Your end goal, friend, is noble, and I don’t mean to discourage you or gatekeep. And yet I must strongly advise you to slow your horses before you squander what I’d call your “social capital”, i.e. the willingness of the people close to you to follow your recommendations and try out new things. If they find their user experience greatly lagging behind what they’re used to, not only will they return to the services they were using prior to your suggestion: they will also be less likely to listen to you in the future and meet alternatives with skepticism, if not hostility. (“I’ve tried it and all this other stuff doesn’t work…”)

Thus, you need to make sure that they have an excellent first experience with whatever you throw their way. As a tinkerer, tech enthusiast, privacy advocate, or whatever you want to call yourself, you’re likely willing to accept a great amount of jankiness, pain, and lack of feature parity because you feel you get something more valuable in return. But that is not how most people use computers. Most people do not care about privacy, digital independence or any of the things you may cherish; they want things to “just work”.

And, to put it brutally bluntly (sorry!),

Like I think I’d need tailscale and docker (still dont get what docker really is)

this part alone tells me your solution is unlikely to “just work” for them. These are some basic skills to have if you want to try and compete with a billion-Dollar company and the convenience it provides to your friends.

So, my advice is this: don’t aim for “perfect”, aim for “better”. And basically anything is better than using FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord or whatever they may be using. Either go for one of the large public Matrix nodes (Matrix.org is unlikely to go down any time soon…) or move your comms to Signal messenger. Both may not be fully under your control (Signal is centralised, and Matrix nodes might be closed or defederated), but they’re e2ee and so professionally managed that your friends might actually enjoy them, use them on a day-to-day basis, and even pull other people over. That way, you’re also building social capital, so that once you’ve obtained the skill to run your own and get it to the level of polish it needs to have, they’ll be willing to follow you there too.

(If this posting sounds like I’ve learnt this the hard way, that’s because I have. Things are fine now, though: almost my entire social graph is reachable via Signal, and I’m preparing to self-host my own comms.)

They did beat America in the race towards oppressive authoritarianism, but under Trump, the U.S. has caught up a great deal. So much winning!

True; I skipped this part because the comment I was replying to was about taxpayer money bailouts. What you’re describing is the creation of an artificial moat against competitors. And it is correct that this is also a motive behind pushing for regulation.

This is clearly the exit strategy here. That’s why AI companies’ try to label their products as “dangerous” and call for their own regulation. On the one hand, they want to be regarded as a matter of “national security” because they bloody well know that this gives them access to taxpayer money, which in turn can bail them out of their failing bet on data center build-out. On the other hand, it helps them shift liability onto regulators if things go south and allows them to say: “We told you we wanted regulation, but you wouldn’t listen.”

Not all hackers are ethical.

True. But the comment I was replying to was talking about hackers with a kind of “ethos” / ethics.

Do not conflate the Zuck or other Silicon Valley suits with hackers. They lack both the technical skill and the ethics.

A man of culture, I see!

No offense taken. With AI-generated texts becoming ever more pervasive, you’re right to be suspicious. 👍 I get that the bullet-point-ish style of my OP gives people ChatGPT vibes. 🤖

I could give you a run-down of ten tell-tale signs of AI writing style if you like. 🔎

Early voters are reporting some hijinks when selecting their choice so be VERY CAREFUL about confirming who you are voting for.

Like so?

But there’s people out there! (shudders)

I’m not an LLM and I don’t use any for writing my postings, if that’s what you’re getting at. ;)

A Booklore fork! Yes, that does make sense, since Grimmory’s commits oddly start with v 2.x.x

It does not, however, change my outlook much. Booklore, too, was a very young project (initial commit: March 2025) and heavily vibecoded by a handful of people.

Grimmory sounds like a new kid on the block, and indeed, it is. I’ve looked into it, and here’s what I’ve come up with:

• initial commit: March 2026 --> very young project, blazed through 24 releases already
• 165 contributors, but upon closer inspection, it relies on only two frequent contributors --> if they lose interest, the project might fall dormant or die entirely
• as per its AI policy, the project embraces AI as a tool, but expects contributors to understand what they’re committing, and reserves the right to throw out blatantly vibecoded contributions. --> Whether two people can actually enforce this policy when getting firehosed with AI contributions remains to be seen.

With all that in mind, I think I’ll give this project a pass for now. Like you said, it’s some work that goes into curating a library and making sure the metadata is correct, and if that locks me into a project that may or may not exist several months or years from now, I’ll probably stick to one of the more established projects with a higher likelihood of long-term maintenance.

Feel free to elaborate. ;) I don’t mind ditching folders. The question is: how do I get at said metadata with the least amount of manual effort, how do I make sure that it’s accurate (sifting through thousands of files is not fun), and how is the metadata stored - particularly so that does not lock me into one application that can only understand its own metadata scheme, and once it dies or I want to switch to a different one, I lose all the work I’ve put into curating my collection. That’s why I was considering folders as an option: they are a software-agnostic way of organising my library.

That sounds reasonable. So you’re essentially throwing everything into one folder and let software do the rest? May I ask what software you’re using, and how it stores your tags? Does it use metadata files or a database?

Hi there,

thanks for not staying true to your username. ;)

[let the LLM] apply metadata to the file

How does this work in practice? I’ve got a bunch of .pdf, .epub, .txt, even some .doc files lying around in a folder. What would an LLM do to them? Write a bunch of .xml files with a file name identical to the corresponding book, or what?

That’s fair.

Now let’s see which of these waste materials I can recycle, and which of them I could, theoretically, leave untouched in their current state for 250-500 years without investing a single Dollar. (The illegal Sweetwater dump was cleaned up, btw. Picture 1 is supposed to be the clean-up.)

it can be stored on site for half a century without issue.

Oh yeah. These issues are so mild that after your “half a century”, we need to dig everything back up, reseal it and find a new place. Playing a thousand years’ worth of musical chairs with radioactive waste may sound fun to you - until one day, the music stops and you can’t find a chair.

To help answer your question, could you first

a) provide information on the total energy generated by the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2, just so we can be sure this is an apples-to-apples comparison and we can be sure that we’re looking at roughly the same amount in both pictures?
b) assess the capacity of the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2 for 1) further damages to the environment and human health, as well as 2) their potential for being recycled?
c) fast-forward these images about 250-500 years and then reasses which one depicts the greater environmental problem and cost factor?

Praising nuclear and deploring the cost of wind? That’s funny, considering the still-unsolved problem of securely storing nuclear waste for thousands of years. It’s almost like we have left the factor with the largest potential cost out of our calculation…