Genuine question to see if the downvotes are justified or not : are you implying Chrome is a good browser and if so, why?

How can you tell? I imagine you have stats on how many plugin developers exist and are active but I don’t know how you can know how many people rely on a file system with CLI tools approach.

IMHO note taking systems are precisely about empowerment. The whole point is to learn… so even if they are not a dev or sysadmin, they can try and scaffold their knowledge, initially typing commands they don’t understand, copy/pasting from the Web, then discover they can write their own, add that knowledge to their system, etc. I’d argue for most people that might be at least as valuable as their own content.

TL;DR: let’s not infantilize fictional users. Having the option to do more, for those who do want to, is extremely valuable.

Source: I’ve seen nurses with no IT training installing drivers in the CLI for their WiFi card, no help from me. IT is cool but it’s nothing magical either, people CAN learn if they want to.

Good point, the thing is… if you do have MarkDown in a directory, as suggested here, then your CLI tools become your extensions. One can start with git and voila, version tracked. One can used a Web server e.g. Apache or nginx, and voila, accessible anywhere on the network, possibly on the Internet (via e.g. Grok or TailScale). That also includes any programming language, e.g. invoking a Python script on said files. Might not sound like much but it’s a LOT.

So… I’d argue maybe not necessarily extensions themselves but the curation of extensions, namely their discoverability because they are all in one neat spot, with comments from users, etc whereas CLI commands are… all over.

Edit: I’d be curious about how many downvoters in this case have been using such solutions and for how long. FWIW I’ve been actively using and maintaining my PIM since 2008.

Related https://lemmy.world/post/25825690

FWIW my point isn’t about shaming people, it’s to make buyers fully aware of the consequence of their actions, both political and ecological. My point is to show that actual alternatives exist and yes they are more rare and expensive (probably also because they are rare, which is by design for Amazon, they do have scale in mind from the founding of the company, they undercut in order to dominate all marketplaces!). I genuinely wish the options I listed were both cheaper and more available. Now… it’s a bit like buying clothes from Primark vs e.g. Patagonia. The pricing is radically different, and their are both selling clothes, but I’d argue they are NOT the same products, including the ecological impact. So… again, not trying to shame anyone, solely show that alternatives, with different trade off, do actually exist TODAY. Every time one person try to go with the cheap and popular, they are tipping the scale to, IMHO, worst solutions for everyone else, including the 2nd hand market.

TL;DR: get a 2nd hand reMarkable, PineNote, Bookeen, etc…

there’s a reason why the kindle is as cheap as it is,

Indeed, cf https://lemmy.world/comment/15163037 unfortunately too cheap usually comes at a non financial cost.

Sure, it’s the same problem with most of electronics, it’s the console business model, or ink printer, where the device itself is “too” cheap and companies make money on content. Unfortunately it comes with shackles. I’m all for breaking the shackles but unfortunately has to be aware of what they are getting into, not just the trouble but also potentially supporting the company promoting DRMs and more.

I work in XR and Meta/Facebook is the embodiment of that problem. The Quest is too cheap compared to alternatives like Lynx (standalone designing in France, unfortunately still running on Android but at least rootable) or even the “old” now Valve Index, which in addition to its price also requires a gaming desktop.

So… it’s a money making machine for corporations. Hopefully recycling is done in a way that provide 0 support for the corporations locking down its device, promoting its marketplace BUT also, sadly less realistic, doesn’t also prevent companies who try to sell genuine alternative that do NOT promote such business model from existing.

Libraries (and Libby, the app they use) are also making it difficult to do anything but read in a browser or use Kindle.

Sadly too true. To be fair though I don’t think ANY librarian want that.

Here in Belgium we have an online library ( lirtuel.be ) that isn’t actually too bad. I looked it up and they say they provided ePub/PDF so I registered right away. Then… I discovered what they meant wasn’t ePub/PDF but rather DRMed ePub/PDF (here is an example https://www.lirtuel.be/resources/67aaf2124e480409978b68fb with ePub logo on the top right). Anyway I contacted them explaining that my ebook reader (reMarkable) does not support DRM and thus I couldn’t read the content. They pointed me to their documentation https://confluence.demarque.com/confluence/cantook-station/fr/faq/verrou-numerique-et-identifiant-adobe/qu-est-ce-qu-un-verrou-numerique-drm which implies it’s all “normal” to use that. I insisted, they didn’t reply.

Long story short, I’m either not using their service anymore or using DeGourou https://github.com/Bingwithyou/DeGourou to make the content legally loaned actually usable. Sad state of affairs but I’m convinced none of the actual librarians, namely people who care for making knowledge discoverable and accessible like that. I’m sure they’ve been coerced by same big publishers.

reMarkable, PineNote, Bookeen, etc…

I’m not saying anybody deserve to be mistreated … but come on, at this point if you buy something from Amazon it’s Stockholm syndrome. Just do NOT. It’s that easy.

F*ck Bezos and other billionaires. Stop making them even richer from your pain. Stop your mind from being literally enslaved!

FWIW I did just try deepseek-r1:1.5b (the smallest model available via ollama today) and … not bad at all for 1.1Gb!

It’s still AI BS generating slop without “thinking” at all … but from the few tests I ran, it might be one of the “least worst” smaller model I tried.

There are plenty of ways and they are all safe. Don’t think of DeepSeek as anything more than a (extremely large, like bigger than a AAA) videogame. It does take resources, e.g disk space and RAM and GPU VRAM (if you have some) but you can use “just” the weights and thus the executable might come from another project, an open-source one that will not “phone home” (assuming that’s your worry).

I detail this kind of things and more in https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence but to be more pragmatic I’d recommend ollama which supports https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1

So, assuming you have a relatively entry level computer you can install ollama then ollama run deepseek-r1:1.5b and try.

Google was “cool” 2 decades ago… or before they combined both monetization (through ad) with power (through monopoly) they inexorably transformed EXACTLY to Microsoft the same way Facebook/Meta did the Google playbook.

Those huge tech corporations are pulled by the market to follow the same, sadly successful, strategy playbook and keep no uniqueness.

Google has been the new Microsoft for years already but through careful marketing consumers somehow believe they aren’t.

Indeed, so still a good advice, thanks for sharing

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

Well they didn’t “write” it, just formatted it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale

Local only.

No, we are nowhere close to learning as the human brain does. We don’t even really understand how it does at all.

Sorry then if I sound like a broken record but again, doesn’t that mean that the analogy itself is flawed? If the goal remain the same but there is close to no explanatory power, even if we do get pragmatically useful result (i.e. it “works” in some useful cases) it’s basically “just” inspiration, which is nice but is basically branding more than anything else.

It is conceptually the same thing. […] The learning the part is not even close.

Well… isn’t the “learning part” precisely the point? I don’t think anybody is excited about brains as “just” a computational device, rather the primary function of a brain is … learning.

At some point it becomes so “simplified” it’s arguably just not the same thing, even conceptually.