I moved to Obsidian after Evernote increased their subscription prices beyond the point I could justify and I think Obsidian is heading down the same path Evernote did. They keep adding more and more features to it when I wish they would call it complete and move it into maintenance mode.
For me, the turning point for Obsidian was their Canvas feature. That was a big move beyond the initial design of it being an excellent editor for a directory or markdown files that supported links and all the other cool things you can do with a basic directory of files and a few conventions. Nothing proprietary, nothing much beyond the directory of files aside from a preferences store. IMHO, Canvas and beyond should have been a new product.
If Obsidian was open source I would have been tempted to fork it at that point.
Joplin is open source but isn't half of Obsidian, it's slow and grouchy, a fairly poor Electron app, but at least I can turn off the plugin that does freehand drawing. It's also has self-hosted sync for free. If Obsidian was open source, I'd have switched already even if it needed a subscription to sync, especially if I could toggle off unwanted features.
Being able to search photos with queries like "show me photos of me and teeray" is pretty useful.
What I really want is my phone to transcribe all of my phone calls to a Notes document. Since it isn't recording an audio conversation, I don't think the consent laws come into play.
A decade ago this didn't require LLMs and cutting edge hardware and a trillion dollars of GPUs. This was a Facebook feature in like 2012.
>What I really want is my phone to transcribe all of my phone calls to a Notes document
This has been doable for decades. Why haven't you done it? My Pixel phones did this with voicemail before LLMs.
Windows Vista shipped with full featured dictation functionality, and it works better than you would expect, all local, all using classical algorithms, all evaluated cheaply. If it wasn't accurate enough, Dragon speech to text tools were gold standard for most of modern computing history, and greatly surpassed the accuracy of that built in system.
BTW, you can, on any Windows machine right now, access that built in voice recognition, and with a "Constrained vocabulary", say if you only want a few specific voice commands, it gets near perfect accuracy constantly. You have to search for old documentation now because Microsoft wants to hide that you don't need an internet connection or an Azure account and monthly bill to ship accurate voice recognition with your app. It's trivial to use, from both C++ and C#, and anything else that allows you to invoke native code, and the workflow is easy enough to understand. I built an app to utilize it instead of buying one of those $10 "Voice control your game" apps to add voice control to ARMA, and it was easier to implement the voice recognition than it was to copy and paste native code invocations for the Win32 api to inject keystrokes. I don't even write C# code in general.
There's tons of documentation about "Grammar" and configuration but the default configuration IIRC is to just turn speech input into text, and do so with at least 85% accuracy, even without the user actually training the recognizer to their voice. If you build context specific grammars or a hierarchical grammar to support a real UX that isn't just hoping some code knows how to interpret raw speech you will get dramatically better recognition performance.
This is IMO a frequent pattern. Time and time again the people who keep saying "I want LLMs to do X" don't seem to be aware that "X" was a robust and mature area of research decades ago! They don't seem to be aware that you could already do X and even buy ready to go software for that purpose! Often enough the LLM version is an outright regression in functionality, as things that were doable with a single microchip in 1960 now require an internet connection.
>Since it isn't recording an audio conversation,
So to be clear, you want this functionality explicitly to bypass law? Federally and in 39ish states, you only need your own consent anyway.
> They're basically making fun of people for trying to connect.
I had the same thought. The clueless people turning into their parents are charming and genuine. The life coach guy is kind of a dick.
Reminds me of Apple's "I'm a PC, And I'm a Mac" ads from Apple. I always understood the point they were trying to make, but the PC character was so much more likable than the Mac.
I'm still upset that they dropped the Smart Keyboard Folio. For me, that was the perfect keyboard case. I was hoping some third party would copy the design and release a new case but it never happened.
The Smart Keyboard Folio is great! I got one on clearance a few months ago and use it whenever I'm using the iPad around house/town. (If I'm travelling out of town with my iPad where I won't be able to use my desktop keyboard, I bring my Magic Keyboard instead.)
It's so good that if Apple changes the form-factor of the iPad Air, I'll probably take that opportunity to buy the last Smart Keyboard Folio-compatible iPad Air to stretch my use of it as long as possible. (Though I worry that at that point I'll wear out the internal ribbon connectors eventually.)
Somehow Woot still has a supply of the Smart Keyboard Folio for certain 11" iPads Pro/Air.
My wife is still using an older gen 11" iPad Pro and her keyboard folio stopped working (they fall apart after a few years ), so I took a gamble and ordered one. It arrived in the original, sealed packaging. As far as I can tell, it had never been opened, and it is perfect condition and works great. My wife is very happy. I bought a second one for when this one falls apart.
> Speed-limits typically remain grandfathered in at their original value
That depends on where you are. In Texas, state highway speed limits are determined though a traffic study[1]. The monitor traffic for a while, then set the limit to the 85th percentile.
People can use this to get out of speeding tickets. If you find that it's been a long time since a speed study was done on the road you were on, the judge might throw the ticket out.
There are some hard limits though. For example, the maximum speed limit that can be set on a road is 85 mph.
If I were to bet on what would get a Microsoft Discord server shut down, I would have put money on discussions of the ties between Microsoft executives and Epstein. They should be happy if the worst thing that's happening is a mildly deragatory nickname.
For me, the turning point for Obsidian was their Canvas feature. That was a big move beyond the initial design of it being an excellent editor for a directory or markdown files that supported links and all the other cool things you can do with a basic directory of files and a few conventions. Nothing proprietary, nothing much beyond the directory of files aside from a preferences store. IMHO, Canvas and beyond should have been a new product.
If Obsidian was open source I would have been tempted to fork it at that point.
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