through Ollama, done in under an hour. Zero cloud dependency, no API bills, no monthly charges bleeding the client dry. The coffee shop owner gets a private AI system that keeps working even if the WiFi dies, and he walks out with $2,100 for an install that takes less time than a long lunch. The hardware cost him $400. One deployment and the machine's already paid for five times over. Then he locks in a monthly retainer for support, somewhere around $100-150, which means every client after the first is close to pure margin stacking on top of recurring revenue. Most people hear "AI business" and think they need to build a SaaS platform or learn to code or raise funding from someone. This skips all of that and goes straight to walking into coffee shops with a Mac mini under one arm. Not a company that scales to a billion dollars, obviously, but a solo operator clearing a few thousand a month from local installs while everyone else is still arguing about which LLM is best on Twitter.show more

A 20-year-old student from China, Li Hao, built an... AI speed radar with Claude alone and sold it to a city district for $317,000 He wrote the whole thing in 9 days, spending about $20 on Claude API calls He set an old camera on his balcony, pointed it at the intersection below, and let Claude watch the road Claude tags every car, motorbike and pedestrian in real time, 653 in five minutes, and flags anyone over the limit The moment a car speeds, Claude clips the video, reads the license plate, matches the owner, and emails the fine on its own A normal radar takes one photo and misses half the time. Claude records full video, so there is nothing to dispute, and the fines go out with no operator He walked into the district office with a flash drive and asked for 10 minutes. he left with a contract Every Claude config he used is in the articleshow more

Claude + Obsidian + n8n + 316 TB storage... built a private second brain that ships AI projects at $3,400 a month. Most people rent cloud space and pray the bills stay low. Data leaks. Models throttle. Projects slow. This stack runs everything local. → Obsidian vault grows without limits. Every note, dataset, fine-tune, client archive links in one graph. → Claude reads the full vault instantly through Projects and MCP. No token caps. No privacy risk. → n8n automates the pipelines. New data drops → auto-ingest → Claude summarizes and links. Nightly fine-tune jobs fire. Client deliverables generate on demand. → One ORICO enclosure starts at 60 TB. Add drives. 180 TB. 300 TB. Final setup hits 316 TB. HDDs for archives. SSDs for active models. Laptop-level speed in a desktop box. Plug, power, done. Month 1: Vault hits 120 GB. First local agent runs end-to-end. Month 2: Private dataset training. Sold one custom workflow for $1,200. No cloud fees. Month 3: Recurring retainers. $3,400. System trains, tests, and deploys while you review. Before: Scattered cloud tabs. Monthly bills. Slow inference. After: 316 TB under your desk. Full control. Zero latency. Projects compound. The second brain does not beg for API keys. It owns the data and prints the income. If this was useful - follow.show more

THAT'S CRAZY, THIS CHINESE FOUNDER BUILT A MASSIVE MAC... MINI FARM AND EACH ONE RUNNING ITS OWN HERMES AI AGENT LIKE A FULL-TIME EMPLOYEE He's not running one AI assistant. He's running an entire workforce. The stack: Mac Mini + Hermes, scaled out across a full physical farm. Every single Mac Mini in the rack runs its own instance of Hermes Agent – and each one has its own dedicated job. Not duplicated tasks. Actual division of labor, machine by machine, the way you'd structure a real team. No salaries. No sick days. No onboarding. Just racks of hardware, each one handling its own piece of the business, running in parallel, 24/7. This is what it looks like when "AI agent" stops being one chatbot on your laptop and starts being an actual operation. Most people are running one AI tool. This guy built a company out of them. Bookmark this post. Full setup in the video below.show more

THIS SHELF OF MAC MINIS REPLACES $4,080 A YEAR... IN AI SUBSCRIPTIONS 00:02 the camera pans across a shelf of stacked Mac minis and the trick is obvious: that silent little farm runs the models you rent every month most people pay 7 companies for AI and use 3 of the tools. they forget the rest on the credit card and call it a stack the Mac mini M4 ends that. one shared memory pool means a $599 box runs 7B and 8B models faster than Windows machines that cost twice as much ollama pull, one command. open webui in one docker line. point Claude Code at localhost and it just works it draws 10 to 30 watts, sits silent next to a router, and runs 24/7 for $3 a month in power it pays back a $20 ChatGPT Plus sub in 3 months, then saves you $4,000 a year while the frontier still rents you compute every month you wait is another $340 gone for compute that fits on a shelfshow more

A HARDWARE MODDER BOLTED A BATTERY PACK ONTO A... $599 MAC MINI M4 AND TURNED A DESK SERVER INTO A BACKPACK AI RIG THAT RUNS FOR EIGHT HOURS WITHOUT A WALL OUTLET he posts a video of the mac mini with a slim battery module clamped to the side, USB-C plugged into the back. no power brick, no outlet, just the 10 to 30W draw of the M4 chip pulling from a 20,000mAh bank. a full work day on one charge. this is not a portable laptop trick. it is a desk-class AI server that fits in a sling bag the same $599 mac mini i recommended in last week's article as the silent default, now untethered. pair it with a mobile hotspot or a Starlink mini and you have a fully off-grid LLM stack that answers questions in a forest, on a plane, in a power outage. the model lives in the box, the battery powers the box, that is the whole stack this is not a gadget. it is the first time the words "AI server" and "fits in your bag" belong in the same sentenceshow more

THIS GUY HAD 1,283 NOTES AND HIS SYSTEM WAS... DUMBER THAN A FOLDER that galaxy in the background is his Obsidian vault > looks incredible > does nothing dead notes, zero connections, zero value extracted from any of it > the fix isn't taking better notes > it's building a pipeline where Claude Opus 4.8 does the research, NotebookLM does the analysis, and every session feeds your vault automatically one command: > Claude Code searches YouTube for 10 relevant sources > passes them to NotebookLM - Google's servers do the heavy processing, not your tokens > NotebookLM runs full analysis, generates infographics, mindmaps, flashcards > everything lands as structured markdown in your Obsidian vault, linked and ready total time: 6 minutes > after a month the vault knows your thinking style. after a year it's a trained research assistant the $300K AI architects aren't taking better notes > they're building systems that compound 30-minute setup. full step-by-step in the article below 👇show more