Thank you so much! This is really helpful. Logseq in particular sounds pretty interesting.

Thank you so much for taking the time to put all of this together! You’re awesome.

I think for my purposes, Obsidian is probably private enough (I don’t share my PC with anyone), but I am interested in exploring more FOSS stuff. I don’t really mind a lack of features/plugins or a dated interface at the moment. My bigger concern is that CherryTree and a lot of other indie FOSS stuff seem geared toward people who are more tech-savvy than I am (the website and download pages seem figure-out-able for me with a little work, but don’t exactly have great UX for non-techies). I’m not a developer or IT person, just a regular office worker type who has become very frustrated with “AI” and big tech companies, but I’m trying to learn more about how things work anyway. I might end up trying both Obsidian and CherryTree.

Thank you! I keep seeing Obsidian mentioned in different places online. If you don’t mind, I have a few more questions:

-Can you add personal notes that are longer than hashtags to your links/articles in Obsidian? -Can you do the above on Cherrytree? -Are there any disadvantages of Cherrytree over Obsidian? -What makes Obsidian not very private?

Thank you so much! Sounds like a pretty cool system.

Awesome, thank you so much!

Oh, OK. Thank you so much!!

Oh, OK. Do you know if you can add notes about links/articles that are more in-depth than just short tags?

Man, I don’t think I want to print out EVERYTHING, but that would definitely be a privacy-preserving option! Nobody can hack into your notes on articles or guess what you’ve been thinking about from your files if they aren’t even on a computer

Zotero looks nice. It looks like you can choose to sync data across devices. Do you know if you choose to sync some things but not everything, or is just an on/off thing where you either sync everything or nothing? Thanks!

Anytype looks interesting. I like that it doesn’t need wifi for access and appears to be privacy/security focused (although I really need to learn more about how things like no server/peer-to-peer sync work). Do you find that you need a paid plan for personal use or is the free version enough?

Joplin looks neat! How does self-hosting in the cloud work? (I thought the choice was usually self-host vs. cloud host, but I know almost nothing about hosting.)

Thanks! Do you mind explaining a little more about how you use these? When would it make sense to use Wallabag but not Logseq, or vice versa?

edit: also, can you add in-depth notes about the articles/links you save, like something more than just short tags?

Hi, just to clarify: If you want to save something that’s behind a paywall/captcha but you’re paying for it or have access to it, can you screenshot it and then move it into Raindrop? Or do you just have to use a separate bookmarker/archiver for that stuff?

Hi, thanks for commenting! Do you mind explaining more about how you use Logsec vs. Readeck? When do you use Logsec but not Readeck?

edit: also, can you add notes that are more in-depth than just tags to your articles and links on either of these? I wasn’t thinking about it earlier, but that would be a really nice feature

Readeck looks really cool! Can you sync across multiple devices? It’s not necessarily a dealbreaker for me if not (I can still consolidate/organize a lot of things better than I am now), but that would be a nice feature to have.

edit: also, can you associate links/articles with more in-depth notes than just tags?

Great essay, made a few things click into place for me. I’ve been hearing people complain about the tech industry’s abandonment of quality for decades, but never quite mentally connected that to the funding model.

Another thought: a lot of the other phenomena discussed here seem to be happening in virtually every industry, as far as I can tell.

Thanks for sharing!

All of the flags that are just stripes. It’s too easy to get them mixed up with similar-looking striped flags, especially if there are others with the same colors. Obviously people from that country will know which flag they’re looking at, but people from other countries can easily get confused. It kind of detracts from the power of the flag if other people don’t know what it represents or have to search it up every time they see it.

Flags should be immediately distinctive and memorable, IMO. Like, I love how Canada’s flag has a Maple leaf. No one else has a maple leaf, so people can remember that one.

This is not quite an answer to your question, but: Wherever you’re starting, it’s really important to check whether the person behind the information source is qualified to speak authoritatively on the topic and whether they have financial incentives to promote something they’re saying.

Ask questions like: Is there a specific human or HIGHLY respected organization (not a random business) putting their name behind the information? Is that human actually qualified in the field/subject they’re talking about? (“They wrote a book on it” or “They have a PhD in an unspecified field” isn’t good enough on its own.) Are they recommending a product or service that they sell? Those filters aren’t enough on their own, but they will help you avoid a lot of nonsense.

You probably already knew this stuff, but I need to continually remind myself to check these things, and maybe this reminder will help you too.

That looks far better than the mainstream AI tools, but I don’t think respecting opt-outs is quite enough. It would be so much better if it were built from solely opt-in training data. As far as I can tell, it’s not attempting to tackle the hallucinations or environmental impact issues. Still, it would be a major change for the better if ChatGPT users switched to something like that.

You hit the nail on the head. They produce output that mimics the appearance of a thoughtful response, but isn’t that at all. LLMs do not actually think and do not have any concept of truth.

This is probably why things like ClickUp naming their AI tool “Brain” annoys me so much. It’s designed partially as a way for organizations to get aggregated access to the major LLMs. So yeah, my former coworkers are getting LLM output from “Clickup Brain.” What a marketing scam.

I’ve been wondering how people’s attitudes toward LLMs would shift if society collectively changed the language we used about them to be more accurate. Maybe there wouldn’t be so many people claiming “AI is great for research” and whatnot. Even then, though, I doubt people would fully get past the human tendency to trust confident-sounding language.