🧠 Sharpen your thinking with a second brain
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🧠 Sharpen your thinking with a second brain

Oct 26, 2023·
Nicolò Pinciroli
Nicolò Pinciroli
· 2 min read
Image credit: Unsplash
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Create a personal knowledge base and share your knowledge with your peers.

Hugo Blox web framework empowers you with one of the most flexible note-taking capabilities out there.

Create a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

Use it as your second brain, either publicly sharing your knowledge with your peers via your website, or via a private GitHub repository and password-protected site just for yourself.

Mindmaps

Hugo Blox supports a Markdown extension for mindmaps.

With this open format, can even edit your mindmaps in other popular tools such as Obsidian.

Simply insert a Markdown code block labelled as markmap and optionally set the height of the mindmap as shown in the example below.

Mindmaps can be created by simply writing the items as a Markdown list within the markmap code block, indenting each item to create as many sub-levels as you need:


```markmap {height="200px"}
- Hugo Modules
  - Hugo Blox
  - netlify
  - netlify-cms
  - slides
```

renders as

- Hugo Modules
  - Hugo Blox
  - netlify
  - netlify-cms
  - slides

Anh here’s a more advanced mindmap with formatting, code blocks, and math:


```markmap
- Mindmaps
  - Links
    - [Hugo Blox Docs](https://docs.hugoblox.com/)
    - [Discord Community](https://discord.gg/z8wNYzb)
    - [GitHub](https://github.com/HugoBlox/kit)
  - Features
    - Markdown formatting
    - **inline** ~~text~~ *styles*
    - multiline
      text
    - `inline code`
    - Math: $x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}$
```

renders as

- Mindmaps
  - Links
    - [Hugo Blox Docs](https://docs.hugoblox.com/)
    - [Discord Community](https://discord.gg/z8wNYzb)
    - [GitHub](https://github.com/HugoBlox/kit)
  - Features
    - Markdown formatting
    - **inline** ~~text~~ *styles*
    - multiline
      text
    - `inline code`
    - Math: $x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}$

Highlighting

Highlight important text with mark:

<mark>Highlighted text</mark>

Callouts

Use callouts (aka asides, hints, or alerts) to draw attention to notes, tips, and warnings.

Use the > [!NOTE] syntax to create a callout.

> [!NOTE]
> A Markdown aside is useful for displaying notices, hints, or definitions to your readers.

renders as

Note

A Markdown aside is useful for displaying notices, hints, or definitions to your readers.

Or use the warning callout type so your readers don’t miss critical details:

Warning

A Markdown aside is useful for displaying notices, hints, or definitions to your readers.

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Second Brain Markdown
Nicolò Pinciroli
Authors
Nicolò Pinciroli (he/him)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at Politecnico di Milano, working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and astrophysics. I develop methods that combine spectra, images, time series, and scientific literature to study rare astronomical sources and transient phenomena. My research spans multimodal representation learning, explainable AI, gravitationally lensed transients, and the search for candidate pulsating ultraluminous X-ray sources.

I collaborate with INAF’s Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma and AstroAI at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. I also work on time-series anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and language-model applications for energy efficiency, and lead Work Package 3 of the Horizon Europe ENERGENIUS project.

I completed my PhD in Information Technology at Politecnico di Milano in June 2026, with the thesis “Making discoveries with multimodal astrophysics.”