Features for the note taking app detailed in this guide include:
- Self-hosted
- Private
- Built to last
- Low maintenance
- Access in one place & from any device (Obsidian charges for this feature)
- Versioning
- Zero vendor lock-in
- Extendable (eg. passing text-embedded notes to AI)
Obsidian ticks all of these boxes and syncthing to sync notes is a 5 minute setup.
Plus it stores things in plaintext instead of a database format that vendor locks you in (despite the claim of “no vendor lock in”)
Ooooo yay another half-baked AI shoved into everything whatever possible.
Obsidian’s only downside is that it’s closed source, but this is a big downside for some people.
Yep and can be easily firewalled to mitigate trust
Man, you guys REALLY do not like AI here. lol Yeah, it’s a novelty for the average consumer. Sure, corporations try to wedge AI into everything, like an AI Rice Cooker. But we have to go there to figure out what it’s core usefulness is. Think of when corps were hit by the trendy cloud thing. They pushed entire operations to the cloud. Then we figured out that what can be run in the cloud, might not ought be in the cloud. So, after a while, we regrouped, and no one even gives ‘the cloud’ much thought anymore…it’s not special or trendy anymore.
It’s like every trendy technological gizmo that supposed to make your life sooo much easier. These are selling points for people who really don’t understand the real potential, and just want to make faceswaps, and bizarre pictures, or maybe music. I use AI when I’m mastering music tracks because I’m clinically deaf and some frequencies I just can’t hear. Works very well.
Your cloud example is exactly right and exactly what we want to NOT HAPPEN.
They shoved the cloud so much down our throats so that they can force you into monthly income-sucking unneeded subscriptions. That is it. That is the single reason everyone did it.
The result is now the average user has a much worse experience overall. One literally has to fight with Microsoft products to save things on their own computer. IoT and smart products literally won’t function without connections to their “cloud”. Phones come without SD card compatibility and with low flash memory to force you into cloud subscriptions. Now every damn piece of software is a way overpriced subscription that almost all originally started as “switching to cloud infrastructure” (fucking adobe creative cloud).
The “cloud” has had so many data breaches and people data have been stolen, siphoned off, lost due to bugs, and sold to earn even more cash on the side.
A huge portion of the general corporatization and bad enshittification of digital services and software in general can be attributed to “the cloud shoving down our throats” that you describe.
AI is looking to do the same thing except castrate peoples’ digital skills, critical thinking skills, transcription skills, and writing skills in order to siphon more and more of your income off in the form of AI subscriptions while they double dip and sell everything you ever say to it and triple dip in mining everything you say to it as R&D that you pay to do
Companies need to do the fucking R&D themselves with their revenue of a small country and stop forcing regular people to pay to be their alpha and beta testers and focus groups, and people gobble that boot up so hard because LLMs have a few small areas where they are slightly useful and can save 10 minutes per day and make them not have to critically think, so people will literally sell their data, their already small income, and their soul to save 10 minutes, and in 10 years the digital experience will be even more shitty and degraded than it got after “the cloud.”
Your usecase is the exact definition as using LLMs as accessibility and to actually better the user experience for certain people which is not the goal of any AI company or 99% of LLM integrations
TD;DR
Non-consentual cloud shoving has caused newer generations to think that paying corporations every month to save files is normal and that your data is not yours and always corporate property ™®©, along with the decimation of understanding simple file structures. You can actually talk to teachers and professors and they unanimously say that tech literacy has nosedived.
Now with the LLM shoving, they are trying to force the new generation to have to pay subscriptions to think, write, compose, draw, and get information by stripping them of those skills.
We could say the very same things about all technology tho. I’m old enough to have lived a rather full life before the advent of the computer revolution. People in my age bracket lamented almost the same things you have pointed out in regards to computers, or really any new technology. Boomers, for some reason, seem to hate technology, even tho they use it on a minute by minute basis. Computers will rot your brain. Computers will do your thinking for you. Computers are going to take over the world. Yet, here we all sit in Lemmy Selfhosted, fully immersed in computer tech.
I hear what you are saying, and in some respects I can find commonality. However, I’m not on a mission from god, and have long since given up on trying to save the world from itself. I’m not saying it isn’t a worthy cause, it’s just that 8.2 billion people have 8.2 billion different ideas than I do.