[utensil4778]

I'm autistic and have serious ADHD. My ideal world is one where everything I browse online, my slack conversations, sloppy notes after a meeting are all fed into a sting of ML models running on a server I own.

Then I get my own knowledge database that I can query with natural language.

I want to be able to ask my second brain "what do I know about x?" And retrieve a list of articles I've read on the topic, conversations where I've talked about it, projects I've used that concept in. My meat brain doesn't have that kind of recall, it takes a lot of mental effort to sort through the enormous pile of things that I know.

The less effort I have to spend on organizing and maintaining my knowledge, the more effort I have available to use it.

It seems like this ideal is just a few years away. Several people are already building systems like this, but it doesn't seem that anyone's actually produced a polished product yet. And absolutely not one that is local-only.

This is not the type of thing that anyone should ever trust to "the cloud". This is something that must be run locally on hardware you own and control.

[nktskr]

Thanks for your thoughts!

When you say "Several people are already building systems like this", could you please name a few? What feature do they lack from your point of view?

About trusting the cloud, what do you think? If the service would offer both local storage and secure synchronization in the cloud, would it be acceptable?

[JohnFen]

I'm not the commenter you're asking, but my take on cloud stuff is pretty simple -- it has no appeal to me and I won't use it. I don't mind if software has the ability to use cloud storage as long as I can keep it disabled and it doesn't phone home anywhere.

[utensil4778]

I haven't been paying close attention, but I've seen a couple of commenters on HN mention their systems. Largely it seems to be a bunch of different services strung together with scripts and it's just too much manual effort. Mostly, local ML models aren't good enoguh yet and everyone farms out at least some of it to OpenAI.

As to cloud, never. This system would ideally contain every detail about my personal life, and frankly I think you'd be insane to trust google or OpenAI with that no matter how heavily you encrypt it. This is a whole new order of magnitude in personal, private data. I wouldn't trust anyone at all other than myself with this.

My server at home gets free solar power and free geothermal cooling. I have no reason at all to ever want to use someone else's computer. I have plenty.