Thanks a bunch for the detailed response! That community looks lovely, I joined and will hopefully be active in it in the future.

As far as physically writing, maybe big tech has already gotten to me but the idea of writing digital notes is much preferable. I’m sure I could definitely get more comfortable writing by hand and organizing in a zettelkasten, but for the moment I really enjoy markdown. Takes up less space, I can make backups, and I can do fun analysis with my notes. The other day I made a github commit-inspired graph of my writing frequency over time, and I don’t see a way I can easily do that with physical notes.

Obsidian is closed source - if I shift away from my current system I’d prefer something open source.

Out of curiosity, any ideas why so many people around FOSS/linux spaces recommend obsidian, despite it being closed source?

I do keep a physical journal on me, and I love it! It’s great for sketching, mapping out thoughts with others, and quick writing on the go, but it doesn’t fit this use case.

Given the volume of writing I do, I don’t think hand-writing is feasible. The last few years average out to about 2000 words a day, and most of it is done on computers where I can comfortably type for long periods, and much faster than I could write by hand.

In addition, I need something queryable. Beyond just a ctrl+f search across my notes, I embed all of my notes and store in a vector db so I can group by semantic similarity.

Thanks for the advice! I have been wanting to check out NextCloud for a while, I think this would be a cool project to explore it.

I find it convenient to be able to write notes on whatever machine I have with me at the time - desktop, laptop(s), or phone. If I only had one device I used, it would be easier to keep a backup on local storage. With multiple devices I prefer to have up-to-date notes on each device, and so I’ve leaned more towards remote storage and peer-to-peer file synchronization. This does add some security holes, but it’s acceptable within my threat model. Frankly, I’ve never used local storage across multiple devices because I don’t know how to do that, if it can be done with Borg but I will check it out!

While this workaround exists, it breaks Microsoft’s Visual Studio Marketplace terms of use: https://aka.ms/vsmarketplace-ToU :/

I appreciate the thought!

As far as I’ve tested it, vscodium doesn’t support the same remote extensions that vscode does, it’s very silly.

Thanks a bunch for the suggestion, I will definitely check out Joplin’s E2EE syncing. I guess I should have been more specific; I’m looking more for a way to store and synchronize notes, rather than a tool to edit them. Given that my notes are all nearly all text, most of the time I edit notes using vim or vscodium.

VSCode! I’m yet to find another editor that runs as smoothly on remote machines. Zed has been getting much better at this, but it’s still too buggy to consider a switch.

I think self-awareness can be a really positive tool to break yourself out of restrictive situations and thought patterns that may be causing you harm. I’ve found this to be true in my own life, with journaling in particular being one of the most beneficial kinds of self reflection. It’s gotten me out of bad relationships, living situations, and addictions.

That said, self-awareness that stares at a wall of things-you-can’t-actually-change can definitely be depressing.

Same here. Such a jarring and upsetting way to start a morning

didn’t even downvote, i suspect taking time to explain something you disagree with in a nuanced matter is more effort than most people would care to do

“respect your privacy” is a vague buzzword phrase, and for a post about local LLMs linking a client that calls APIs which log user data is unhelpful

Ollama used to be Facebook’s proprietary model

Just to be clear, llama is the facebook model, ollama is the software that lets you run llama, along with many other models.

Ollama has internet access (otherwise how could it download models?), the only true privacy solution is to run in a container with no internet access after downloading models, or air gap your computer.

I’ve been extremely happy with my boox go 10.3! Crazy long battery life (on the order of months; no backlight and i keep wifi off), amazing reading experience (looks basically indistinguishable from paper) and writing experience is good enough as someone who doesn’t write often on it.

I use jira software for task management! It’s just me on the team, so it’s maybe a bit overkill, but I’ve found scrum / sprints to be massively helpful in prioritizing important work.

It sucks jira is in the cloud, but I’m yet to find an open source scrum system with the same features. Taiga.io comes close, but i don’t yet have a reason to switch; i’ve been using Jira for two years with no issues.

i’d love a reading list! i have read a bit of marxist-inspired thought but never much marxism itself

I’m a little more optimistic; like yeah, all of that is definitely happening, but there is lots of genuinely helpful research being done in the US. Not everything here is rotten. China’s research output is just an order of magnitude greater. See https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/academic for a cool list of research outputs by institution.

China dominated the Top500 list by 2017, with 202 machines compared to 143 from the U.S. Then the U.S. restricted Chinese access to Intel processors and other U.S. hardware in 2015, followed by broader export restrictions under the Trump administration in 2019, which have been tightened further by the Biden administration in 2022. As a result, Chinese participation in the Top500 list dwindled, to some degree because access of Chinese entities to the latest hardware got harder and to some degree because Chinese scientists no longer want to share details about their machines with anyone.

Why is anyone surprised that the country with the highest research output, that has historically dominated the Top500 list, has the fastest supercomputers?

I find that rogerebert.com ’s reviews are pretty solid. I use that for a quick tool to decide if I want to watch something - I don’t think i’ve ever been disappointed by a film they rated 3.5-4 stars.