Hacker News Reader

Comment by saejox | Hacker News Reader

Note taking is supposed to be a map of my brain. Not generated garbage from LLMs. I only want the most memorable things to be in there.

View on HN

The app you're looking for is Obsidian. Notion abandoned that goal years ago. Notion is making money for being a project management / team wiki. They don't care personal note taking.

Notion is on its track to become the new Lotus Notes, just with notes instead of email memos.

"Notes and Domino is a cross-platform, distributed document-oriented NoSQL database and messaging framework and rapid application development environment that includes pre-built applications like email, calendar, etc." [0]

Lotus Notes was the original offline-first everything app, including cutting edge PKI and encryption. It worked over dial-up and needed only a handful of MBs of memory (before the Java rewrite at least). Has anything else really come close since?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes

But why would I want my team generating/reading AI slop in our Wiki??

You don't. Notion stakeholders do.

I do writing with RAG and it can be implemented to suprisingly good if you already have your own writing that the text is being generated from. FAQs etc can be pretty easy when your content is context for the AI.

After a few rounds of AI generating AI content from AI content, I'm sure it could eventually become slop...like the model collapse lol idk.

"AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y

I've looked yesterday on replit. It used to be such a nice tool to play with various languages, be able to create a, say, python file, share it with students, etc.

Now you are welcomed by a "AI chat" that wants me to specify what a great application I want to create. Total madness...

I find that I get most value out of less memorable notes in my Obsidian, because for the more memorable ones my brain is able to stay on top of it.

I use LLMs to extract key points, make proposals or generate a short summary, but I personally want to manually be responsible for adding all this and I don't want my note taking tool to do this unsupervised in the background.

I was waiting for a linux client for such a long time. Or a way for api access where i do not need to poll for changes.

But instead more ai slop.

And thats not the worst. Every time when a company adds ai features, i know they want to train on my data sooner or later.

So hard pass for that one.

edit: seems like webhooks are here now. Will give them a try, but knowing notion, expect wild limitations

Reply on news.ycombinator.com