I mean... I, for my own needs, which are rather simple, can replace Dropbox with rsync. That's one thing. But yes, it's an entirely different thing to consider you don't need, or worse, could own, such business, on the simple premise you don't need it at your own level. That would be madness to mistake one for the other.

That is fascinating how the more knowledge and reasoning we can get our hands on and actually produce, the higher the risk of us, as a species, to become actually much dumber.

It's hard to describe the feeling of seeing intelligence being delegated increasingly to AI. If that's not a pivotal moment, a revolution, I don't know what is.

> That is fascinating how the more knowledge and reasoning we can get our hands on and actually produce, the higher the risk of us, as a species, to become actually much dumber.

This has always been true. There was a time where someone had to teach farming to others and that information had to spread and be passed down. Eventually, farmers became better than hunter-gatherers and they became known as hunters. The information on what was safe to gather for civilisation got passed down as 'safe to eat on the hunt' because the farmers were farming. The civilisation collectively "forgets" foraged foods as that knowledge becomes niche.

Does that mean we got dumber?

If you're not familiar with it, I recommend looking up the Taoist concept of overdevelopment. Sums it all up perfectly.

I wouldn't show it as an alternative to Obsidian though. It shares MD files with it and both are supposedly about note taking ("supposedly" is for Obsidian, I haven't tried Files.md yet), but Files.md seems to have its own way of making the users work with their thoughts, notes and knowledge altogether.

When I read "an alternative", I assumed feature-parity and API compatibility. But what I found out was entirely different and much more interesting.

I'll give it a try, thanks for sharing your year-old work!

> When I read "an alternative", I assumed feature-parity and API compatibility. But what I found out was entirely different and much more interesting.

Thanks for a good observation! Indeed, I don't position it as Obsidian alternative. I don't know a better pitch for it just yet.

For me that's something about: simplicity, lazy flow of adding things, readiness to use out of the box.

To focus on what works, and not what is fancy.

I would say "open source markdown knowledge-base similar to Obsidian" but I'm not a marketing guy

Your markdown notes without the circus.

The boringly simple knowledge base.

Maybe something like "self-hosted markdown notes you fully own" or "personal knowledge server"? Leans into the ownership angle instead of competing with Obsidian on features.

Well, that sounds great, actually.

> When I read "an alternative", I assumed feature-parity and API compatibility

When I read “alternative” I immediately had a rant in my head about people calling things alternatives that are not.

tl;dr;

> "What happened the last time that everything changed?"

Honestly, I'm glad we hear more of the commoditization of AI, and I hope that the comparison of AI with water or electricity will become mainstream and that the states (as in nation states) will understand that sooner rather than later and act accordingly.

How the fuck can you put ai on par with water or even electricity?

May be cuz it needs water and electricity for its existence?

Have we gone full circle? From the invention of HTML to the rebirth of plain text with MD to the rediscovery of HTML anbrhe age of LLM?

The facts that this article needs to list the pros of HTML over MD, like inreraction, visual density, etc, is weird to me. Maybe the ahdience is not tech-savvy people but I read it as an unnecessary word salad.

It feels like a word salad that's been created to hit a word target because it's also LLM generated. Really not worth spending 5-10 minutes reading some "AI" output.

I don’t think so.

It is just realization by author that HTML is also useful tool and MD lacks some stuff.

He didn’t write anything about “now we should stop using MD files”.

It is more like: “I see I can do cool stuff with HTML and found cases where it definitely is right tool for the job”.

I've discovered typst in the last year and used to build a resume and cover letter template that feeds from a YAML file.

After a bit of tinkering and understanding the idiosyncracies of Typst, the joy of having reliable, consistent, beautiful, data-driven resumes and cover letters is not measurable. It basically lifted any barrier to applications, while whatever I had before I had always considered a burden.

On top of that, I can add hiring process data directly to the yaml file to run further analysis.

Can LaTeX do this? Most probably, but the learning curve is the difference.

You're absolutely right.

Minus the AI part, I agree. I'm 100% convinced many fax machines nowadays exist just for bureaucracy and are actually fax-to-pdf.

If the genersted PDFs are stored encrypted in an accessible server with proper access control, then that is a measurable improvement over email containing medical informstion that a random citizen would send, which would be bouncing around unencrypted around at least one third party SMTP server. Of course, if then that person uses an online Fax service, they are sharing that information with at least one other party...

And that's even without considering the security benefit of not receiving files that could be compromised, instead generating a file from an image stream. (Now I'm trying to picture what a daisy chain of exploits would be needed to craft a malicious Fax.)

I tried NixOS and failed miserably. I've pointed at to the Fedora Atomic distros, which are also immutable, and apparently incomparably easier to setup.

I'm tempted to give it a shot, with the extra bonus that I've never dabbed with a fedora-based distro.

I’ve been driving Bluefin DX for a year or two. On the plus side, it works absolutely flawlessly. This is the longest I’ve ever run a Linux distro without a Nvidia driver update causing the whole thing to explode. It truly is the year of Linux on the desktop.

But I can’t say I recommend it for dev work. It wants you to do everything inside devcontainers, which I like in theory but in practice come with so many annoyances. It wants you to install Flatpaks but Flathub is pretty sparse. I ended up downloading raw Linux binaries into my home directory (which actually works surprisingly well. Maybe this is the future, hah)

I think next time I’ll just go with vanilla Fedora.

I tried fedora silverblue for a while, but the way it works is that it builds a new root fs image whenever you change the installed packages, this makes system package changes take comparatively long vs a traditional os. They suggest installing most apps via flatpak, which is okay as long as you can deal with flatpak idiosyncrasies.

I also tried fedora coreos for a vm + container host, but found the recommended method to configure the system with ignition files and one shot systemd units to be too involved for making a one off system, and it’s probably better for a cloud deployment with many identical nodes.

In all fairness, Nix is similarly slow.

Chuck Norris let death take him.