As a random internet user, I want to remind you, are we sure even if humans are that intelligent to begin with? All those steps you give, are not needed for intelligence.

We keep moving the goal post for what intelligence is, and last I saw we have started to divide intelligence into different categories.

LLMs are just “imitate as closely as possible human responses” for good and for bad. And now we are trying to fix that to be as right as possible, when the flaw is that we as humans are mostly always wrong.

Thanks for the extra details! I mean, it does make sense the way you are guiding the use case for the project. It’s just not my use case :)

In any case kudos for the job you’ve done!

Hey, pussies are great, don’t compare them to that idiot.

Very promising! If I understand correctly though, I can’t even create a note in offline mode to sync later? That would be a bit of a deal breaker for me personally. I couldn’t see much details on e2ee either, but maybe I missed that. Anyway, really well done!

This is surprising… And completely unmanageable from a user’s point of view. In order to find what licenses it has I need to browse folder by folder in the code, instead of, you know, having a list of licenses and where they apply.

On a quick look I saw only two places with a special license, one is the example indicated by the developer of the server package which is an odd license that gives me pretty bad vibes for my lack of legal knowledge but probably is ok? It might even be reasonable, but what is the server package? Is that the server I self host? Or the server for paid Joplin? Then I found some other code that was an MIT license… But how deep do I need to go searching in the folder structure to find all licenses? This is irritating. I guess I gotta consider changing to something else then if only to be able to know what license I am using.

Also… What is the legal implications of using a software than upon any update might suddenly add a weird random license? Would that mean I am expected to keep checking all foldernevery time they change something?

Not OpenAI, please! Do not attack the servers! Save the ram first!

Couldn’t Frodo have thrown the ring into one and hope it eventually goes to Mordor’s volcano? Anyway good luck retrieving it in there :)

As someone with similar feelings in general and a similar history, I feel you are blaming only the latest and worse effects on tech and of tech on society.

I started my career in parallel with mobile devices and smartphones. The whole idea of new possibilities, new ways to interact with tech, miniaturization, etc., is what called me most as it was a huge field starting and I tried to find my path forward. I’ve seen from close, real close, how an incredible tech, full of possibilities has been slowly been captured by the market capitalists that inevitably always ended up controlling the direction of every company.

This is not caused by crypto, this is not caused by LLMs. The origin is greed and capitalism. Decisions being made to make number go up.

Really, crypto is a fascinating tech, it’s not the fault of the technology that crypto-bros came to conquer everything and misuse it and abused it to make a quick buck.

LLMs are impressive, think about it, we have managed to completely break the Turing test. We have machines that sound so human that mostly everyone is in a constant suspicion that everything they see is made by an LLM. LLMs sound so human that they are full of confidence and mostly always full of shit. Just think about it, AI is just a representation of humanity, what we do with it just represents and highlights the issues in society.

The reality is that those two, have just suffered a faster, the fastest we’ve seen yet probably, tech lifecycle - growth, hype, plateauing, and eventually decline and enshittification of any service related to the tech.

Consider search engines, their demise is not because of AI, AI is just the last blow. I used to be very good at finding what I wanted, I knew how to use the tool to make the best of it. Slowly over the years much as I want, I cannot get the results I want without a lot of effort. I haven’t somehow become shit at it, the tools and the tech have been modified and changed until it has become useless, the whole point is not finding anymore, but making you search as much as possible.

Consider the mobile hardware field as it is now, compared to the years when it started blowing up with all kind of devices and possibilities. The market has been captured, a few companies remain, releasing the same thing over and over with the latest and bigger number each year. Slowly the whole wild world we had of custom roms, has been captured so that if you get out of the fenced field your apps won’t work because it is not safe. Apps check that you are using them in an unmodified and perfectly controlled OS where you own nothing. Apple has always been king of fenced fields, but now Google is doing all it can to imitate it, squeezing in and trying to capture as much of their open field into their very high fenced safe areas. They want to control the source of apps, the developers, and remove the freedom from the devices. It’s crypto and LLMs at a slower pace. Working for so many years as a developer I can feel how I’m more and more tied up to the whims and wishes of companies that don’t pay me the salary, I keep bringing this up and make a safer path for the future but the company that does pay my salary doesn’t care, they just want the latest BS and hyped concepts.

People like you or me, we have a special vantage point. We know how we can still fight that, we know what are the alternatives, we know what the tech could become. We need to bring that knowledge to everyone, keep pushing for FOSS solutions, keep teaching everyone that tech is not difficult, it’s not magic, but it requires learning and education. It requires not falling on the path of less resistance, and fight against lobbying and market capture. It’s tough, when we just get so tired of constantly fighting it. What I think you find so tiring is not Crypto and LLMs but how tech is being guided to its demise, to become a tool for control and nothing more.

Hmm so how does the workflow look like for you? Is the calibre web tied up to the DB of that calibre VNC? Do you manually add the books to calibre over the VNC? Then is calibre web allowed to make changes to the DB or does it have read only access? as far as I understand calibre is not recommended to have multiple sources of changes to the DB as it can end up corrupted or something? (At least it can’t resolve conflicts I think)

As a solution it seems like it could work, but it feels like over complicated to get around the limitations of calibre.

I’ve been using calibre since around 2009 and it is an incredible piece of software. For handling ebooks, specially for eBook readers and file formats, it has no equal. Unfortunately it is built around the idea of installing it into one computer and connecting your eBook to it. Which makes it a bit clunky in my opinion nowadays.

Maybe calibre web fixes that, I need to check it one day. For actual books I think it falls between that and booklore.

All the other options seem to be more indicated to comics and manga, which is another aspect I’ve been noticing calibre does not do such a great job. I think I’ll have to keep two different ones, one for reading from a tablet comics and such and another for ebooks to send to the reader.

That looks like someone messed up the vector graphic icons. It doesn’t look like an AI problem.

No apologies needed, I’m not even OP :) it was just a long shot :D

Are you in Europe by any chance? :)

I hear ya, I used Nova for so many years, always trying other things but going back to it. And like you, I dropped it as soon as it got sold. But I struggled to find a good alternative. The most similar in usage and capabilities was lawnchair and I settled with it for a long while. Nearly all other options were too simple or lacked something I really wanted in a launcher (some quick gestures, proper folder handling…)

For the first time I have found a different approach to a launcher that I find genuinely useful aside of the Nova style.

But of course buddahriffic! Let’s see how I can explain it, it is quite a different approach to other more classical launchers. There’s no option to put icons on the launcher, there’s no paging or anything. In fact when I found it out it couldn’t even have widgets. But the Dev has been hard at work it seems and has been making really nice changes. Now it allows to use widgets, so at least you got that going. But otherwise the screen remains rather empty and clean.

Then the usage goes with gestures, but I’ve found it is less about gestures and just about straight lines of movement with your finger and how long. So when you start it it has nearly nothing set up to be used, you need to make a long click (I think it is like 3 seconds long and you see some UI feedback) to bring up the settings. In the settings you can see one of those screens with multiple rings in the screenshots on FDroid. On those rings you can manually and one by one add icons for apps or actions (and in the last version even more rings nested). You can set as many as you want, in as many rings as you feel like (maybe there’s some limits I don’t know). The customization options are quite nice, including distance to move the finger for each ring and area of no effect (if you want to cancel the action, I keep moving my finger in the screen quickly, browse the options in the rings and cancel it in the center where I started the gesture, it’s kinda satisfying, like a fidget thingy).

So in the home page, you can’t see the rings (maybe there’s an option for that) and wherever you press will set the center of the rings and then with the same gesture always you can reach the same action/app. The result is quite clean and easy interactions, once you learn your own setup. The apps I use less are a bit harder to find if I forget where I put them, but in those cases you can open a list of all apps just like any launcher. And at the beginning I was struggling to get used to it, but now I find it very convenient and fast for my most used apps. Getting the right place for the icons in the rings is also a bit of a learning process of where you want things.

Well, I hope I made it clearer and not more confusing :) maybe with the description and the screenshots in the app store you can get a pretty good idea of how it goes.

I’m enjoying a lot using Dragon Launcher, it’s a bit more complex with a bit of a learning curve but really nice once you get used to it. It’s less known so I’m trying to increase its visibility because it deserve all the love it can get.

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.elnix.dragonlauncher

I’ve been using lawnchair (which is a great substitute) ever since the news of the buyout from an ad company was announced, but that was a long time ago… Not sure why this is coming up now.

Anyway, a few days back I found out a new launcher and I want to spread the love for it. It requires more effort to configure it at first but I’m really liking its UX and the simplicity of the screen. It is called dragon launcher and I am having a nice time making small incremental changes to personalize it more and more and has been working great for me: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.elnix.dragonlauncher

Awesome comment!

About the dashboards, I have been using CasaOS for a while now, it is not a OS, but it decently handles containers and allows you to install a bunch of services in a very user friendly way. Nowadays (as I found out a few days ago) the project seems to be moving in the direction of a fully purposed OS with NAS capabilities plus the containers stuff. Unfortunately the project (under the name ZimaOS) has gone into proprietary software and (for now) a one payment level to unlock full options with a free limited version.

I don’t think I can recommend anymore to go with casaOS due to that (although for now casaOS remains free OSS kinda separate). I have been also looking for alternatives to set up a NAS and so far I am heavily leaning on OMV as it is a full OS with the idea of handling a NAS with all ready, plus it is based in Debian which is a plus for me too. Alternatively I am looking into YunoHost also, but I think it is not exactly what I want, although it looks promising.

Edit: forgot to mention FreedomBox as another option that can work as a NAS OS of sorts that helps with self hosting services too.

Thanks for the feedback! I’ll definitely check it up as I try to build a NAS to deal with the extra storage needs.

I have been using casaos and sincerely it is great as a simple solution to avoid some hassles. On the other hand if you are already handling those things yourself and are fine with it, it might have less value.

I am considering some changes and now I am finding out that maybe having a backup of the configuration to set it up again later is not something I can get in casaos.

Is ZimaOS even worth considering if is not Open Source?

For me personally this is a key aspect. I would avoid any proprietary solution, or you will be left in a position where you have no control of your data. I definitely won’t be checking zimaOS.

Instead I want to check and maybe try yunohost or freedombox.